A New Dawn for Day-Lewis : Movies: Portraying disabled Irish painter and writer Christy Brown in ‘My Left Foot’ has proven to be his most difficult role. But it has provided him with a star turn.

It’s hard to imagine a more unglamorous movie role than the one of Christy Brown, the late Irish writer and painter whose muscles were so affected by cerebral palsy that he could barely speak or move without great physical effort, sometimes accompanied by spasms, grunts and spitting.

In a profession where actors so often are heard to anguish over whether a certain part will spoil their image, Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Christy Brown in the new film “My Left Foot,” has shredded the wisdom of Hollywood. In his short but already notable career, Day-Lewis has been seen on the big screen as the upper-class Edwardian twit in “A Room With a View,” a homosexual London punk in “My Beautiful Laundrette” and a sensual Czech surgeon in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

Yet, surely this was the most difficult assignment to date for the 32-year-old Old Vic graduate whose technical virtuosity has been matched by an equal passion to avoid easy answers to anything. When the question was put to him over tea at the Carlyle Hotel in midtown Manhattan, Day-Lewis said: “Everything seems to be difficult to me. Everything really seems impossible. And then you do it. I guess it was. I mean, I don’t know really. I’m sure everyone will assume it was. I suppose it must have been.”

Then comes a smile, an indication that this grappling for truth, at least over tea, is not an occasion for suffering. There is always time for that later. Day-Lewis, the son of Britain’s former Poet Laureate C. Day Lewis and actress Jill Balcon, is not the sort of public man who tries to make you believe that he has the world figured out. Nor has he been the kind of actor who shifts effortlessly into the self-promotion gear. On this visit to New York from London to help get the word out about “My Left Foot,” he was in high spirits, unstudied and at ease even as he questioned what it is he’s doing.

“Obviously with something like this, it’s not an easy film to encourage people to go and see. The awful truth is that half of me doesn’t want them to see it.”

Really?

“Maybe it’s perversity, but I can’t be so pretentious as to think that it will carry with it some great meaning for a great number of people. I don’t want to be a salesman because it would be so much against the spirit in which the film was made.”

Perhaps it is easy for an actor to say such things when the early reviews have been suitable for framing. In any case, Day-Lewis will never be taken for a salesman. In the Carlyle lobby, he looked pleasantly unkempt, like a wiry Irish cowboy in jeans and blue-denim shirt with a red bandanna around his neck and a mop of black hair at outlaw length.

“We set about making the film not knowing really whether it was possible or not,” he said, referring to writer-director Jim Sheridan, who brought him the script, “but with a huge desire to take it on. Perhaps more importantly, a lack of anxiety over the fact that it might be impossible. Neither of us actually cared about that. Which is desperately important in making films, which so often tend to be weighed down with expectations imposed by outside influences.”

Sheridan, who grew up in the same working-class Dublin known to Christy Brown, had worked as a playwright and director in Dublin and New York but had never made a movie before. That didn’t bother Day-Lewis after he read the screenplay Sheridan wrote with Shane Connaughton.

“The script itself is a very powerful piece of writing. Very few scripts I’ve read exist in their own right as beautiful pieces of work. But that was.”

Before filming, Day-Lewis was able to spend almost three months in Ireland learning about Christy Brown from those who knew him, as well as studying the effects of cerebral palsy, a neurological disease that interferes with muscular control, including speech.

Once filming started, he insisted on remaining in character off camera as much as possible, even continuing to speak in the halting drawl of someone whose facial muscles don’t work properly. He restricted himself to a wheelchair, was lifted in and out of cars and was fed by others. He said the experience was invaluable for the role, although what he learned was not pleasant.

“I think the most obvious thing to say is the incessant rage you feel being beholden to other people, about the lack of consideration of other people, the huge lack of sensitivity. It’s strange what happens, regardless of the conceit, even though everybody knew who I was and what I was doing. When people see someone in a wheelchair, their attitudes change. People’s voices change, they start treating you like a child.

The film reflects many of the new attitudes toward disability brought about in the last 10 years by disabled civil-rights activists--that Christy Brown is not so much a victim of his disease as of the societal prejudices that bar him from a normal life, including an active sex life, until he breaks down the prejudice with the combined force of his talent and corrosive personality.

In the person of Day-Lewis, Brown is shown to be an abrasive, often difficult character who commonly insulted people, started fights and was not easy to love, except for his mother (played by Brenda Fricker) who stood by him always.

“Christy’s thing was to force people into an open confrontation as if to say, ‘This is how I am. I can be dangerous. I can be drunk. I can fight with the best people.’ He just insisted on that confrontation,” Day-Lewis said.

Born into a big, poor Irish family in 1932, Brown was assumed to be mentally incompetent until one day, at the age of 9, he was able to clutch a piece of chalk between the toes of his left foot and write the word mother on the stone floor. His left foot was the only part of his anatomy that he could control.

As he learned to control it more deftly, he became a commercially successful painter, then a writer, breaking into print with “My Left Foot,” his autobiography, followed by “Down All the Days” and other books. He died in 1981 at 49, after choking on a piece of food at dinner.

“ ‘Down All the Days’ was probably his greatest work,” DayLewis said, “and I think the film is closer in spirit to (it). ‘My Left Foot’ was a very nice book, a very simply written book but almost sanitized for public consumption. Then came this sort of volcanic torrent of rage and anguish in ‘Down All the Days’ and that was really the sound of his true voice for the first time.”

The film spans much of Brown’s life (with a younger actor, Hugh O’Conor, playing the boyhood scenes) showing many of the battles he fought to be accepted and some of the bitter setbacks he endured. One of his lowest moments comes during a restaurant scene in which he learns that his love for a woman doctor is unrequited, and he responds by pulling a tablecloth and its contents to the floor with his teeth.

“I asked Jim to set it up so that we could do the whole scene in one shot,” Day-Lewis said. “I had a sense of what was going to happen, but I didn’t know exactly. I said I didn’t want to rehearse or discuss the scene, and I think I created an incredibly unpleasant atmosphere in the room before we began to shoot it because I was filled with a sense of foreboding about it. And I think little by little, it just began to get to people.”

When he was preparing for the movie, which was made for about $2 million in Ireland, Day-Lewis heard from a number of disabled people, including some actors, who were “apprehensive,” he said, about his playing the part.

“Some were very angry about it. It’s something we discussed a lot. There’s nothing that I can do about it.”

The reaction to the film from the disabled community in Britain and Ireland, where the film opened last summer, “seemed to be good,” he said.

“It’s very complicated. To some people, the film will encourage the belief that everything worked out fine for Christy Brown, that people might think (disabled persons) don’t need our consideration after all. He had a tough life, he survived, he had a great spirit and, you know, he got the girl in the end. There is a great danger in that, and at the same time, it’s a true story.”

Finishing his pot of mint tea, he said he had no immediate plans. “The thing about ‘Hamlet’ is that I had to take stock of things a bit when that happened. I’ve just been drifting a little.”

He will go back to London, where he lives simply in “an empty house” he bought not long ago. Possibly, he will get on a motorcycle and just travel across the countryside, which is one of the things he likes to do when he’s not getting into somebody else’s skin.

Although he grew up in a house full of books and under the nose of the nation’s poet laureate, he says he never felt any pressure to be a writer.

“Quite the opposite. I mean, I was aware of the family name and what it meant and I wanted in some way to be able to contribute to that name. I was quite proud of it. But it never occurred to me to write.”

Instead, Day-Lewis gravitated to his mother’s side of the family, without her encouragement. “Not that she discouraged me, but she’d have loved it if I’d become an electrician, I’m sure. Or anything but an actor.”