MOVIES : The Fire This Time : Daniel Day-Lewis delivers a blistering performance in ‘In the Name of the Father’--but the charismatic star plays his personal cards close to the vest

Some actors play parts. Daniel Day-Lewis becomes them: “My Left Foot,” “Last of the Mohicans,” “The Age of Innocence.” He’s developed a reputation as an actor who out-Methods even big Method guys like De Niro, Pacino and Hoffman. He stays in character on movie sets whether the camera’s rolling or not. He’s been known to show up for interviews with the media affecting the costume and manner of his current project.

Day-Lewis’ gift at becoming someone else on film only compounds the mystery of who this 36-year-old English actor is in real life. Sitting in a New York hotel suite to discuss his role in Jim Sheridan’s “In the Name of the Father”--in which he plays Gerry Conlon, an Irishman wrongly convicted of IRA bombing deaths in England--Day-Lewis is not the enigmatic and brooding thespian that the press has often painted.

His wardrobe is casually stylish: black jeans, motorcycle boots, with a thick green turtleneck giving off just a hint of Irishness. His dark hair is short and unkempt, which detracts not at all from his charismatic good looks. He seems gregariously at ease, even upbeat. It might be an act, but who’d ever be able to tell?

“I’ve never read any account of myself,” Day-Lewis says, downplaying the mystique that has built up around him. “I mean, if people make my life seem mysterious, then I think that is probably a false impression. My life is fairly mysterious to me, but I don’t see why it should be to other people.”

He says this with an ironic half-smile. He hates talking about himself, and he hates talking about his acting. He did minimal publicity for Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence” but has been much more compliant in promoting “In the Name of the Father” (which opened in Los Angeles and New York last week and opens wider this month), the success of which will largely depend on his considerable star power.

So far, critics have lavished praise on the film and Day-Lewis’ performance; he was voted runner-up for best actor by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. for his work in both “Innocence” and “Father” and just won a Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a drama for “Father.”

The case on which the movie is based, a cause celebre in England, is largely unfamiliar to most American audiences. Gerry Conlon was 19 and living in London when British authorities summarily arrested, charged and convicted him and three friends of the 1974 bombing of two pubs in Guildford, a London suburb. Dubbed the Guildford Four, they were branded as Irish Republican Army terrorists and served 15 years, despite the fact that they were innocent and had little if anything to do with the IRA--a fact British authorities knew all along.

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The movie, based on Conlon’s book about his ordeal, “Proved Innocent,” makes the Brits look very bad but does not endorse the brutal tactics of the IRA. The focus is on Conlon and his father, Giuseppe, who was imprisoned as an accomplice, and their complex and evolving relationship.

Day-Lewis was persuaded to star in the film by Sheridan, who directed the actor’s Oscar-winning performance in 1989’s “My Left Foot.”

“He started telling me the story, and by the time he was finished I was completely taken with it,” Day-Lewis says. He also liked Conlon, whom he met while staying at Sheridan’s house in Ireland.

“I was most immediately struck by his sense of humor,” Day-Lewis says. “He’s very bright and very witty, and I was astonished to find myself howling with laughter at his descriptions of life in some of the toughest of Her Majesty’s prisons. The story is so relentlessly grim that I think that humor was terribly important.”

Besides humor, Day-Lewis takes Conlon’s character through violent extremes of pain, despair, sadness and, ultimately, joyous vindication. Sheridan, who also co-wrote the screenplay, says he “kind of wrote it with Daniel in mind, somebody with that kind of an intensity.” Day-Lewis went to Belfast, met Conlon’s family, and hung around their tough working-class neighborhood to absorb the accent and what Sheridan calls the “physicality” of the part.

Once filming started, Day-Lewis had transformed himself into Gerry Conlon, physically and mentally.

“It was like Gerry playing Daniel sometimes,” Sheridan says. “When we were doing the interrogation scenes, he kind of got himself into a state of absolute tiredness where he was on the verge of tears all the time.”

Says Pete Postlethwaite, the English actor who plays Giuseppe Conlon: “There were times when I didn’t know if he was reacting to me as me or as Giuseppe or if he was being Dan or Gerry. It’s just the way Dan works. It’s total.”

Michelle Pfeiffer, Day-Lewis’ co-star in “Age of Innocence,” describes him as “very pleasant to be around.” Did she get to know him? “No,” she says. Because he was his character, Newland Archer, the whole time? “If he wasn’t Newland, he was a very protected Daniel. He’s not one to wear his heart on his sleeve. He’s very private, and one learns to respect that. I mean, he’s very warm and engaging, but he really does keep things to himself.”

Scorsese, who first saw Day-Lewis in 1988’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” praises the actor’s “dedication to the work.” What they concentrated on, Scorsese says, was “minimal movement and expression” by Day-Lewis’ Archer.

The director describes a moment at the end of the movie between Archer and his son. It is a pivotal scene, revelatory for Archer, and Scorsese filmed Day-Lewis’ reaction both as a medium-distance shot and a close-up:

“I looked at both shots, and I realized the medium was better because Daniel does this little subtle movement with his body that says as much if not more than the close-up did. I didn’t need the close-up.”

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Day-Lewis insists that there’s nothing unusual about his approach to acting: “Basically, it’s just common sense. Any person who wants to understand a life and to borrow that life for a while, there are various means by which you do that. The reason I get involved with things in the first place is the life . It’s not the idea of making a film that appeals to me; it’s the idea of discovering a life which is fascinating to me. It’s not like an exercise in self-flagellation or some kind of willful act of dedication that leads one to work in that way.

“If you’re going to explore a life, the easiest way to explore it is from within, by holding onto it, and not sort of wandering in and out of it and wearing it one moment and slinging it off the next.”

He cuts himself off, saying, “This is all junk, because I’m talking about something I don’t really understand.”

Actors and directors who have worked with him, even friends like Sheridan who have known him for years, seem hard-pressed to say what there is of Day-Lewis’ life in the very different lives of the characters he’s played.

“He’s a very self-disciplined guy,” says Michael Mann, who directed “Mohicans.” Postlethwaite pronounces him “egoless.” Scorsese cites his “elegance” and “respect for other people.” The comments about him seem almost random.

Unlike so many actors, even ones known for completely inhabiting their roles, Day-Lewis seems to bring no idiosyncratic traits or tics to the screen with him. A few qualities those who know him agree on: intelligence, humor, intensity. Mann adds one more to the list: anger.

“There is a moment of killing rage in ‘Mohicans,’ ” he says. “And there’s a rage inside Daniel. You don’t summon that from outside yourself.”

As the title suggests, much of “In the Name of the Father” deals with the difficult relationship between the brash, rebellious Gerry Conlon and his father, Giuseppe, a God-fearing, peaceful man plagued by a weak heart. Day-Lewis’ own father, English Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, died when Daniel was 15, after a long illness. Day-Lewis denies that he is haunted by his famous father, though he once collapsed onstage while playing Hamlet and said later that it was because he, like the melancholy Dane, had seen his father’s ghost. He calls that story a “half-truth” but acknowledges that certain feelings about his father “filtered” into this film.

“You always want your father to be the big fella,” he says. “So I did sort of understand the resentment of illness that Gerry has for Giuseppe. It is shocking to see someone who’s very big shrinking while you’re sort of going the other way.”

Day-Lewis cuts himself off again, as he tends to do when the conversation gets too personal or cuts too close to the bone. “Do you want a cookie? They’re rather good,” he offers, grinning and biting into one himself, then washing it down with cola. Neither of these substances jibes with his legendarily ascetic dietary habits prohibiting meat, sugar, starch, caffeine and alcohol.

“That’s not true,” he says. “I’ve gone through periods of living like that. At the moment I’m half-on, half-off. Cookies are acceptable and I’m drinking again.” His rules about drinking only on weekends while filming “In the Name of the Father” didn’t last long, he says with amusement. “With Gerry’s story, it seemed to be quite important that I drink.”

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Connecting with Conlon’s--and his own--Irishness was another reason Day-Lewis was drawn to this film.

Stephen Frears, the director of one of the actor’s first films, “My Beautiful Laundrette,” once said, “I knew Daniel before he was Irish.” The crack still bugs Day-Lewis, who was born and raised in England but recently acquired a passport issued by Ireland (his father’s native country) and soon plans to move into a house in the south of Ireland. He resents the implication that his Irishness is some kind of pretentious pose or silly affectation.

“When he’s got nothing better to do, he sits around and tries to think of something more unpleasant to say than the last thing he said,” Day-Lewis says of Frears. “My sister and I were both educated in England, so we are both English in that sense, but my father took great pains to introduce us to his country and make us feel that it was as much a home as any place. Yes, I love Irish music. I love Irish people. I love the Irish country.”

He won’t say where in the south of Ireland he’s moving. Nor will he discuss his reported involvement with French actress Isabelle Adjani, although he wears an Irish claddagh ring with the heart pointing inward, which indicates romantic attachment, rather than the opposite.

“If you do ask me about it, I’ll probably sling you out on your ear,” he says with Gerry Conlon-like swagger. Pressed on the meaning of the ring, he simply smiles: “Wonder away.”

Day-Lewis’ status as a sex symbol started with “Unbearable Lightness,” which had him saying, “Take off your clothes” in a bored monotone to assorted Euro-babes. But it was his mostly shirtless performance in “Mohicans” that cemented his image as the thinking woman’s Tom Cruise. But his appeal, though undeniable, is hard to put into words--even from someone like Pfeiffer, who should be unflustered by such questions.

“Other than the fact that he’s gorgeous?” Pfeiffer says. “He has a certain kind of darkness about him that’s appealing. He’s very intelligent. And he has an innate sensitivity that came through even in ‘Last of the Mohicans,’ which was a macho role.”

With evident embarrassment, Day-Lewis avoids the topic by protesting that his “Mohicans” muscles fell off “in about a week and a half.” When he was in Dublin making “In the Name of the Father,” he says, the local women were disappointed in him: “They come up to me prodding me in the chest and saying, ‘Where did it all go? Look at you, you miserable little bastard. Where did all those lovely muscles go?’ ”

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He doesn’t know what his next film will be, and he plans to take at least several months off, he says, “to keep my head down, hide for a while.” Told that a reviewer once suggested that somebody should remake “Wuthering Heights” because Day-Lewis would make such a good Heathcliff, he takes the notion as a high compliment.

“Have you ever read ‘Wuthering Heights’?” he asks. “It’s one of the most violent and depressing books I’ve ever read in my life. I reread it not that long ago with a view to maybe doing something about it. Heathcliff is one of the most unrelentingly morbid characters I’ve ever come across in literature.” He pauses, savoring the memory. “But very appealing.”