Movies: The book of Daniel

Every three years or so, the world is forced to confront the possibility that Daniel Day-Lewis, the professional craftsman, father of three and resident of County Wicklow, Ireland, might well be its greatest living actor. Day-Lewis, it seems, is again in a movie for which critics can barely contain their enthusiasm.

Hard as it is to imagine in a career already celebrated for such roles in "My Beautiful Laundrette," "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "In the Name of the Father" and his Oscar-winning turn in "My Left Foot," there's more clamor than ever before over the remarkable things Day-Lewis does in "There Will Be Blood" -- as well as, inevitably, talk of another Academy Award.

Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a prospector in turn-of-the-century California whose single-minded, scorched-earth pursuit of oil's riches transforms both himself and everything around him. In sheer impact, Day-Lewis' detailed, riveting portrayal is as startling as the movie that surrounds it. "His performance," writes the New Yorker's David Denby, "makes one think of Laurence Olivier at his most physically and spiritually audacious." The New York Critics Circle has honored Day-Lewis with a best actor award, and he's collected his fifth Golden Globe nomination for best actor.

To this storm of acclaim, Day-Lewis brings a demeanor of self-containment and grace. He emits warmth and ease in self-expression and -- up to a point -- in self-disclosure. Such calm belies the prevailing image of Day-Lewis, 50, as a mercurial and intensely committed actor whose sense of detail and verisimilitude, whether it's as quadriplegic writer Christy Brown in "My Left Foot" or as an Irish revolutionary turned fighter in "The Boxer," is often terrifying to behold. He's the kind of actor who, to keep his anger honed to a razor's edge as antebellum New York crime lord Bill the Butcher in "Gangs of New York," pumped his ears full of Eminem's raps.

In 2005's "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," written and directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller, Day-Lewis played a single father living reclusively on an abandoned island commune. Some believe the role is as close to Day-Lewis' real life as any he has played, because he spends much of his time in Ireland as a cobbler.

"I never choose to speak about that," Day-Lewis says of the cobbler gig and the rest of his off-screen life. He does speak, with mild amusement, of this image he has of being a "misanthropic hermit ... which is an image I don't recognize, but I guess others have.

"I've never regarded my life as being a retreat from this work I do onscreen, but actually as a search for other things."

Going back to Ireland, he says, "is my way of re-engaging with the world in the hope that one has experiences in life that are more than whatever happened on the previous movie set. And time spent indulging a fascination with life itself is not time misspent."

He is asked what it takes for a script to pry him loose from his regular life and back onto the screen every two or three years.

"Well, I don't necessarily need to be pried," he says. "Once my curiosity is unleashed, then I'm gone. No one has to entice me or sell anything to me. And I suppose that sense of irrevocability comes to me in infrequent intervals."

Day-Lewis says he found such irrevocable intensity in this script. "It was utterly unique, from that prologue where page after page describes this man's life in detail and tells you everything you need to know about him without him saying a word. And the audacity of that struck me in the most delightful way.

"I had the sense of moving completely into this unknown world as one's own life recedes a bit. Those are the things that quicken my pulse."