Indeed, it is an important part of Day-Lewis the actor that we hardly know what he looks and sounds like as an Englishman now. But is he an Englishman – or has he gone away?

For the third time in his life, Daniel Day-Lewis has delivered a stunning portrait of an American, in Gangs of New York. And then, at varying class levels, he was Englishmen in Gandhi, The Bounty, A Room with a View and My Beautiful Laundrette. He came to an early peak in the late Eighties with a furious, romantic Hamlet on stage (but had to withdraw with nervous exhaustion) and as Tomas in Philip Kaufman’s film of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.He was poised to be the new Olivier. He turned down Philadelphia, Interview with the Vampire, and so on, all the way to the role that is making a star of Viggo Mortensen in The Lord of the Rings.

By withdrawal or a polite “no”, Day-Lewis has been the godfather to so many other careers, without ever losing the sense of range or intensity that could do.. anything. But “anything” is sometimes next to nothing.If you’re as good as Day-Lewis, it amounts to a large theatrical gesture, a kind of displayed disapproval, that he hasn’t acted for five years. And if, as rumoured, he was instead learning the anonymous craft of shoemaker in Tuscany, I take it that Day-Lewis’s shoes were closer to humble wooden clogs than to the calfskin Gucci loafers that also come out of northern Italy. Somehow, with Day-Lewis we take it for granted that the gesture and the large personal hope that prompts it tend towards something simple and common. But when such an actor grants that it is time to come back to his trade, then the particular choice is crucial. And Gangs of New York does not remotely live up to the preliminary gesture. It leaves one thinking that maybe Daniel Day-Lewis is an odd fellow.

And starts you thinking how easily actors – the best and the worst of them – could go a little crazy.Don’t misunderstand me. I suspect that Day-Lewis will win the best actor Oscar for his performance as Bill Cutting, the Butcher of Five Corners, in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. Miramax, the distributor, is now trying to sell its ailing picture as a romance between the Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz characters That’s a hopeless task. The ads for Gangs should be for a strange circus in which Day-Lewis is hero, villain, ringmaster, knife-thrower and one-eyed demon His energy is everything. For surely, once back in harness, Day-Lewis felt how flimsy this immense, expensive venture was, and guessed that its plausibility depended on his flamboyant confidence as Bill Cutting. And so he is the film’s tent-pole, holding up a flailing script and doing all he can to suggest that the painfully callow DiCaprio is a proper rival in a life-and-death struggle.We have seen this kind of commitment before from Day-Lewis. A little over six feet tall, but slender and shy, he went into six months of training to alter his stamina, his body and his attitudes so that he could be Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans.

In an age of inflated movie males, many of whom live in the gym (or in front of a mirror) – just think of Seagal and Stallone – Day-Lewis seemed like a man who had lived in the forest, who could run a marathon carrying a 12lb flintlock rifle, who could catch, skin and cook a rabbit, and set a pine tree shuddering at thirty paces with a well-aimed tomahawk.People talk of Robert De Niro’s physical transformation, becoming Jake La Motta for Raging Bull, as a peak of actorly dedication But Day-Lewis’s Hawkeye was more startling. He had become not just a forest creature, but a man of another century. Indeed, this was a large part of what attracted him to Hawkeye. “I liked the idea of a man who had not been touched by 20th-century neurosis,” he explained.