Day-lewis: I quit films after the last one made me so sad
AS ONE of Hollywood’s most acclaimed actors, Daniel Day-lewis’s decision to retire from acting was as shocking as it was baffling.
This summer, the winner of three Oscars for best actor astounded the industry when he issued a statement declaring that Phantom Thread would be his last film.
Now, in his latest interview, the 60-year-old has revealed how the film about London’s fashion industry in the Fifties had left him “overwhelmed” with sadness. He also reveals how shortly after announcing his retirement he was involved in a motorcycle crash in which he nearly lost a hand.
In the interview with W magazine, Day-lewis said that when he started out in the film, he had not expected it to be his last.
Explaining how he and Paul Thomas Anderson, its director, had both been affected by it, he said: “Paul and I laughed a lot before we made the movie. And then we stopped laughing... we were overwhelmed by a sense of sadness. That took us by surprise: We didn’t realise what we had given birth to. It was hard to live with. And still is.”
He explained that the statement revealing his retirement was “uncharacteristic” but a desperate attempt to “draw a line” and avoid being “sucked back into another project”.
He added: “All my life, I’ve mouthed off about how I should stop acting, and I don’t know why it was different this time, but the impulse to quit took root in me, and that became a compulsion. It was something I had to do.”
The star of My Left Foot and The Last of the Mohicans continued: “Do I feel better? Not yet. I have great sadness. And that’s the right way to feel. How strange would it be if this was just a gleeful step into a brandnew life.”
In Phantom Thread, Daylewis play Reynolds Woodcock, a high society dressmaker in post-war London whose world is transformed when he falls in love. Day-lewis admitted that despite living in New York with his wife, Rebecca Miller, he remained essentially English, having been born in Greenwich, London, the son of Cecil Day-lewis, a poet laureate. “I don’t know why, but suddenly I had a strong wish to tell an English story,” Daylewis, who also has Irish citizenship, told W. “England is deep in me. I’m made of that stuff. For a long time, a film set in England was too close to the world that I’d escaped from – drawing rooms, classic Shakespeare.
“But I was fascinated by London after the war. My parents told stories about living through the Blitz, and I felt like I ingested that. I am sentimental about that world. And my dad was very much like Reynolds Woodcock. If a poet is not self-absorbed, what else is he?” Shortly after his announcement, he was involved in an accident riding his motorbike in New York.
“It’s a journey I’ve done hundreds of times. An ambulance ran a red light, and there was nothing I could do. I’ve avoided hundreds of accidents, and this was the one I just couldn’t avoid.” The bike was crushed and he suffered a badly broken arm.
“When I was on the ground, I remember thinking that I would probably lose my hand. I thought, ‘OK, it’s my left hand, and I have another one’.”
However, after surgery his hand was saved. Day-lewis has not yet seen his latest and last film, but now wants to “explore the world in a different way”. The movie is being released in select theatres later this year.