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Daniel Day-Lewis

From his earliest roles, Daniel Day-Lewis, impressed audiences and critics alike, moving easily from a flamboyant punk-rocker in My Beautiful Laundrette to a delightfully foppish Victorian suitor in Merchant-Ivory's A Room With A View. Together, these performances earned him 1986's New York Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor. He made his film debut in 1971 with an uncredited role as a child vandal in John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday, followed by supporting roles in both Gandhi and The Bounty.

Though Day-Lewis has continued to turn in one highly-praised performance after another, it was his role as writer, artist and Cerebral Palsy sufferer Christy Brown in My Left Foot for director Jim Sheridan which won him an Academy Award for Best Actor. He received his second Oscar nomination for In The Name Of The Father, his second collaboration with Sheridan--the true story of a man unjustly imprisoned for 15 years. His third Academy Award nomination for Gangs Of New York reunited him with acclaimed director Martin Scorsese, for whom he had played the aristocratic Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence.

His other wide-ranging roles include the early American adventurer Hawkeye in The Last Of The Mohicans, Philip Kaufman's film version of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, in which he won praise for his memorable lead role and in the Arthur Miller classic The Crucible, in which he portrayed the repressed Puritan John Proctor, opposite Winona Ryder and directed by Nicholas Hytner.

Day-Lewis trained at the Bristol Old Vic School. He then devoted over a decade in the 1970's and early 1980's to perform with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company, Royal Shakespeare Company and The National Theatre, turning in notable performances in Another Country, Dracula, Futurists and Hamlet.


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Daniel Day-Lewis Facts

Birth NameDaniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis
OccupationActor
BirthdayApril 29, 1957 (51)
SignTaurus
BirthplaceLondon, England, United Kingdom
Height6' 1½" (1m87)
Awards2008 Academy Awards: Best Actor (for There Will Be Blood)
2008 Golden Globe Awards: Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (for There Will Be Blood)
2008 Screen Actors Guild Awards: Best Male Actor in a Leading Role (for There Will Be Blood)
2008 BAFTA Awards: Actor in a Leading Role (for There Will Be Blood)
2003 Screen Actors Guild Awards: Best Male Actor in a Leading Role (for Gangs of New York)
2003 BAFTA Awards: Actor in a Leading Role (for Gangs Of New York)
1990 Academy Awards: Best Actor (for My Left Foot)
1990 BAFTA Awards: Actor in a Leading Role (for My Left Foot)

Selected Filmography

There Will Be Blood
The Last of the Mohicans
Gangs of New York
The Crucible
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
A Room With a View
My Left Foot
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