Michael Balcon, Daniel Day-Lewis's maternal grandfather, was a significant figure in British cinema. He helped start Alfred Hitchcock's career and was the head of MGM-British between 1936 and 1938.
Day-Lewis preferred acting to school. In fact, he went on a shoplifting spree in the hopes his school would expel him. Day-Lewis considered becoming an artisan and had an apprenticeship with cabinetmaker John Makepeace before he went into acting school. He studied acting at the Bristol Old Vic and Royal Shakespeare companies.
His first adult role was a small, inconsequential part in "Gandhi" in 1982. The same year, he was in the British television shows "Frost in May" and "How Many Miles to Babylon?" He did not play a significant role until the feature film "The Bounty" in 1984 and "My Beautiful Laundrette" in 1985. In these films, critics noted his acting range and described him as a major talent. He was named Best Supporting Actor by the New York Film Critics for these performances.
"The Bounty" was a movie that was almost never made. David Lean and Robert Bolt worked on the film between 1977 and 1980. The film was originally going to be two different films called "The Lawbreakers" and "The Long Arm." However, Warner Brothers withdrew from the project and Lean decided to combine both films into one. He was going to make it a seven-part TV series until Dino De Laurentiis decided to fund the film. Lean dropped out of the film and Mel Gibson brought in Roger Donaldson to direct it. If Donaldson had never made this movie, Day-Lewis may not have received the attention that let him achieve noteworthiness.
Daniel Day-Lewis often goes into seclusion when he is not working on a film, spending this time to recover from the emotional strain of getting into the mindset of his characters. Day-Lewis goes out of his way to try to rearrange his life to mirror that of his characters. When he played a famous writer who could only write with his left foot in the film "My Left Foot," he spent time in a cerebral palsy clinic.