Daniel Day-Lewis

Born: 29 April 1957
Where: London, England, UK

The Oscar-winning actor has amassed a small but wisely chosen canon of work ranging from The Last of the Mohicans to In The Name of the Father.

He is known as one of the world's most selective actors, appearing in only four movies in the last ten years.

The son of actress Jill Balcon (daughter of the former head of Ealing Studios) and the late British Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, he was brought up in Greenwich.

Cecil Day-Lewis was already 53 years old at the time of his son's birth, and seemed to take little interest in his children. (following frequent health problems, he died when Daniel was 15).

Finding himself among tough South London children while being "Jewish and posh", he was often bullied and learned to adopt local accents and mannerisms.

In 1968, Day-Lewis' parents, finding him to be "too wild," sent him to Sevenoaks School in Kent, as a boarder.

Though he detested the school, he was introduced to his two most prominent interests: woodworking and acting.

He made his debut in Cry, The Beloved Country, wearing extensive makeup for his role as a black boy.

While his disdain for the school grew, he made his film debut at the age of 14 in Sunday Bloody Sunday in which he played a vandal in an uncredited role.

He described the experience as "heaven," for getting paid £2 to vandalize expensive cars parked outside his local church.

After two years at Sevenoaks, he was transferred to the Bedales School in Petersfield and followed a dramatic path at the National Youth Theatre.

Although he had excelled onstage, he decided to become a cabinet-maker, unsuccessfully applying for a five-year apprenticeship.

He then applied (and was accepted) at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which he attended for three years, eventually performing at the Bristol Old Vic itself.

Eleven years after his film debut, Day-Lewis continued his film career with a small part in Gandhi as Colin, a street thug who bullies the title character, only to be immediately chastised by his high-strung mother.

In 1984, he had a supporting role as the conflicted, but ultimately loyal first mate in The Bounty, after which he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet.

The actor was next featured on stage as The Count in the stage-play of Dracula where he appeared with his hair dyed blond in a throwback to Nosferatu.

He later let his hair grow out to give a frosted "punk look" when he played half of a gay bi-racial couple in My Beautiful Laundrette.

Day-Lewis gained further public notice when the film was released simultaneously with a completely different character in A Room with a View (1986), in which he played the effete upper-class fiancé of the main character (played by Helena Bonham Carter).

In 1987, Day-Lewis assumed leading man status by starring in Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, co-starring Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche, as a Czech doctor.

Day-Lewis put his personal version of "method acting" to full use in 1989 with his performance as Christy Brown in Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot which won him numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actor.

He returned to the stage to work with Richard Eyre, as Hamlet at the National Theatre, but collapsed in the middle of a scene where the ghost of Hamlet's father first appears to his son.

This would be his last stage appearance as he broke down during the run later claiming to have seen the ghost of his father.

In 1992, three years after his Oscar win, he underwent rigorous weight-training as well as learning to forage to star in The Last of the Mohicans.

While the film carried him to new heights of stardom, Day-Lewis preferred less Hollywood films such as The Age of Innocence co-starring Michelle Pfeiffer and directed by Martin Scorsese.

He ultimately returned to work with Jim Sheridan on In the Name of the Father, in which he played Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four who were wrongfully convicted of a bombing carried out by the Provisional IRA.

In 1996, Day-Lewis starred in a film version of The Crucible based on the play by Arthur Miller and co-starring Winona Ryder and followed that with Jim Sheridan's The Boxer as an IRA member recently released from prison.

Following The Boxer, Daniel Day-Lewis took a leave of absence from acting by putting himself into "semi-retirement" and returning to his old passion of woodworking.

He moved to Florence, Italy where he became intrigued by the craft of shoemaking, eventually apprenticing as a shoemaker.

After a three-year absence from filming, Day-Lewis returned to act in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York in the Oscar-nominated role of the villainous gangleader Bill the Butcher.

Next up his wife, director Rebecca Miller, offered him the lead role in her film The Ballad of Jack and Rose, in which he played a dying man with regrets.

In 2007, Day-Lewis appeared in director Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, renamed There Will Be Blood.