All about my brother: growing up with Daniel Day-Lewis

Early reports say Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in Lincoln is set to be his finest yet. But his brilliance is born of a troubled childhood with a distant father and domineering mother. His only companion was his sister Tamasin, who writes here for the first time of their lifelong bond, saving him from schoolboy admirers, teaching him to steal and learning how to be free

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Tamasin Day-Lewis

16 November 2012

Your brother’s arrived.’ It was six in the evening and I was sitting in my French class at Bedales in Hampshire when Matron made the shocking announcement. I was 14 and Dan, 11, was at Sevenoaks, a prep school in Kent.

I had been forbidden to write to him by our mother as my school tales were pure joy and he was suffering pure hell. The edict could never have worked: as fellow conspirators it was always us against them after we’d had a fight and one of us was about to be punished; a human shield of solidarity erected instantaneously, the innocent party begging for the guilty one not to be beaten, the source of the conflict denied and erased at a stroke.

This was different. This was big-time. Dan had run away with two friends and fled across country with his pocket money and a packet of untipped Woodbines. By the time I had to face his headmaster, I had the story. Dan was fed up with boys jumping into his bed at night and had taken his trunk into a field to sleep in. Enough was enough. I told his headmaster this in all innocence, after all it was the truth. He slammed his fist down and told me that that sort of thing didn’t happen in his school. Dan was allowed to take the tests for Bedales at the end of that term and came to join me that September. We were inseparable.

It wasn’t until three years ago, as our mother was dying, that Dan and I began to discuss and make sense of this period in our childhood. He had begged to be allowed to leave Sevenoaks as he was so unhappy and been met with total intransigence. It wasn’t an option. He knew then, at 11, that he was on his own, that children — us — weren’t listened to. I already knew that; knew that I was the unfavoured one by our mother and, rather than feeling resentment against Dan, was hellbent on becoming a tearaway, sensing that any attention was better than none. Causing my mother displeasure was an end in itself, a way of getting my own back. Leading Dan astray came later. Or so she believed.

At Bedales it was different: enlightened, liberal-minded, the relationship with teachers more equal; we called them by their Christian names, they listened to our points of view, and not all discipline was a pointless exercise more designed to make you rebel than conform. Though we both did rebel most of the time. Drinking, smoking, stealing, organising a hunger strike, escaping late at night to the opposite sex’s dorms, we led by bad example. The strict Victorian upbringing we went home to, which in my case included being constantly criticised by my mother and never being allowed to have an opinion — which she considered ‘answering back’ — meant I specialised in breaking rules where there was no fear of emotional cruelty. I egged Dan on and, he has told me since, was an evil influence! He insists I made him steal for me. My defence: it was his choice. We were partners in crime.

‘What would we have done without Bedales?’ Dan asked me during our mother’s final days when we were keeping watch at the Petersfield Hospital minutes away from school and the village to which she had moved after our father’s death. In truth, without Tim, a house master who saved Dan from expulsion more than once and saw the good in the bad, as, similarly, did my tutor Gonda who ‘despaired’ of me but said it with a twinkle, we would both have been written off before we’d begun.

But by then ours were exceptional circumstances, with the ill health of our father in his early sixties descending like a smog over the house before we reached our teens and our parenting — unlike Dan’s and my children’s experience now — remarkable mainly for its absence, its detachment, its being discipline-led rather than involvement-based.

We were mostly left alone. And Papa was older than most of our contemporaries’ fathers as we were his second family. He was perhaps more distant than many of his generation because of the nature of being a poet and writer. He was, however, ruthlessly fair, gentle until driven to fever pitch, with a childlike sense of humour and natural grace. He hated domestic conflict.

We didn’t holiday with our parents until we were nine and six. We were sent instead to our grandparents on our mother’s side in Sussex, or to the Black Mill House Hotel at Bognor Regis with Nanny. What was normal for us we didn’t question, until we realised that other children didn’t seem to live like us, and had families that did things together. When we finally went to County Mayo in the west of Ireland for the first of many summers until the year Papa died, Dan and I experienced a different way of life that had a profound influence over our lives. In showing us the heritage we came from, our father, without imposing it, allowed it to bed down and settle like sediment, layer after layer, year after year. The great edge-of-the-world landscape where land mass meets the Atlantic, huge elemental storms and gales, getting to know local families who have remained a part of our lives, all these things have fed into our creative lives and bit by bit we discovered that nature is where you can connect with the simple things that have the greatest value. We were lucky that it formed its early bones in us and meant we couldn’t get spoilt by the sort of artifice that surrounds the upper echelons of our professions. We were also brought up knowing the pitfalls of fame.

When we left Kensington for Greenwich in our early childhood, we found ourselves living a sort of above-stairs life up in the eaves of the nursery and attic floors, completely removed from our parents four floors below. We didn’t come down for dinner, we had tea in the nursery with Nanny, and were thrown together into a solitary world but for each other, which led us straight to the landscape of the imagination. We drew and wrote and invented plays, which we’d put on, appearing from behind the mustard curtains of the window seats in the nursery, wearing mouldery, fusty-smelling velvet Victorian clothes that we bought from the local junk shop. I remember Dan deciding he was Yuri Gagarin, the Russian spaceman, and the pair of us slugging back bottles of Woodward’s Gripe Water kept in the nursery cupboard, which was tincture of dill and God knows what proof.

We invented our own secret language and songs, characters who made us collapse with mirth just at the mention of their names. Even now we write cards to each other in our secret-speak, texting obscenities about people and situations to defuse despair, annoyance, impossible situations, political correctness. It is a kind of childishness that we refuse to grow out of. We sing snatches of songs down the telephone to each other at the beginnings and ends of our conversations. Our children’s embarrassment is limitless.

In Ireland we had summer romances, one year, brother and sister with brother and sister. We were always tough on the opposition. Anyone who entered our mutually exclusive world had to contend with a sort of closeness born of necessity, by the death of our father, that isolated us and cauterised our childhood. Our frankness about each other’s partners hasn’t always been easy, though the strength of our blood tie ultimately wins. If we can’t be honest with each other, who can we be honest with?

Dan’s position in terms of who he can and can’t trust since he became well-known makes honesty all the more important. As a young documentary-maker, his was always the criticism I wanted and believed and still is. I know how much my reaction to his work is what he needs and values, too, seeing the phoney or impure or self-interested verdict of critic or friend who wants to sting or praise as not the real truth. As Dan waited painfully for the verdict, away from the crush of the after-party at Claridge’s at the premiere of Nine, he texted me: ‘Please feel free to lie’, which we both knew was his way of asking me for my opinion. The others may hurt like f*** — we both believe the bad over the good, it’s in the genes — but our mutual honesty is without malice or cruelty.

Dan found our mother’s unstinting praise of him as hard as I have its opposite, another thing we discussed days before she died when I was determined that he would see how different each of our experiences of our parents had been. Having to judge for yourself is the hardest of lessons. We both learned from opposite perspectives.

The self-doubt that accompanies any artist is best not spoken about to outsiders. Yet we don’t even speak about process and how we work to each other. Dan is constantly asked or written about in terms of his ‘method’, his perceived ‘total immersion’, when really every-one’s creative process is simply what they feel they need to do for themselves and cannot be demystified. Look at the work. That’s all. You can’t teach it, bottle it, explain it. So much of it is sheer hard graft, so much of it is the unconscious, the being a channel for it to race down once you are prepared, but not knowing how or what you have done nor whether it has worked. When people imagine that Dan’s doubt as an artist must have vanished by now, they couldn’t be more wrong. It all gets more difficult. The stakes get higher.

In the worst crises of our lives we have always been there for each other. When Dan walked off stage at the National Theatre while playing Hamlet and arrived on the milk train to Somerset, he lived with me and my family for a few months. The press, wide of the mark, surmised that Dan had seen the ghost of our father. It is not right that I go into detail, but it was a period when Dan had to recover away from intrusive pressure and even Mum was kept in the dark. I felt that just being there was the only way. You can sense things with those closest to you that others can’t. Despite the difficulties, we drew close again in a way that others often remarked on as so close that it is almost impenetrable from the outside.

When my 18-year-old son Harry was badly injured skiing ten years ago and spent a spell in intensive care, and it was touch and go as to whether he would die, Dan was a whisper away and in constant contact. He was, particularly when my three were little, the perfect ‘Wicked Uncle Daniel’, climbing trees and telling stories and being generally subversive.

When he was making The Age of Innocence with Martin Scorsese in New York, I asked Dan to ask Marty if I could come out and watch them at work. Within a day I was being measured up for a costume over the telephone. I spent a few days as an extra in the ballroom scene with ‘May’ (Winona Ryder) and hanging out in Dan’s trailer, dancing to Irish music and eating chicken, pasta and tomato sauce.

I don’t have a favourite film of Dan’s, but there are things in The Age of Innocence that I think come as close by stealth, reticence and subtlety to the more obvious great acting of his character parts. The pain Newland Archer suffers as he makes the decision to marry based on class and appearances rather than on true love is excruciating and visceral, something that no one does as well as Dan. Yes, the physical parts like The Last of the Mohicans and My Left Foot show his extraordinary physical prowess, but the internal is so tricky to pull off on screen.

This summer Dan and his wife Rebecca brought his three boys over to Mayo when I was there with my younger daughter Charissa, who has just started out as an actress. Dan has done much to play devil’s advocate with Charissa as her ambition has grown from child to young woman. He has seen her rehearse Juliet for a drama school audition, which he believed she would get in with (she didn’t), and as a director friend pointed out, if you can perform for him, nothing else could come as close in the fear department. But if she makes it, she will make it on her own terms with no help from him. He has tested the purity of her intention and she is finding what works for her in the same way he did all those years ago.

We didn’t discuss work, we were more intent on having what we call ‘a good nosebag’, a glass of champagne, being with the children, watching Katie Taylor bring home boxing gold for Ireland, though the subject of getting his boots made right for him to play Lincoln came up: we are both fiends for our feet and Dan seems to work from the feet up with his characters. And we discussed the short shooting schedule — Dan doesn’t like to rehearse, luckily — which meant that he was truly unaware of how the character was building, whether it was working, unable to determine whether he had pulled it off.

We walked the headland together and hurled ourselves into the Atlantic breakers for the first time since our teenage years. We swam and swam, remembering the summers when our father, after floating out to sea on his back, washed up on shore with a flask of Jameson and a packet of Ginger Nuts. The sea sparkled across to the fjord and the Twelve Bens, the lavender mountains beyond. We felt buoyed up by that sense of continuum, freedom, aloneness, togetherness, by this place of childhood roots and its reconnecting us to each other and to the childhood selves we were back then. ES

Tamasin is writing her new book Smart Tart, which readers have the opportunity to crowdfund on the Unbound books website (unbound.co.uk)

All about my brother: growing up with Daniel Day-Lewis

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