Melding of ‘Left Foot,’ Day-Lewis ‘Was Kind of Magical’

“The evening was sort of darkening,” Daniel Day-Lewis says.

“And it was a very white script,” he said, that glowed on the doormat of his London home.

“So it was kind of magical,” he says. “Normally you get some kind of accompanying explanation, a letter, or a phone call . . . but this just came.”

His smile broadens. “And on the front of this phosphorescent white paper was written, “My Left Foot.’ I was captured by the title. And the first page, as written, was one of the most extraordinary first pages I’d ever read.”

The foot belonged to an Irish man, a real one, whose name was Christy Brown, who was born with cerebral palsy.

Brown’s muscles had betrayed him and his mouth required careful training to form words that anyone besides his mother might understand. The single reliable limb in Brown’s body, the limb with which he painted and drew and composed both poetry and novels that sold all over Europe, was his left foot.

Daniel Day-Lewis had heard of Christy Brown--indeed, he had been mesmerized by Brown’s story, which he had heard at a party at the home of Irish theater producer Noel Pearson. But nothing had come of that conversation until the arrival of the glowing script.

And that night, Day-Lewis, still on a publicity tour for his acclaimed role in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” examined scene by scene the utterly different emotional and physical work expected of the actor who would play Christy Brown.

“I got up now and then and kind of danced for joy,” Day-Lewis says, “because I hadn’t read anything as wonderful as that for a long time.”

This week the New York Film Critics Circle voted Day-Lewis best actor and “My Left Foot” best picture.

Day-Lewis knows that both he and director-writer Jim Sheridan have delivered something extraordinary. He says that he watched the movie in a Dublin theater and that the audience reactions alone made the evening unlike any other. “A night of madness,” he says. “I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”