When Serena Davies was 14, she wrote a fan letter to Daniel Day-Lewis and got a reply. The answer included some heartfelt words on his acting raison d’etre.
When I was 14 I wrote a fan letter to Daniel Day-Lewis. I’d seen him in Hamlet at the National Theatre, the part that would happen to be his last stage role after he walked out halfway through a performance, believing he’d just seen the ghost of his dead father. Fortunately, on the night I was there, he lasted the evening. We got three hours’ worth of riveting existential torment and palpable madness from an actor for whom the term “burning intensity” has never been a cliché.
Luckily, I picked the man whom the American film academy now rates as the greatest film actor who ever lived for my teenage crush. The greatest, that is, because in the early hours of this morning he won a record-breaking third leading actor Oscar for his “resurrection” (as one critic called it) of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s film about the president.
The actor, sweetly, wrote back to me. He answered several of my rambling questions and included some heartfelt words on his acting raison d’être, which I’m sure he won’t mind if I quote here. (Strange to say, the letter has survived the six house moves I have made since then.)
“Yes, the words must always be your own. That is all acting is. Each time is the first time – each word, from each thought or impulse, must be your own. Simple and nigh on impossible.” Watching his performance in Lincoln the other day reminded me of another part of Day-Lewis’s letter. I can’t believe it qualifies as a spoiler to say Lincoln dies at the end of the film. When Spielberg shows the moment he is pronounced dead, we see a room filled with men of state crowding round the body on the bed. But instead of giving us a man rigid on his back, his chin in the air, in the way we are used to witnessing the filmic demise of kings and great ones, Day-Lewis is a crumpled, foetal bundle of sharp-angled limbs.
It is a truly brilliant corpse, and, in tune with Day-Lewis’s whole performance, offers humility and awkwardness where you might expect grandeur or pomposity.
For this reason, I like to think its ugly shape was the actor’s idea rather than Spielberg’s. Day-Lewis’s postscript to his letter to me, after discussion of the way he had draped his murdered body across the foot of a statue in the play, was, “Being dead was always a speciality.”
