How one of screen's best actors lost the will to go on

As the three-time Oscar winner's breakthrough film, 'My Beautiful Laundrette', is re-released in cinemas, Xan Brooks looks at Daniel Day-Lewis's career and apparent retirement

- Xan Brooks

One day, God willing, they'll make a film about the filming of Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017). This might be a documentary or a drama, a Shakespearean tragedy or a frantic farce, but it would take us behind the scenes at a central London townhouse to show how a great actor lost the will to go on. The shoot was too long, the conditions too stressful and the pure thrill of performing simply wasn’t there any more. On completing his role as the society dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock, Daniel Day-Lewis announced that he was calling it quits. “I need to believe in the value of what I’m doing,” the then 60-year-old actor explained. And just lately, he added, that had not been the case.

On learning of the death of the US president Calvin Coolidge, Dorothy Parker famously remarked, “How can they tell?” It’s tempting to ask the same question of Day-Lewis’s retirement, given how infrequently he appeared on screen in the latter part of his career. He’s made a mere seven films since the turn of the century and reputedly considered his future at the end of each one. He’s the most fragile, ambivalent, unstarry movie star of them all. Perversely, of course, that’s part of his mystique.

If we can’t have a new Day-Lewis film this summer, we can at least have an old one, unearthed and reissued. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) casts him as Johnny, a peroxide neofascist punk who’s redeemed by the love of a good man (in this case, Omar, an Anglo-Asian schoolmate). This was the young actor’s big breakthrough role, landing in UK cinemas just ahead of his turn in Merchant-Ivory’s A Room with a View (1985). Here, he’s third-billed on the cast, blending in with the brickwork; a component part as opposed to the headline player.

Directed by Stephen Frears from a script by Hanif Kureishi,