Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his ability to vanish inside a character - then he seemed to vanish altogether. Five years later Sarah Kerr writes, he's returning to the screen in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York
At first we called him chameleon. Early in his career Daniel Day-Lewis seemed determined to tackle more wildly varied roles than any actor of his generation, creating characters so distinct that years later, without effort, we still recall their names: Johnny, the drifter; Cecil, the uptight suitor; Christy Brown, the genius quadriplegic; Gerry Conlon, the wronged Irishman. While the typical movie star plays versions of himself, myths grew up around the rigor with which Day-Lewis got ready for roles, checked his ego at the door, and vanished inside.

Then he seemed truly to disappear. After winning the Oscar for My Left Foot, in 1990, and a second nomination four years later for In the Name of the Father, on the heels of an eventful love life (rumored dalliance with Julia Roberts, drawn-out affair with Isabelle Adjani), Daniel Day-Lewis signed on for the film version of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. During preparation for that movie he met Rebecca Miller, the playwright's daughter with photographer Inge Morath. They quickly married, and in 1997, after completing work on The Boxer, he took a break for film work and public eye. He'd chosen family life for a while hardly as dramatic a change as say, Brando's retreat to Tahiti. But whether or not he intended it this way, when Day-Lewis left, a certain mystique stayed behind. He no longer tries out for roles. Directors request his presence in their films, quite often to no avail.

One of very few to get the nod is Martin Scorsese, who persuaded the actor to take a role in Gangs of New York, which opens next year. To find out more about Day-Lewis's return, I got to meet him one afternoon at Scorsese's Park Avenue office. But solemn events intervene and nudge our conversation down another path. It is a week to the day since the World Trade Center collapsed, and the city is still in full grief. Prior to my arrival, the office staff has spontaneously gathered around Day-Lewis, and when I enter he is saying something about the Taliban. Everyone listens, but no, I think, just because he is a star. As the son of the Anglo-Irish writer Cecil Day-Lewis, British poet laureate in the late sixties and early seventies, and the son-in-law of one of the great American playwrights, Day-Lewis has more cultural authority at his disposal than any other actor I can think of. Thankfully, he doesn't choose to exercise it in an obnoxious, lecturing way: It's the gentle, careful quite in his voice that makes you listen to what he's saying.

He is wearing a T-shirt with tiny stripes in different shades of purple, a navy nylon windbreaker, a thin coral necklace. His hair is cut severely short, and the bulked-up muscles from his The Last of the Mohicans days seem to have been permanently replaced by the more wiry physique of a marathon runner. At 44, Day-Lewis still would be almost too handsome if not for his nose, whose clean lines break just slightly in the middle, as if they had been pinched and nudged to one side. He liked talking politics, it turns out, and is extremely well informed; we spend 20 minutes on the terrorists' worldview, and the awful attack itself, which he witnessed from the apartment he keeps downtown. (He and Miller and their three-year-old son live in the Irish countryside, but they recently spent so much time in Italy, where Gangs was shot, that both felt it was Miller's turn to be close to her work - she's a writer and independent filmmaker - and to her parents, who live in Connecticut.)

For a confusing split second, Day-Lewis says, the noise that day viscerally brought him back to a blast years ago in London, when an IRA bomb went off two miles from where he was then living. In the days after September 11, he was widely written up as a celebrity hero because he stood in line and attempted to give blood. The papers blew a normal human gesture out of proportion, he says with obvious embarrassment, simply because he is famous. But then, what else is new? Day-Lewis is amused by the media drumroll accompanying his turn in Gangs, as if he were making "a comeback" after a quasi-retirement - a kind of a thespian Michael Jordan getting back into uniform. "I don't remember ever announcing my retirement, but there you go," he says, laughing. "As I haven't worked in four or five years, I guess it's not an unreasonable assumption."

Loyalty and a compelling story are what lured him back. Early last year he received a call from Scorsese, who had directed him in The Age of Innocence. Instead of offering Day-Lewis a role straight off the bat, the maestro did something he is known to do exceptionally well: He spun a good yarn. Halfway through the nineteenth century, there was a corner of Manhattan - roughly from today's Little Italy to just south of Chinatown - called the Five Points. The place was so wild and lawless it was like an urban Barbary Coast. Boatloads of impoverished immigrants docked nearby, and saloons and bordellos filled to overflowing, Gaelic-speaking Irish rowdies squared off against prejudiced English-only thugs, fighting in gangs with crazy names like the Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies. Boss Tweed built his machine in the Five Points, and the Draft Riots - a crucial, ugly episode in the Civil War - came to a boil there. By the time the neighborhood went into eclipse, it had laid the messy, vital foundation for modern New York City.

"When Martin started to talk about his it was not without a sense of dread that I felt drawn back into his orbit," Day-Lewis says. "I was thinking, Oh, God, don't lead me into this!" The movie's title and much of its raw material were taken from a rollicking 1920s account of the Five Points ruffians crime writer Herbert Asbury. The project came with unusual pressure attached, even for Scorsese. The director had longed to get it made since the seventies - a period in American film remembered for its unparalleled brilliance but for monomaniacal overreach, as well. The movie also required a much higher budget than Scorsese was accustomed to, and it will test the audience's appetite for violence - all the more so in light of recent events.

Day-Lewis eventually agreed to play one of the standouts of Asbury's book, Bill "The Butcher" Poole - an actual butcher, legendary street fighter, and ruthless leader of an anti-Irish gang called the Native Americans. Leonardo DiCaprio plays the film's Irish protagonist, who swears revenge on The Butcher for killing his father (Liam Neeson), falls for a pretty thief named Jenny (Cameron Diaz), and grows up to lead the Dead Rabbits; mayhem, naturally, ensues.

Day-Lewis's Poole promises to be a fantastically wicked baddie, but the actor is not inclined to condemn him. "If you take any character like that out of the context of the time in which they lived and judge them by contemporary standards, ethical or otherwise, they would be beyond the pale. But at the time they were living with the hand that was dealt them. And they were - almost in medieval sense - tremendously colorful characters. Bill Poole was much renowned for his good humor even as he was fighting to the death."

It's a spicy role but hardly a vain one. Day-Lewis grew a plush, drooping mustache and big mutton chop sideburns. (Pictures the paparazzi snapped of him walking through Rome one days off, wearing street clothes and a baseball cap, are a hoot: He looks like a cheeky bank robber wearing an outlandish disguise.) And then there are the playfully loud costumes - part rigorously authentic, part inspired fantasy - by Sandy Powell, who won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. "Sandy came up with the most incredible collection of fabrics before she began to build those things," he says, "I had one meeting with her in Dublin before it all started. And the next time I saw her there was a rack of these extraordinary clothes, which actually took me completely by surprise, because it was not how I envisioned this world." Instead of the raggedy threads you might expect a street fighter to wear, he was handed the full-blown regalia (top hat, stiff coat, vivid prints) of a Victorian dandy. "It hadn't occurred to me that these men were such peacocks."

To help Day-Lewis further immerse himself in this roguish world, Kenneth Lonergan, the gifted dialogue writer and director behind last year's lovely You Can Count On Me, came on-set to work period gang jargon into the script. "If we had chosen to be 'Dogme' about it," Day-Lewis says - alluding to the in-your-face cinema verité style that is the current rage in art-house cinema - "we would have had subtitles for the whole film." As it is, Gangs should be a fun festival of lingo. Young people who think attitudinous slang was born in late twentieth century with rock and punk and rap are in for a surprise. " 'Dead Rabbit' itself was like, you know, we use the word bad - we use wicked in London - but dead was a slang word for something that was good," Day-Lewis says. "And a rabbit was a gangster, so a dead rabbit was a good gangbanger."

Much has been made in the past of Day-Lewis's obsessive preparation for roles. The man who learned to paint pictures skillfully with his toes for My Left Foot no longer likes to talk freely about his methods. But he does admit to putting in time with a London butcher, so one can expect him to wield knives with a terrifying grace. Indeed, Day-Lewis's immersion techniques can feel so organic, self-effacing, and altogether unusual that he sometimes seems to come from an acting school of one. When I suggest to Stephen Frears, who directed his breakthrough performance in My Beautiful Laundrette, that Day-Lewis seems set apart, somehow, from typical American and British actors - less smoothe than the Brits, less ego-driven than the typical Hollywood stars, less mannered than gifted American parallels like Sean Penn - Frears doesn't join in the theorizing. "I'd say he's just jolly good!" But he concedes that theater-trained British actors must cross a threshold if they're to become film stars. They have to let go of the technique and theatricality. Day-Lewis broke into that looser space exceptionally early, and, says Frears, "he decided to let it rip."

It was early on, too, that he began to feel ambivalent about his own success. A Room With A View and My Beautiful Laundrette had launched him as an actor to watch, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being had promoted him to leading man. But Day-Lewis recalls a touchy personal transition in the late eighties, just before he began work on My Left Foot, when he saw full-blown stardom around the corner and half wanted to pull back. "I'd kind of overworked a bit before that and did a few things that just pushed me into an area where I felt - how to describe it - a little bereft of myself. And somehow demeaned in a strange way." He determined to save himself from burnout in the future, working only when absolutely drawn to a part. Eventually, that meant turning down plum roles like the one Tom Hanks won an Oscar for in Philadelphia. Shifting priorities like this was more scary before he committed to it than after, he says with hindsight (and it no doubt helped that his price per movie by the early nineties was rumored to be around $7 million). But Day-Lewis ruefully recalls the disapproving judgments he encountered: "I mean, the number of times people told me I'd ruin my career by turning down something is pathetic. They made it clear that they didn't think highly of my decision, and that I'd pay for it in the long run." His Hollywood peers failed to grasp that "paying for it," to Day-Lewis, would mean cultivating success at the expense of his life. "He's not like a lot of regular dumb actors who know about only one thing, and because of that I think he often worries about whether acting is really what he should be doing - he's always going off to make shoes of whatever." says My Beautiful Laundrette writer Hanif Kureishi. "Because he's bright, I guess acting probably isn't enough for him."

About making of shoes: Did Day-Lewis really go to Italy a few years back, as a gossip item claimed, to work with a cobbler in Florence? It's a key to the Day-Lewis mystique that his pursuit of a quiet, solitary hobby - not his love life or how he got on with DiCaprio - was what everyone who knew I was interviewing him asked about. Day-Lewis, who once showed up before shooting on The Crucible to help construct the New England saltbox sets, nods yes: He likes to build things. Though it turns out that he wasn't exploring a bizarre new career path with the shoe episode but returning to something familiar. As a teenager he attended Bedales in Hampshire, England, a boarding school that exalted crafts and making things with your hands. His decision to pursue acting came about, in large part, because a teacher thought he had the gifts but not the right temperament to pursue his other youthful dream - furniture making.

Gangs of New York was shot at the storied Cinecittà studios just outside Rome, on a city set built from a scratch by the visionary Italian designer Dante Ferretti, with Scorsese working out of the office once occupied by Fellini. Rome would seem an ideal location for someone like Day-Lewis - a place to escape and ingest some nourishing culture. But the city was "a glorious irrelevance," he says, and the picture he paints on a set is hardly la dolce vita. Up before dawn for physical training, at work by five, rarely home before eight or nine at night. Nor did he interact that much with costars DiCaprio, Neeson, or Diaz. "Everyone is living in their own private purgatory," he says, "and trying to deal with it as best they can."

He jokes that his energy is dwindling as he gets older, but quickly reverses himself: This isn't really the case. "I think I have a feeling that it does, and then I suppose when I'm working I realize that the embers can be rekindled." Several times in our conversation, he reaches for this metaphor of fire. The best art, he believes, is made by people burning to make it. When I ask him to point out such an artist, a certain playwright quickly comes to mind. "My father-in-law is an obvious example - he never stops working; he's just finished a new play. My mother-in-law is always working on a new exhibition. They're astonishing. I'm both awestruck and at the same time slightly deflated by the whirlwind of energy that they generate between them." Day-Lewis is also delighted that his wife published a book of stories this fall. And after they returned from Rome, she shot an independent movie in less than a month. As a couple, he laughs, they cover the whole gamut of modern film.

As for Day-Lewis's next step, "I really wouldn’t have missed doing this for anything," he says. "To my mind it's a very great privilege to be asked once in lifetime - just once - to work with that man. If he goes looking for you a second time it's almost impossible to turn away." That said, he is not about to rush back in front of the camera tomorrow. "Nothing happened to me during the course of that filming when I thought, Oh, wow, why don't I do this more often? It was just how I remembered it - and probably harder."

Is he setting the stage for another hiatus? That's his secret, but it's hard not to wonder if Day-Lewis is done being a chameleon - an accommodating creature, after all, that politely adjusts to its surroundings. These days he suggests a different phenomenon of nature, one with more say over its destiny. As long as he keeps acting, his performances will be intense. But they may be fewer and farther in between, like the show put on by a desert plant that blooms unpredictably, and only when it's ready. Keeping us waiting certainly hasn't hurt him so far. Chances are when he's ready, we'll be there once again to watch.