There is rather an old-fashioned courtliness about him as he leads me, clutching my tea and biscuits, up the curving stone staircase to his green-painted, book-littered ground-floor study. It makes him sound grudging about the invasion of his privacy, and generally grumpy - which today couldn't be further from the truth.
But inside, it is just like any other large, modern family home - children's toys lying about, holiday pictures, coats, caps, scarves, boots, cats, all the paraphernalia of a 'normal' existence.ĭay-Lewis once remarked of himself that he had made a 'lifelong study in evasion', and the process of publicising a film is clearly not one he enjoys. From the outside its modest Georgian good looks - door in the middle and a window on either side, like the Play School house - suggest the perfect residence for Cecil Vyse, the pompous suitor that Day-Lewis played in the 1986 Merchant Ivory adaptation of EM Forster's A Room with a View. The point is emphasised when we arrive, through woods and via a gently rising track, at the house he shares with his wife, the writer and director Rebecca Miller, daughter of Arthur Miller (they met in 1996 when he was filming an adaptation of The Crucible) and their two young sons, Ronan and Cashel. He has no truck with the trappings of celebrity. But the man behind the wheel makes it clear that with Day-Lewis it is just what he says it is - dropping in for a pint with an old friend.
'That's where Daniel sometimes likes to stop for a drink.' With any other film star you can imagine it being something of a visitation, complete with cameras and a blue plaque afterwards. As we pass through one village en route he points out the pub. The driver who fetched me from Dublin airport to take me to the actor's home in the heart of the Wicklow mountains is one Day-Lewis himself uses regularly.
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