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Daniel Day-Lewis by Stephen Rebello

I'll make it plain: I'll see anything Daniel Day-Lewis does. Anything. Which means I have to cop to having ferreted out this actor under some mighty trying circumstances. Like when he played a Brit art expert out to buy a Renoir from American crazies in the God-awful Stars and Bars. Or when he acted the itinerant evangelical dentist in the God-awful Eversmile, New Jersey. Or the petty bureaucrat Mr. Kafka in the Godawful The Insurance Man. Okay, so I didn't catch him in Nanou, but only because I would have had to go to Paris for it. In the meantime, can anyone send me a video copy of Nanou?

Despite some of the scruffy, fuzzy little blips of things he's done since My Beautiful Laundrette and A Room with a View--stuff in which you can practically hear him rage against the filmmaking world, "You will not make this serious actor a movie star!"--Day-Lewis is that rare bird, a serious actor who is also a movie star. My liking for him surprises me because my tastes tend to run to the less-obviously important, the more naturalistic. You know: Meryl Streep no, Jeff Bridges si. No acting allowed, if you know what I mean. Daniel Day-Lewis, who's got technique down to the last hair follicle, is forever acting.

What about those interrogation scenes in In the Name of the Father, for instance, that end with the authorities forcing Conlon to confess to a crime he didn't commit? That whole harrowing sequence is thick with moments when I would have paid Day-Lewis to stop whining and blithering. But, then, in the prison-cell scene with the father, he spews a Vesuvius of rage, shame and childish need, and is so flipping brilliant, he's working the scene on so many levels, that I forgive him for his technique. Those moments made my neck hairs stand on end and it wasn't the first time Day-Lewis had sparked such a visceral reaction.

No, I don't mean in The Last of the Mohicans. Okay, he looked groovy as Hawkeye, but I didn't think he was particularly good playing him. And for me, his desiccated, velvet-voiced George Sanders-type sexuality in The Age of Innocence harked back uneasily to his desiccated, velvet-voiced George Sanders-type pince-nez prissiness in A Room with a View.

I could rest my case entirely on The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but the moments of vintage Day-Lewis I'm thinking of just now are in My Beautiful Laundrette and My Left Foot. In Laundrette, as the working-class bad boy who carries on a refreshingly carnal, guilt-free affair with his boss, a Pakistani man, he's funny, narcissistic, touching, brutish, tender. You won't catch him condescending to his character. There's an especially cool moment when he and his lover are about to fling open the doors of the run-down laundromat they've spiffily renovated together. All decked out in brand-new, bourgeois striped shirt and trousers, he primps his skunk-dyed hair and grins at the sight of himself in a way that says, "Who'd have thought I'd climb so high in the world and isn't it fucking fabulous?"

My Left Foot has an amazing amount of great stuff in it, but I'll limit myself to the scene in which Day-Lewis's physically challenged character gets sloshed and screams vengefully at the woman who has opened his world by aiding his physical and psychic rehab. Wailing that all his life, all he's had is platonic love, he spits, "Fuck Plato!" If movies get any more aching or funny, if acting cuts any closer to the marrow, show me.

In some very weird way, maybe my thing for Daniel Day-Lewis connects with the affection I felt as a kid for the one actor whose movies I never missed back then: Vincent Price. Sure Vinnie's ham was sliced thickly, but in stuff like House on Haunted Hill and The Fly, he had a similar moist, sepulchral charisma, an unapologetic theatricality, even a nasality, that somehow reminds me of Day-Lewis. And, what Price did for those Poe flicks he made for American International Pictures--well, don't get me started. Wow, imagine Daniel Day-Lewis really digging under the flesh of one of Price's old Poe roles--as a druggy melancholic yearning for his own sister, played, of course, by Madeleine Stowe--in a remake of The House of Usher. I'm there.

Winona Ryder by Michael Angeli

Are there words to describe the wicked subversiveness of Winona Ryder's sex appeal? Who cares? I see her pictures as an opportunity to smell again. Long ago, I waged a war of attrition on my olfactory nerve. A tube-a-day glue-sniffing habit in high school followed by the involuntary inhalation of paint thinner as a charlatan house painter in college robbed me of my sense of smell. Today magazines smell merely like magazines when Passion and White Diamonds should be wafting up from between the pages. I long for the briny bouquet of oral sex, the aroma of Dodger Dogs, and the manly scent of Irish Spring. And when I see a Winona Ryder film, I can once again smell the crystallized winter air locked in wool sweater, banana-scented lipstick, and the sweet, fragrant tickle of Downy fabric softener in the pucker of a bra.

There is a furious decency in Winona's knitted eyebrows, something suggesting that a fumbling, clunky, well-meaning young man will never be judged too harshly. Whether she's driving a cab or wearing a corset, Winona manages to convince you that her unconditional sense of fairness is a handicap that leaves her unaware of her own heart-stopping beauty. If you watch her closely onscreen, she seems to be holding her breath on occasion, as if not even she knows what she's capable of doing next. One thing's certain: in the realm of Winona's senses, I smell--again!

I didn't always go to the movies looking for my lost youth. Back when I had the youth, I went to the movies to see grownups. "Sidney Poitier, Sidney Pah-teay, Sidney Paw-te-aye," I recall chanting his name through the first half of The Defiant Ones. The idea was to get it right because I had to tell any other eight-year-old who would listen about how cool this man was. Not just black-man cool, but white-man-Vic-Morrow/"Combat" cool. How could anyone be in possession of more smoldering, Homeresque forbearance than Sidney playing an escaped convict manacled to fellow escaped convict Tony Curtis as they stagger through the woods with the hound dogs on their trail? Curtis's "Hee Haw" Southern accent alone would've driven a lesser man to amputation.

Sure, Sidney got the most beautiful girl on the planet in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? But the minute she opened her mouth and all that phony upper-middle-class liberal Daisy Clover drivel bubbled up, all the sun dresses in the world wouldn't have kept me from telling her where to stuff it. Not so with Sidney, who had a fuse as long as the Mason-Dixon line. Not even the monumentally condescending Spencer Tracy, or the spaniel-eyed gentility of Katharine Hepburn could set him off.

You want cool, Mister Tibbs? Take a look at In the Heat of the Night. Witness Sidney, cautiously circling his role like a matador cornered by a gut-wounded bull. Here he is, dumped in a town leavened with kissin'-cousin rednecks, sneering bigots with tire irons, and a dispassionate sheriff who needs a fresh piece of gum real bad. Fred "The Hammer" Williamson would've shaken the wrinkles out of Rod Steiger's police jacket, gone out overheated and kicked some cracker ass. Not air-cooled Sidney, he of thick skin and thin ties. Now that is cool. Alas, being unable to pronounce his last name was not. Poy-te-ay?

Nicolas Cage by Michael Atkinson

Sometime before puberty hit my nervous system like a Volvo full of crash-test dummies hitting a laboratory wall, I knew this kid named Jimmy. I was only friends with him for a few years, because, frankly, I couldn't take much more than that. He'd deliberately tumble off his bike in front of student drivers, inform a crowd of younger kids waiting to see a department-store Santa that "The real Santa Claus is dead!" and bury cats up to their necks in his front lawn and then mow in circles around them. Everyone was certain that Jimmy was headed for prison, the bughouse, the Marines or all three. But he was a hell of a lot of fun to be around.

Of course, now that I'm a grownup, having or even knowing a kid like Jimmy could make me drink antifreeze. But that's what movies are for--enjoying what in real life you wouldn't touch with your worst enemy's trembling hand. Which is why my favorite actor is Nicolas Cage. Like a sociopathic 10-year-old, Cage is an authentic loose cannon, an agent of pure chaos. With his insomniac glower, his crazed proto-Elvis body language, his berserk hair that often becomes a character all of its own, Cage is one of a kind. No actor takes as many hair-raising chances: the testicles-in-a-vice gargle with which he delivered his dialogue in Peggy Sue Got Married, the droopy-eyed Elvis snarl he worked up for Wild at Heart, and every second of Vampire's Kiss, a mild farce that Cage drives straight into the Twilight Zone. Cage can be kabuki-like in his desire to go where no actor has gone before, but that's half the fun, even in deranged bombs like Zandalee.

It's not just the Scott-of-the-Antarctic daring that makes Cage special. His comic timing is faultless: check out his dead-eyed frenzy at Peter Boyle singing the whole score of "South Pacific" in Honeymoon in Vegas, the delirious "I lost my hand!" rant in Moonstruck, the whole enchilada of Raising Arizona, perhaps the only instance where an entire film was as freaked-out as Cage. Even silent farts like Amos & Andrew contain a few (too few) moments of Cagean hilarity. I'd pay to see Cage in an asbestos suit signing out the phone book in semaphore. I'll even see Guarding Tess, despite a pustular rash that covers my body in seconds whenever I'm exposed to Shirley MacLaine.

As a kid, my matinee obsessions began at the other end of the spectrum, with Charlton Heston. With a profile that resembled Mount Rushmore before it was carved, and an acting range that ran the gamut between squinting stiffly at gorillas and squinting stiffly at Karen Black, Chucky was the cool, huge-boned monolith all honest preteen boys wanted to be. I knew in each movie he'd grit his massive teeth, hunch up those looming cheekbones and mutter something criminally stupid. At that time, Heston's career had waned, thank Christ, from the big-budget Biblical mastodons that made him famous to some of the cheesiest, silliest studio movies of the '70s: Earthquake, Skyjacked, The Omega Man, Airport 1975, Soylent Green, Two-Minute Warning, not to mention Beneath the Planet of the Apes (the sequel to 1968's Planet of the Apes, which Heston also starred in), which frankly would've hooked me on Morey Amsterdam had he starred in them. Chuck was truly The Man, though, handling any preposterous disaster by thrusting his chin out like it was a third set of knuckles. Those poor slobs who know Heston through his sorry cameos in Tombstone and Wayne's World 2 just wouldn't understand. Maybe only Jimmy would, wherever he is. Or Nic.

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Eve Golden, Martha Frankel, Stephen Rebello, Michael Angeli and Michael Atkinson all write regularly for Movieline.

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