My Left Foot

Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot opened in 1989 and won two Academy Awards in 1990, Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis and Best Supporting Actress for Brenda Fricker, with three further nominations: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (Sheridan and Shane Connaughton). Sheridan was forty, and the film made him the Irish director of his generation with the widest international reach. In the Name of the Father (1993) and an international career followed.

Christy Brown was a real Dublin writer and painter, born in 1932 with cerebral palsy, the tenth of twenty-two children in a poor tenement family and the only one who could not at first walk or speak. He learned to write, and eventually to paint, with the one limb he could fully control: his left foot. Day-Lewis plays Brown across his adult life and Hugh O'Conor plays him as a child. Brenda Fricker is his mother, Brigid Brown, and Ray McAnally his father.

Day-Lewis's preparation became famous: he stayed in character for the entire production and was wheeled around the set in a wheelchair throughout the shoot. The result is about as physically committed as a lead performance gets. Around it Sheridan builds a biographical drama and a study of working-class Dublin family life in the middle of the century, and he asks, without fuss, what kind of identity is available to someone in a body that conventional society treats as broken.