Daniel Day-Lewis projects the image of the reluctant star. He has been extremely selective about his screen roles since he burst on to the international scene in 1985 in My Beautiful Laundrette. His recent output has been especially meagre – four films over the past 10 years, including in 2005 The Ballad of Jack and Rose, directed by his wife Rebecca Miller.

For his latest role, Day-Lewis plays the greedy oilman-entrepreneur Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s saga There Will Be Blood, loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! There is already Oscar-buzz about Day-Lewis’s performance. Probably Anderson’s most ambitious film to date, it is a uniquely American sprawling epic of power, family, faith and religion at the turn of the century.

Day-Lewis was attracted to the role by the quality of the writing. Speaking in Hollywood recently, he explained that “Paul [Thomas Anderson] is first and foremost a writer, which is not the case with most other directors. He has a deep love and appreciation of language.” This should come as no surprise for the son of Cecil Day-Lewis, who was British poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. Yet when asked if he inherited from his father a gift for writing, he quickly says: “There’s no such thing as inheriting talent. Writing was his thing, not mine.”

He is also quick to disparage his cultured English background. “Where I came from, it was heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, let alone Hollywood movies. We were encouraged to believe the classics of the theatre were the only thing to do.”

Yet Day-Lewis made his screen debut aged 14 in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). In the 1970s and early 1980s, he performed with the Bristol Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, turning in notable performances in Another Country, Dracula and Hamlet . He did not appear on screen again until 1982, in Gandhi.

From his earliest roles, Day-Lewis impressed audiences and critics with his ability to move easily from a gay punk rocker in My Beautiful Laundrette to a foppish Victorian suitor in Merchant-Ivory’s Room With a View, two films that earned him the New York Film Critics Circle Award as best supporting actor. A string of accolades followed, including a 1989 best actor Oscar for Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot, the powerful biopic of artist and cerebral palsy sufferer Christy Brown. He reunited with Sheridan for In the Name of the Father, the true story of a man unjustly imprisoned for 15 years, for which he received another Oscar nomination.

Day-Lewis made two very different films with Martin Scorsese: he played the aristocratic Newland Archer in the period drama of mores and manners, The Age of Innocence, and Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, easily stealing the show from Leonardo DiCaprio. He says he did Archer “because Scorsese asked me”, and that he found it more challenging to play the violent gang leader.

His other roles include the early American adventurer Hawkeye in Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans, which established him as a potential Hollywood heartthrob, a label he detests. Additional credits include Philip Kaufman’s charming version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the Arthur Miller classic The Crucible, directed by Nicholas Hytner, where he met his future wife Rebecca, Miller’s daughter. With their two boys, the couple now split their life between Ireland and New York City. He has another son who lives with his mother, French actor Isabelle Adjani.

Asked what baggage he carries from film to film other than emotional intensity and hard work, he says: “If there’s some consistency, it’s because it’s me rather than somebody else doing those various things. With each work, I begin from nothing again. One of the essential demands of acting is the humility to recognise that you’re a baby when you start a new role.” Enormous preparatory work goes into the devising of a totally different look, walk, accent and voice for each part. But does he subscribe to any school?

“I never had the need to define myself as a method actor, but apparently people seem to think that’s what I am. My training was in the Stanislavski method, therefore my way of working would certainly have a lot in common with that. But I don’t ask other actors how they arrive at their particular truth; it’s none of my business.”

The need to embody his character fully means extensive preparation – it took years before a single frame of Blood was shot. Since his character is loosely based on Edward Doheny, who began as an itinerant gold prospector and went on to become the billionaire owner of Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company, Day-Lewis read books and examined photos of the era, and watched movies such as John Huston’s classic 1948 study of greed and paranoia, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

He says the American West has always held for him “the lure of unlimited possibility, opportunity”. So he perceived Blood as a sprawling saga about freedom and sudden success, basic tenets of the American value system. Ultimately, what attracted him to the picture was its “character study of the corruptive effects of money, fame, and power” – despite the apparent contradiction to his reticent public persona. “It’s been suggested that I have something of the hermit in me,” he says, “but I don’t know if that’s true. I just lead a quiet life when I am not working, and not working is a very positive thing to me.” He explains: “I am not hiding behind closed doors when I am not making films – there are just other things I like to do.”

‘There Will be Blood’ opens in the US on December 26 and in the UK in February