[7] After supporting film roles in Gandhi (1982) and The Bounty (1984), he earned acclaim for his breakthrough performances in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), A Room with a View (1985), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988).

[8] His father, who was born in the Irish town of Ballintubbert, County Laois, was of Protestant Anglo-Irish descent, lived in England from age two, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968.

[10][11][12][13] Day-Lewis's maternal grandfather, Sir Michael Balcon, became the head of Ealing Studios, helping develop the new British film industry.

[15] Two years after Day-Lewis's birth, he moved with his family to Croom's Hill in Greenwich via Port Clarence, County Durham.

[16] Living in Greenwich (he attended Invicta and Sherington Primary Schools),[17] Day-Lewis had to deal with tough south London children.

[16] For a few weeks in 1972, the Day-Lewis family lived at Lemmons, the north London home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard.

[25]During the early 1980s, Day-Lewis worked in theatre and television, including Frost in May (where he played an impotent man-child) and How Many Miles to Babylon?

[21] In 1985, Day-Lewis gave his first critically acclaimed performance playing a young gay English man in an interracial relationship with a Pakistani youth in the film My Beautiful Laundrette.

Directed by Stephen Frears, and written by Hanif Kureishi, the film is set in 1980s London during Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister.

[27] In 1987, Day-Lewis assumed leading man status by starring in Philip Kaufman's adaptation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which he portrayed a Czech surgeon whose hyperactive sex life is thrown into disarray when he allows himself to become emotionally involved with a woman.

[28] He and other young British actors of the time, such as Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tim Roth, and Bruce Payne, were dubbed the "Brit Pack".

[29] Day-Lewis progressed his personal version of method acting in 1989 with his performance as Christy Brown in Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot.

[30] Day-Lewis prepared for the role by making frequent visits to Sandymount School Clinic in Dublin, where he formed friendships with several people with disabilities, some of whom had no speech.

[21] Playing a severely paralysed character on screen, off-screen Day-Lewis had to be moved around the set in his wheelchair, and crew members would curse at having to lift him over camera and lighting wires, all so that he might gain insight into all aspects of Brown's life, including the embarrassments.

[36] The media attention following his breakdown on-stage contributed to his decision to eventually move from England to Ireland in the mid-1990s, to regain a sense of privacy amidst his increasing fame.

He returned to work with Jim Sheridan on In the Name of the Father in which he played Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four, who were wrongfully convicted of a bombing carried out by the Provisional IRA.

[40] Day-Lewis returned to the US in 1993, playing Newland Archer in Martin Scorsese's adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel The Age of Innocence.

To prepare for the film, set in America's Gilded Age, he wore 1870s-period aristocratic clothing around New York City for two months, including top hat, cane, and cape.

[42] The film was critically well received, while Peter Travers in Rolling Stone wrote: "Day-Lewis is smashing as the man caught between his emotions and the social ethic.

[44] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a grade of "A", calling the adaptation "joltingly powerful" and noting the "spectacularly" acted performances of Day-Lewis, Scofield, and Allen.

[46][47] Impressed with his work in the ring, McGuigan felt Day-Lewis could have become a professional boxer, commenting, "If you eliminate the top ten middleweights in Britain, any of the other guys Daniel could have gone in and fought.

Rotten Tomatoes's critical consensus reads, "Though flawed, the sprawling, messy Gangs of New York is redeemed by impressive production design and Day-Lewis's electrifying performance.

[50] In the early 2000s, Day-Lewis's wife, director Rebecca Miller, offered him the lead role in her film The Ballad of Jack and Rose, in which he played a dying man with regrets over how his life had evolved, and over how he had brought up his teenage daughter.

[57] The film featured a large ensemble of distinguished actresses, including Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, and Sophia Loren.

[60] Based on the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, the film began shooting in Richmond, Virginia, in October 2011.

Speaking in Lincoln's voice throughout the entire shoot, Day-Lewis asked the British crew members who shared his native accent not to chat with him.

[69] After a five-year hiatus, Day-Lewis returned to the screen to star in Paul Thomas Anderson's historical drama Phantom Thread (2017).

[4][5] Displaying a "mercurial intensity", he would often remain completely in character throughout the shooting schedules of his films, even to the point of adversely affecting his health.

"[80] Widely respected among his peers, in June 2017, Michael Simkins of The Guardian wrote, "In this glittering cesspit we call the acting profession, there are plenty of rival thesps who, through sheer luck or happenstance, seem to have the career we ourselves could have had if only the cards had fallen differently.

A registered UK charity, the Poetry Archive is a free website containing a growing collection of recordings of English-language poets reading their work.