The son of actress Jill Balcon (daughter of Ealing supremo Michael Balcon) and writer C. Day-Lewis, Daniel was trained at the Bristol Old Vie, and he has already done impressive work in the theatre—in Christopher Bond's Dracula, Julian Mitchell's Another Country, as Mayakovsky in Futurists, and in several Shakespeare plays, including a London Hamlet that he gave up because of exhaustion. There is an electric volatility to Day-Lewis, as well as a rare poetic feeling, that makes him seem like the Olivier of his talented generation. At present, Day-Lewis is seriously stretching his own range in ways that promise a career of uncommon power.

He had small roles in Candhi (82, Richard Attenborough), and The Bounty (84, Roger Donaldson), and he played Mr. Kafka in The Insurance Man (85, Richard Eyre), written by Alan Bennett. His breakthrough was in My Beautiful Laundrette (85, Stephen Frears), playing a mysterious drifter who develops a serious gay relationship. He was very funny in A Room with a View (86, James Ivory), and then at a loss in Nanou (87, Conny Templeman) and Stars and Bars (88, Pat O'Connor).

Philip Kaufman cast him in the lead role, Tomas, in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (88), but Day-Lewis seemed too young and thus too deliberately cynical in the part—it needed more age and a more hardearned sourness. But he seized on the role of Christy Brown in My Left Foot (89, Jim Sheridan), as hungrily as Thierry Henry with a loose ball in the goal area. Day-Lewis had strong Irish sympathies, and he felt no inhibition about delivering Brown's anger and sexuality to the screen. Actors playing cripples have won Oscars before, but Day-Lewis let us see and feel how true and human a warped spirit can be. The part begged for bravura playing, but Day-Lewis took the performance into real areas of danger. He made Christy fearsome and uncontainable. He was better than the modest context of the film.

For no clear reason, he played a spokesman for dental consciousness in Eversmile, New Jersey (89, Carlos Sorin), filmed in Argentina. Whereupon, Day-Lewis took a great challenge: as Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans (92, Michael Mann), the kind of role that even Olivier would have declined. He seemed physically changed— larger, more muscular, and completely in his element, hurtling silently through the primal forest. He then returned to fine clothes and complicated manners as Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence (93, Martin Scorsese). But he seemed lost, and even effete, and he could not bring the necessary tragedy to bear.

He fell on the role of Gerry Conlon in In the Name of the Father (93, Sheridan) like a freed prisoner. Day-Lewis was bold enough to show Conlon as a martyr scarcely deserving of a film— feckless, immature, lazy—until prison made him a man worthy of his own father. The performance brought substance to an overly simple film.

Day-Lewis continues to be hard to please: in the last ten years he has made five pictures—De Niro, with whom he is sometimes compared, did twenty-three. I'd argue that both numbers are excessive, and hope that Day-Lewis finds a happier medium. He played John Proctor in The Crucible (96, Nicholas Hytner) and married Arthur Miller's daughter, Rebecca. He was The Boxer (97, Jim Sheridan), which had little more than Irishness to recommend it—but he is an Irish citizen. Then years of absence turned into his gangleader in Gangs of New York (02, Scorsese).