He creates quite a scene in a crowded restaurant getting heavily drunk. In one extraordinary moment towards the end of the film, Brown finds out that the teacher, who’d helped with his speech and encouraged his painting and who he’d fallen in love with, is engaged to be married. I do when I see Daniel Day-Lewis as Christy Brown. I don’t recall ever feeling somebody’s inner spirit while watching a film. There’s a restless soul trapped inside that body. His eyes exude a gamut of emotions – defiance, anger, affection, loneliness, frustration and indomitably. Most miraculous is the spirituality that he’s able to convey through the tics and spasms. During the six-week shoot, Day-Lewis refused to break character and spent each day sitting twisted in a wheelchair, speaking in the garroted tones of Brown, and being fed and cared for by other cast and crew members. Some of the scenes were captured using a mirror as Day-Lewis could better manipulate his right foot.

He learned to paint and type with his foot. For eight weeks, the actor prepared for the role at the Sandymount School clinic near Dublin. The film is an adaptation of the 1954 memoir of the same name by Christy Brown, the celebrated Irish novelist and painter. Would he be able to move and have the dexterity and command of his body to move the way Brown did? When the actor was at SBIFF in 2013, he talked about that opening scene being the thing that intrigued him about the script because he thought it would be impossible to do. It’s a prodigious achievement both physically and mentally. Day Lewis’ performance in this movie is one of the greatest I’ve seen. What we’re witnessing takes a lot of effort, but this is the way Brown learnt to get on with his life. Throughout this we hear the strong breathing of the actor in character playing Christy Brown who had cerebral palsy since childhood.

We continue observing as the foot turns on the phonograph and then moves to grab the needle and gently places it on a particular groove on the record. We watch as the toes take the record out of its sleeve and carefully place it on a player. “My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown” (1989) – an unaffected and revitalizing film about embracing life’s challenges and rewards – opens with a close up of Daniel Day Lewis’ foot grabbing a vinyl of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. How those words ring true – and when spoken in the film – it’s equal parts heartbreaking and triumphant.

Yet like everyone else, I am acutely conscious sometimes of my own isolation, even in the midst of people.”

I have made myself articulate and understood to people in many parts of the world, and this is something we all wish to do whether we’re crippled or not. “It would not be true to say that I am no longer lonely.

Christy brown my left foot book