Sometimes, during the grueling location shooting of The Last of the Mohicans in the mountains of North Carolina, Daniel Day-Lewis wondered what on earth he was doing.
After all, he had won an Oscar for playing disabled poet Christy Brown in My Left Foot, and his most popular previous role had been as the lusty doctor in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He figured prominently in such art-house hits as A Room With a View and My Beautiful Laundrette.
None of these is the type of film that opens in more than 1,000 theaters across the country — which is exactly what The Last of the Mohicans, a $40 million-plus version of the James Fenimore Cooper schoolroom classic, will do Friday.
“The thought of myself in an epic is mind-boggling,” the lean, soft- spoken actor says. “I thought I’d always keep on doing intimate films. I couldn’t for the life of me decide what I was doing alongside such an enormous spread of machinery. It’s so difficult to retain the core of privacy you need for making any film. … At times, I just wanted to get a beeper and disappear into the forest, but at that point I couldn’t even deal with the technology of a beeper.”
Day-Lewis plays Hawkeye, the courageous guide born to white parents but adopted by peace-loving Indians. Madeleine Stowe plays the British colonel’s daughter Hawkeye loves, and American Indian activist Russell Means is his Mohican father.
“I don’t know where my attraction for the role came from, only that there was a definite attraction,” he says. “It was mysterious, almost exotic to me. I couldn’t put a label on my attraction. It’s probably the sort of heroic role I would love to do in my fantasies, and I worried if it was not improper of me even to accept the part. But there’s a sense of freedom — enviable freedom — in playing such a heroic role.
“The Last of the Mohicans was as physically demanding as My Left Foot. But physical constraints liberate the mind — a dangerous truth to apply in general.”
Hawkeye’s simple sense of right and wrong struck a chord with the philosophical actor. “One of the fascinating things about Hawkeye is the clarity with which he faces decisions. In that way, he’s so unlike Hamlet, which was the last role I had played.”
Day-Lewis played Shakespeare’s bewildered prince three years ago at London’s National Theater. He left the role prematurely because of nervous exhaustion. His Hamlet departure is something he politely would prefer not to discuss, just as he would prefer not to discuss his relationship with actress Isabelle Adjani, whose credits range from The Story of Adele H to Ishtar.
The 35-year-old actor’s pedigree is impressive. His mother was actress Jill Balcon, the daughter of Sir Michael Balcon. Sir Michael was the head of Ealing Studios, which produced such classic British comedies as Kind Hearts and Coronets and Tom Jones.
His father was Cecil Day-Lewis, the Irish-born poet laureate of England who wrote detective novels under the name of Nicholas Blake. The actor, who continuously smokes Camels during the interview, delightedly tells of unexpectedly finding a Nicholas Blake novel at a New York City bookstore specializing in mysteries. But his literary appreciation does not extend to James Fenimore Cooper.
“I had never read The Last of the Mohicans until I accepted this part, and then I just read it out of curiosity,” he says. “I don’t want to be insulting to Cooper or to lovers of his work, but I had no affinity for it. Of course, I had read Mark Twain’s hilarious criticism of Cooper before I read Mohicans. I don’t know if my dismissal would have been as devastating as Twain’s, but I couldn’t help laughing.
“I hadn’t really read much American literature other than Scott Fitzgerald and The Catcher in the Rye. But lately I’ve become more eclectic. My tastes range from Jim Harrison to Carson McCullers.”
Winning the Oscar for 1989’s My Left Foot, against heavy competition from the popular Tom Cruise for Born on the Fourth of July, was “a complete surprise.”
“I had a monumental Irish party afterward — and after that, total confusion. All I knew is that I had this need to get away from the screen. If anyone were to say to me, ‘You’ve won an Oscar, now there’s no reason to go back to the stage,’ that person would become an instant stranger. And after the hoopla of the Oscar, it becomes difficult to recognize the truth inside of you.
“It can be quite confusing to know what to do. I have a fierce need to work and a correspondingly fierce need to get away from work. I find those two things to be mutually dependent.”
He has just finished filming Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, in which he plays a turn-of-the-century aristocrat torn between his fiancee, played by Winona Ryder, and an elegant countess, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the drama was moved to a fall 1993 release after being scheduled for the year-end season. The postponement will allow Scorsese more time to edit his first period movie. Day-Lewis says working with the director was “a wonderful experience.”
“I love film, just as I love stage,” the actor says. “And I will preserve my love for film by not being involved indiscriminately. People know how to make successful films. They just don’t know how to make good films.”
True words, definitely, if maybe just a little bit pompous. But, as always, they’re spoken politely and, yes, charmingly.
— The Last of the Mohicans will be reviewed in Friday’s Showtime!
