If there is more powerful living actor than Daniel Day-Lewis, I know nothing.
He made Abe Lincoln rise from history’s dead. He pounded the fists of injustice as wrongfully accused Gerry Conlon in Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father. Last of the Mohicans, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, My Left Foot, The Age of Innocence. Considering how frustratingly selective, and reclusive he is, it’s not the number of roles he’s owned. It’s the pathos and the theme in each character. He is not an actor, but a living artist. A British/Irish eccentric who makes his living as a shoe cobbler, in between being reluctantly being prodded back to a film set.
I have loved you before I knew why you were great. From tortured Tomas in Communist Prague to the afflicted Christy Browne, you waxed Euclid’s theory of self-evident equality without an ounce of grandiloquence or condescension—only reserved and controlled expressiveness, as though it really were 1865 and we were thinking about ending slavery. Which made it rise up through the complexity of America’s muddied journey, turning it historic, and not glib. You are not Abe Lincoln or Gerry Conlon, or Hawkeye, or Danny Flynn. Those characters are all you.
And for the latest and most fascinating, I sincerely wish for you, your third Academy Award.
