All-singing, all-dancing Day Lewis

Playing a maestro film-maker in search of his muse involved seducing a bevy of leading ladies and enjoying the Italian backdrop – a far cry from the grim sets that Daniel Day Lewis has inhabited for his recent roles, writes FIONA McCANN

INTENSE: THE ADJECTIVE most paired with Daniel Day Lewis, and what I’m geared up to expect of a one-on-one with the two-time Oscar-winning actor.

Intensity. Intelligence. Concentration. A kind of real-life Daniel Plainview meets Christy Brown. It comes as a surprise, then, to find that in person he's much warmer, more down-to-earth, accessible, and infinitely more personable than most of his on-screen creations. Not that his latest cinematic incarnation doesn't have his charm: in the new musical Nine, Day Lewis plays Guido Contini, a maestro film-maker in search of his muse, who seduces a veritable firmament of leading ladies in the process. Day Lewis in person is equally compelling – tall, clean cut, with his iron grey hair now cropped close and a big, ready smile – but does not, he assures me, share Contini's Casanova characteristics.

He does, however, relate to his character's creative crisis. "I have those periods, in work, where you just don't know where it's going to come from," he tells me. He also admits to a particularly Contini move at the world premiere of Nine, which is based on a musical adaptation of Frederico Fellini's autobiographical film 81/2. In one key scene in Nine, Contini slips out of a press conference while the various members of the media are looking the other way.

On the evening of the premiere, Day Lewis, after walking the red carpet and posing for snaps with co-stars Penélope Cruz, Kate Hudson and Nicole Kidman, also managed to make his escape. “I scarpered,” he admits somewhat sheepishly. “I fled down the stairs and jumped into a car . . . I couldn’t have sat through it.” Perhaps this is because, for the first time in his career, Day Lewis is not only acting, but singing and dancing alongside a star-studded cast that includes Sofia Loren, Judy Dench, Marion Cotillard and Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. After all, as he tells me a little shamefaced, he’s not that crazy about the whole notion of people breaking into song during a film.

'I'M NOT ACTUALLY a big musical fan," he says outright, though he confesses a soft spot for Fred Astaire and Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge. So what persuaded him to star in a musical then? Rob Marshall, he says without hesitation of the film's director, who already has an Academy Award nomination as best director for his cinematic treatment of the musical Chicago.

"Rob was a magnet for all of us." There was, however, another name attached to the project that helped convince Day Lewis of its merit: the script was co-written by the late Anthony Minghella, a director and writer described by Day Lewis as "an absolute gentleman". He didn't get to work with the gentleman in question before his death last year, which he sees a as "a real chance missed", so the appearance of Minghella's name on Nineseemed fortuitous. "Somehow, reading his script . . . I thought maybe there'll be a way of working with him through this." Still, it's Marshall who he credits with turning "my squeak into a roar".

Surely, given the fact that he spent most of his childhood summers in the west of Ireland, it wasn't the first time he had to sing for his supper? "In the Ireland of the past, when I was younger, if you went to somebody's house and had a drink, sure enough there would come a time when you would be asked to get up, it would be your turn," he admits, such singsong training being all that he had to draw on when it came to Nine. "That would be the extent of my singing. That and as a choirboy in the church when I was younger." Was he daunted, then, when it came to Nine, given the challenge that music and dance would pose for a straight-up actor? "I think we all felt terrified actually. And terror," he says with a glint in his eye, "is a terrible aphrodisiac." Apparently so, given how it galvanised an all-star cast, all of whom at least appear to be having a ball, spinning around Italy and dancing through extravagant set pieces.

It all makes for a stark contrast with the grim backdrops of There Will be Bloodor Gangs of New York. Was it as much fun as it looks? "Every day," he says without skipping a beat. "Every moment of every day." There was the added bonus of being surrounded by scantily clad dancers and actors in almost every scene. Did it bother him that almost every woman in the film had to don a corset at some stage, mostly acting as foils for his own character's crises? "Quite honestly," he tells me in that impeccable British diction, with its occasional slide of Irish that comes from his years spent living here, "I'm not being deliberately obtuse about it, but I didn't really look at it in that way. I mean, I was so drawn in by the idea of Guido's creative dilemma." He adds to this the respect he has for his female co-stars – in particular Cotillard, whose performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rosehe extols. "I thought the opportunity would never come again to work with those people."

It also appears to have given him a break from the gruelling challenges he often takes on as a method actor. Not that method wasn’t useful for Guido: “All work really springs from the same place,” he says when questioned on his much-documented approach to new roles. “You need to have an approach to the work.” Still, one imagines the requirements for slipping into the skin of an attractive Italian film-maker in glamorous 1960s Italy are less gruelling than those for an artist with cerebral palsy, or an ex-IRA boxer. “Technically the demands were very different,” he admits.

Filming Ninehad a further attraction for Day Lewis, however: it returned him to Italy, the country where, rumour has it, he once trained as a cobbler. "My lips remain sealed," he says somewhat mysteriously when asked about the truth behind such shoemaking stories. "I have spent a year in Florence." That's as far as he'll go, though, remaining resolutely tight-lipped about his famous time out and closing off the line of questioning with a grin. He does, however, reiterate his abiding love for Italy, a country which has "been a big part of our lives".

BUT IT’S TO Ireland, and his home in Co Wicklow, that he returns once all the promotional folderol of his latest film is over. And then? “I’m very happily retired for the moment,” says the man who is notoriously picky about his cinematic projects and resolute about the time he takes between each one. “I always think of these periods after work as in integral part of the work in a way, as they go hand in hand with the work itself.” For now, it’s back to Annamoe, to the home he shares with his wife, writer and director Rebecca Miller, and their two sons Ronan and Cashel.

It’s clear he has already shed Contini, along with the long hair and crumpled Italian suits that went with him. In doing so, he leaves cinema goers another larger than life on-screen persona: a troubled maestro, mother’s boy, and irrepressible cheat. None of which can be ascribed to Daniel Day Lewis, it seems. He’s not bedding starlets aplenty then? He laughs, a loud, genuine, winning laugh. “No!” Out comes the boyish grin, and he shakes his head vehemently. Then, with a courtesy that is all Daniel Day Lewis, he adds: “No. Thank you.”

Nineopens on December 26th