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It’s no act, he mutates

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Times Staff Writer

IN the age of celebrity, where have all the actors gone?

That’s what crossed the mind when Daniel Day-Lewis ascended the stage to collect the statuette for best leading actor for his role as the rapacious oilman Daniel Plainview in the epic “There Will Be Blood.” From the moment he emerges from the bowels of a mine in the film’s opening, Day-Lewis incarnates the spirit of unhinged American capitalism, just as he once vivified a gay English punk, a furious disabled artist, a 19th century American aristocrat and other iconic parts.

The 50-year-old, double-earringed Day-Lewis began his acceptance speech by sending up his own super-serious image, kneeling to Helen Mirren and cracking, “This is the closest I’ll ever come to getting a knighthood.” He then thanked the academy for “whacking me with the handsomest bludgeon in town.”

For many moviegoers, Day-Lewis himself might be the handsomest bludgeon in town -- a pure, untainted artist who knows how to wallop the audience with raw emotion.

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More than almost any other living actor, Day-Lewis has been able to escape the tarnishing effect of celebrity culture. He lives off the media grid in Wicklow, Ireland. He works rarely and speaks even less, appearing miraculously out of the collective memory to take on parts that it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing.

And then there’s the power of the transformation.

“He doesn’t perform or act but mutates,” said Michael Mann, who directed him in “The Last of the Mohicans.”

The stories are legend of what Day-Lewis will do to fully inhabit his character. To play an Irish Republican Army partisan turned boxer in “The Boxer,” he trained twice a day, seven days a week, for three years. For “Mohicans,” he learned to hunt and built a canoe. To play a crime kingpin in “Gangs of New York,” he practiced throwing deadly knives and reportedly glared so much at costar Leonardo DiCaprio he intimidated the young superstar.

To those who’ve worked with Day-Lewis, the legends often misconstrue what he is actually doing.

“It’s a kind of a different level of focus than the normal person,” said director Jim Sheridan, who’s worked with Day-Lewis on a series of films, including “My Left Foot.”

Yet Sheridan stresses that Day-Lewis’ ferocious commitment is not an exercise in ego but in empathy. For instance, in “In the Name of the Father,” which was based on true events, Day-Lewis plays a man falsely imprisoned for an IRA bombing. One of the plot’s conundrums was why Day-Lewis’ character would sign a false confession.

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“That seemed very hard to muddle through logically,” Sheridan said. But not after Day-Lewis stayed up two to three days in a row in a prison cell. “He was in a kind of emotional condition when we were doing the scene. . . . He was close to tears because he was very tired. That answered all the questions of logic.”

Similarly, in his last Oscar-winning performance, “My Left Foot,” Day-Lewis spent eight weeks learning to paint with his left foot like his true-life protagonist, Irish writer and artist Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy. And yes, he did spend the whole time making the film in his wheelchair. But, Sheridan pointed out, “we actually filmed with children who had cerebral palsy. I wondered what it would be like if you had an actor who stood up [at the end of] filming and walked out. It was a commitment to their suffering that he stayed in character.”

Paul Dano, the young actor who plays Plainview’s antagonist Eli Sunday in “There Will Be Blood,” did keep his distance from Day-Lewis during the filming. “A lot of people think he’s strange to be that committed, but it really makes sense when you see it in person.” During the film, Daniel Day-Lewis shoved Dano’s face in the mud and hurled prop bowling balls at him, but, Dano explained, “as much as he goes through or puts himself through, he never expects another actor to do the same, as long as they get to where they need to get to. He doesn’t have any ego. He would let me slap him in the face, but he’d never expect to slap me in the face unless I wanted it to happen.”

In today’s film world, transformative acting is more often associated with women. The great chameleons of today are people like Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett. Their essential natures remain mysterious no matter how much the media attempt to pin them down. By contrast, the male stars, even great ones like Will Smith or Sean Penn, maintain some recognizable vestige of themselves from role to role.

But not Day-Lewis. He can truly mutate because of the unerring and often thrilling control he maintains over his physical being.

Mann said that physicality is one of Day-Lewis’ important portals through which he arrives at a character’s emotional state. For “Mohicans,” the actor learned all the skills of an 18th century Native American. “He kind of works through the physical,” said Mann, so much so that it affects “all the complex circuitry in his wiring pattern” of his brain, which “starts to refract into your attitude.”

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“Daniel had just come off of what happened on the London stage,” recalled his “Mohicans” costar, Madeleine Stowe, referring to an incident in which Day-Lewis, playing Hamlet at the National Theatre, ran from the stage crying, convinced he was talking to the ghost of his own dead father. “I felt from him a great deal of uncertainty until he got into the physicality of the character. When he was physical and could run, then he seemed incredibly confident.”

Day-Lewis often seems to fuse with his directors, working repeatedly with Martin Scorsese and Sheridan. In his Oscar acceptance speech, he said that his Daniel Plainview “sprang like a golden sapling out of the mad beautiful head of Paul Thomas Anderson.”

Sheridan says Day-Lewis doesn’t like to rehearse and doesn’t need direction, just a kind of watchful nurturing. “There’s the being observed by whoever directs. Although I think Daniel comes as prepared as any actor, the observation is still of paramount importance.”

And then there’s just Day-Lewis’ own brand of magic -- the ineluctable energy that defies parsing. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how he merged so completely with Daniel Plainview, the ferocious human inferno who nonetheless encapsulates human frailty.

Whenever he was asked to describe his character’s driving impulse, Day-Lewis often used the metaphor of a man gripped by a fever. In Plainview’s case, it was for oil; in Day-Lewis’ case, the sometimes-brutal quest is for transcendence.

“The work becomes an end in itself,” Day-Lewis explained to one interviewer. “And I think that’s also true of the, you know, if you compare that fever to the fever of prospecting, that those guys that thought they knew what they were after, which is the vast mansion on the Pacific Coast, by the time they had accumulated enough wealth to build that pyramid for themselves, the work was actually an end in itself. The fever was the thing that they lived for.”

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rachel.abramowitz @latimes.com

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