"You can go to incredible lengths, on an enormously circuitous, serpentine journey to arrive at an understanding of someone else's life," he says with some fervor. "You can do that. You can also look at someone and, in a moment, understand what it feels like to look through that face. It happens to me that in walking or sitting in a public place I see a face that interests me, or a body that has a shape or a way of moving, and I have a huge desire to see through that person's eyes. And it's a simple transition from where I'm sitting to being in that person's body. And it could be a total miscomprehension of that life. But for me it's a totally genuine one."

DAY - LEWIS'S own life has been blessed by privilege and shadowed by the early death of his father. Cecil Day-Lewis was a translator, detective-story writer, and poet laureate of England. Born in Ireland, a Communist in his youth and a fellow traveler of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, he had become a professor at Oxford and Commander of the Order of the British Empire by the time Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis was born on April 29, 1957, an event celebrated in a published poem:

"Welcome to earth, my child!/Joybells of blossom swing,/Lambs and lovers have their fling,/The streets run wild/ With April airs and rumours of the sun./We time-worn folk renew/Ourselves at your enchanted spring,/As though mankind's begun/Again in you./ This is your birthday and our thanksgiving."

Day-Lewis's mother, Jill Balcon, an actress, is the daughter of Sir Michael Balcon, who was the head of Ealing Studios and produced some of Britain's greatest films over three decades, from "The 39 Steps" in 1935 to "Kind Hearts and Coronets" in 1949 to "Tom Jones" in 1963. The parents named their son for Daniel O'Connell, the Irish statesman, and for the Biblical figure (the Balcons were Eastern European Jews), thereby pleasing both sides of the family.

"The predominant influence in the household was literary," says Day-Lewis. He recalls a visit from an aging Auden, whose tiny eyes and thick folds of skin unnerved him. In the evenings he and his sister, Tamasin (now a documentary film maker in England), were read to by their father. But Cecil was an aging eminence himself. Fifty-three years old and on his second marriage when his son was born, he died of pancreatic cancer when Daniel was 15 and still an unruly, confused malcontent.

"My main memories of my father are of his illness," he says. "I felt a bitter sense of regret when he died that I hadn't achieved anything at that time to give him any pleasure. When things go well for me, I often think about that."

Day-Lewis was educated at a primary school with working-class children, a socialist statement on the part of his father. (The accent needed by an upper-crust boy to disguise his origins later became the basis for the voice of street-hardened Johnny in "My Beautiful Laundrette.") When he was sent away to a public school that better reflected his background, a spartan academy called Sevenoaks, Day-Lewis was so miserable that he eventually ran away. "I was literally in a state of shock for about a year and a half. After having been an incredibly obedient child, I suddenly became completely uncontrollable."

This "first experience of profound unhappiness" was followed by the "paradise" of his next stop: Bedales, a school molded by the Arts and Crafts movement. He became serious about woodworking and acting -- his father lived to see him in his first stage role, as Florizel in a school production of "The Winter's Tale" -- and at the age of 16 Day-Lewis was torn about which career to pursue.