Daniel Day-Lewis

The thing about performance, even if it’s only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.

Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis (born 29 April 1957) is an English actor with dual British and Irish citizenship. Day-Lewis studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He has won three Academy Awards for Best Actor for portraying Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood , Christy Brown in My Left Foot and Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln. He is one of a very few actors who has received three Oscar Awards and the only actor who has ever received three Academy Awards for Best Actor in the history. His father was Cecil Day Lewis and his grandfather was Sir Michael Balcon.

Quotes

• You don’t merely give over your creativity to making a film—you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night’s washing-up.
  • City Limits (London, April 7, 1988).

• Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence—the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.
  • City Limits (London, April 7, 1988).

• The thing about performance, even if it’s only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.
  • Rolling Stone (New York, February 8, 1990).

• [re: Abraham Lincoln.] "For whatever reason, and I can't explain why - that moment at which one is drawn into the orbit, irrevocably, of a life. I felt the tug of that orbit. I didn't know why; I was quite alarmed by it..."
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?#t=590s.

• [re: Abraham Lincoln] "Shall we stop this bleeding."^{[citation needed]}