Daniel Day-Lewis Became a Star With Two Wildly Different Roles in One Year

The Big Picture

• Daniel Day-Lewis is considered the greatest film actor, with a body of work that showcases his exceptional range and talent.
• In My Beautiful Laundrette, Day-Lewis plays Johnny, a punk with a tender heart and the ability to code-switch between tough and dignified.
• In A Room with a View, Day-Lewis portrays Cecil, a clumsy aristocrat with a shallow emotional range, whom viewers find both amusing and pitiable.

Few things in life are generally agreed upon, especially in the world of arguing over movies, where everything is subjective. It’s been said that people don’t even see the same shade of color, let alone see the same nuances and merits of an actor’s talents. That said, if there is such a thing as a consensus opinion in the realm of film acting, it’s the notion that Daniel Day-Lewis is the single greatest film actor we’ve seen.

With all but a handful of genuine misses to his credit, he’s curated an impeccable body of work, speaking to the unfathomable level of range that he’s always had inside of him. He’s possibly the only actor in history whose actual work lives up to the legend about him, and that legend was truly born in the year 1985, when he gave the world a pair of performances so polar opposite to each other, that it forced everyone to sit up and go “whoa.” We’re talking about A Room with a View and My Beautiful Laundrette.

Who Does Daniel Day-Lewish Play in ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’?

My Beautiful Laundrette is about the relationship between two men, Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), and their joint effort in opening and operating a laundromat. Omar is the liberal son of a Pakistani family who largely believes in the false promises of wealth that Margaret Thatcher foretold, while Johnny is a member of a gang of right-wing extremist punks. The two used to be childhood friends, and they quickly fall into a romantic relationship that they must keep under wraps in their largely conservative area. Johnny is largely defined by the contradiction between his rough mannerisms and the tender heart that he secretly carries. He can acknowledge that he fell into a right-wing crowd, and show his drive to move on from that lifestyle by committing to his love for Omar. Johnny may have spent some formative years on the wrong side of the tracks, but it wasn’t enough to fundamentally change him for the worse, thanks to his connection with Omar.

What makes Day-Lewis stand out in this role is how radical and coarse he looks and sounds. Rocking platinum frosted tips, a working-class brogue so thick that every third and fifth letter is missing, and the body of a punk-chic mannequin, Day-Lewis carries himself as far more self-composed and graceful than your average street thug. He successfully exists in between worlds, being equally at home as the tough guy who can easily throw out anyone who threatens his business, and also able to converse with Omar’s family in a way that evokes dignity and respect. His ability to code-switch when he’s around conservative folk who would rather not know about his homosexuality is an early sign of the emotional dexterity that Day-Lewis would bring to roles for years to come.

Not to mention that he boosts the sex appeal of the film’s refreshingly upfront attitude about homosexuality, as the love scenes between him and Warnecke are genuinely tender and sell you that Johnny would be willing to change his whole lifestyle for the sake of his oldest friend. If nothing else is impressive about the change that Day-Lewis would eventually make for his next character, it’s how drastically he was able to flush all of his sex appeal and coolness out of his body to play a total sap.

Who Does Daniel Day-Lewis Play in ‘A Room with a View’?

A Room with a View is one of the crowning achievements of the legendary independent filmmaking duo of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, who spent a career making the kinds of tasteful costume dramas that have since been bastardized as “Oscar bait.” An adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel, it’s the tale of Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) as she grapples with choosing between true love and the unspoken pressures of tradition, as personified by the two men she must choose from. In one corner is George (Julian Sands), a free-thinking romantic who is outspoken about his passions (which include her, obviously); in the other corner is Cecil (Day-Lewis), a boring fuddy-duddy who’s the textbook example of an “aristocrat”, with his nose high in the air and the pulse of a sedated sloth. While, on paper, this should be a no-brainer, Lucy is at least aware that she’s potentially passing up the chance for fat stacks of cash and lifelong security, provided she can put up with a life of un-requested literature readings and horrible kisses. It’s not so much that Cecil is a bad guy, as he seems well-intentioned in his feelings for Lucy, it’s just that he’s so clumsy about any kind of emotional expression that he makes you wish he’d kept his thoughts to himself.

To be subjected to Cecil is to be a captive audience to a one-man show devoted to his flamboyant navel-gazing at all things artistic. The genius of Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance is how he imbues Cecil with a sonorous voice that is an inch deep and a mile wide, rich with carry and yet so absent of rhythm or depth. He is the ultimate person you’d dread to be around in real life, but you can’t stop watching when he’s onscreen. It’s almost tempting to argue that Day-Lewis is playing him as comic relief in an otherwise deeply serious matter of spiritual indecision, as it’s simply too hard to stifle laughter when he lags behind a group because he’s too busy reading or when his smooch game is so bad that he knocks his glasses off his face. Yet Day-Lewis can also inspire you to pity Cecil, mainly due to how divorced he is from the ramifications of his shallow emotional range. It would be rational to think that being confronted with his artistic fixation would inspire some kind of change in approach, but instead, all Cecil can muster is a bemused critique of her newfound voice, with the intrigued respect of a true craft connoisseur. It’s a testament to Daniel Day-Lewis’ empathy that he can take an obvious wet blanket and make him into a character with an oddly ironic charisma, the kind where you would be cringing if he weren’t so engaging in his attempts at impressing anybody who would listen to him.

Critics Were Instantly Impressed With Daniel Day-Lewis’ Range

The release of these two films was mere months apart, and it allowed audiences and critics the chance to see the immense promise of Daniel Day-Lewis in real time. There was instant chatter from notable critics like Vincent Canby, who said that his My Beautiful Laundrette performance had both “extraordinary technical flash and emotional substance,” and Roger Ebert, who proclaimed his A Room with a View performance a “masterpiece…give him a monocle and a butterfly, and he could be on the cover of the New Yorker.” Even Sheila Benson, in her review of My Beautiful Laundrette, saw fit to make note of how Daniel was “an emerging star, as you will see when you compare this performance with his diametrically different role in ‘Room With a View.'” Critics weren’t simply pointing out that Day-Lewis had good acting skills, they were openly marveling at his ability to be completely different people in such a short period. This is the kind of critical notice actors dream of getting their entire careers and Day-Lewis was getting them before he was even a truly established name.

This double bill was only the first taste of the transformative power that Daniel Day-Lewis had always held in him. He’s one of the rare actors who is difficult to analyze because every choice he makes feels so perfect that you don’t know where to begin the dissection. You don’t win three Academy Awards for being a lead actor and resurrect Abraham Lincoln unless you have an instinct for how to stretch yourself in ways that nobody is expecting. Many actors have earned the reputation of being “chameleons”, but few have done so with a nearly supernatural ability to seemingly change their entire DNA without the use of prosthetics or weight change like Day-Lewis can. While the concept of “method acting” has been ruined by narcissistic men seeking excuses to engage in toxic behavior, Day-Lewis has sold us on his method practices better than any actor in history, as it’s difficult to imagine him consistently pulling off the magic that he did without following through on what worked for him. Playing a rebellious punk and playing a self-serious egghead are not challenging roles on their own, but putting them back to back in a relatively short time is a daunting idea for almost any actor. For Daniel Day-Lewis, it was Tuesday.

A Room with a View is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

Watch on Max