30 Unknown Facts About Daniel Day Lewis – Only Male Actor To Win Three Academy Award For Best Actor

Sir Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis, an English actor, known for his devotion to and deep research of his roles, is one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation. Here are 30 facts to know about the actor:

1. He was born as Daniel Michael Black Day Lewis on 29 April 1957 in London to poet Cecil Day Lewis and British actress Jill Balcon.
2. He is known as a method actor who stays completely in the character for the duration of the film shoot. His devotion to the character is so intense to the point, where it affects his health adversely.
3. He is one of the very few actors in the film industry who are very selective in doing films. He has acted in only 5 films since 1998 up to 2017 taking a gap of 5 years between each role.
4. Lewis is the only male actor to win three Oscars in the Best Actor Category. He won Best Actor for “My Left Foot” in 1989, “There Will Be Blood” in 2007 and “Lincoln” in 2012.
5. He was knighted in June 2014 at the Buckingham Palace in honor of his services to drama.
6. Time magazine named Lewis as the “World’s Greatest Actor” in November 2012. He has won 4 BAFTA Awards, 3 Screen Actors Guild Award, 2 Golden Globe Award apart from 3 Oscars in his career.
7. Being a rich Jewish he was bullied in his childhood. To escape from that he soon mastered the local accent and their mannerisms. He regards that as his first greatest performance of his life.
8. His first film experience was at the age of 14 when he was given a role of a vandal in the movie “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. He regards the experience as heaven as he was paid pound 2 for vandalizing cars outside a church.
9. He was transferred to three different schools in a short duration owing to his wild behavior. He found some reprieve in an independent school in Bedales in Hampshire where his interest in acting started to take shape.
10. At the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School he was understudy to Pete Postlethwaite. Ironically, he later co-starred with Postlethwaite in the movie “In the Name of the Fahter.”
    
11. After a gap of 11 years, in 1982, he got a small part role of a South African street thug in the movie “Gandhi.” He is one among the group of youngsters that racially abuse the title character walking along the side walk.
12. His first major supporting role came in 1984 for the movie “The Bounty.”
13. His popularity in America rose immensely when in 1986 two of his movies featuring him in prominent roles opened on the same day. In “My Beautiful Laundrette” he portrayed the character of an ex-skinhead gay lover and in “A Room with a View” he portrayed a snobbish and repressed upperclassman.
14. His first lead role was of a Czech doctor in the movie “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, an adaptation of the book by Milan Kundera. He had initially turned down the role terming it as very nice. Later the script was revised with inputs from the book that made his character less perfect and apt for the movie.
15. His co star Lena Olin in the movie “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” met him for the first time on the first day of the shoot. Ironically she had to perform an intense nude sex scene with him on the very same day she met him.
16. The director Philip Kaufman cast Lewis for his movie “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” after watching him on TV. Though he forgot the movie, he had remembered Lewis’s name and was impressed with his acting skills.
17. He won American Award for Best Actor and BAFTA Award for Best Actor for his performance in the 1989 movie “My Left Foot.” The movie was about the real life writer and painter Christy Brown who suffered from cerebral palsy. He was able to use only his left foot.
18. It was later revealed that many of the scenes in the movie “My Left Foot” were filmed through a mirror. The reason being Day-Lewis was able to manipulate only his right foot for the shoot and the character requires left foot.
19. Known to remain in his character during the filming schedule, Day-Lewis remained hunched all the time in the wheelchair, and was always required to spoon feed. On one occasion his English agent got so frustrated from Day-Lewis’s remaining in the character act that he took off from the set.
20. According to a report he had taken time off movies to work as a cobbler in Florence, Italy. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, director Martin Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein lured him to New York on a false pretense to make him take leading role in movie “Gangs of New York” in 2002.
    
21. Several times he was offered the role of Aragorn in “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy but turned it down.
22. For the character Bill the Butcher in the movie “Gangs of New York” he listened to songs of Eminem to get into the angry frame of mind.
23. During the production of “Hamlet” in London's National Theatre in 1989 he fainted during a scene where ghost of Hamlet's father appears. He sobbed uncontrollably stating that he saw his own father and never returned to theatre since then.
24. He is the first actor to win 3 Oscars for Best Actor. His Oscar for “Lincoln” in 2013 was his third.
25. For his role as Daniel Plainview in the movie “There will be Blood” in 2007 he won a total of 23 acting awards including the prestigious Oscar for best actor.
26. Very few times Day-Lewis could be found actively pursuing for a movie role. He tried in vain to get the role of Vincent Vega in “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, which eventually went to john Travolta.
27. On November 2014 he was knighted by Prince William in Buckingham Palace. In 2008 while receiving Best Actor Award at Oscars from Helen Mirren, he knelt in front of her and she knighted him with the Oscar Statue. He quipped “This is the closest I will come to ever getting a knighthood.”
28. He holds dual citizenship of England and Ireland. He holds the press responsible for him getting Irish citizenship, because when he required some privacy they made him public.
29. He read over 100 books on Abraham Lincoln to prepare for the title role in 2012 movie “Lincoln.” He had first declined the role. Director Spielberg approached him again after Liam Neeson dropped out.
30. He was introduced to his wife Rebecca Miller by her father Arthur Miller when he went to visit the playwright for the stage play “The Crucible”. They married a year later and have 2 sons.
31. Daniel Day Lewis Net Worth: $50 Million