My Left Foot

Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot opened in 1989 and won two Academy Awards in 1990 — Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Best Supporting Actress (Brenda Fricker) — alongside three further nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay (Sheridan and Shane Connaughton). The film consolidated Sheridan, then forty, as the most internationally significant Irish director of his generation; he would go on to In the Name of the Father (1993) and his subsequent international career.

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

Day-Lewis's central performance — including his famously committed Method preparation, in which he insisted on remaining in character for the entire production and was wheeled around in a wheelchair across the shoot — was widely received as one of the most physically committed lead performances in cinema. The film operates simultaneously as biographical drama, study of working-class Dublin family life across the mid-twentieth century, and quiet meditation on what kind of identity is actually available within a body that conventional society treats as broken.