Daniel Day-Lewis: the acting gene came from his mother As the actress Jill Balcon was fond of remarking, she was always described as someone's daughter, wife or mother. The men who cast such a long shadow were her father, the Ealing Studios supremo Sir Michael Balcon; her husband, the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis; and her son, Daniel Day-Lewis. It was more an observation than a complaint, and those of us who knew Jill well before her death in 2009 at the age of 84, saw her maternal pride and selflessness rewarded at the Oscars" ceremony when Daniel, brandishing a record third Best Actor statute for Lincoln, said simply, "for my mother." In 2003, the actor made his one and so far only foray into the less glitzy world of radio drama to star alongside his mother in Deadheading Roses, a play commissioned by the BBC to mark her 60th anniversary as a stalwart of the airwaves. In that world, Jill Balcon was a star, too. Daniel's good looks may be down to both parents. Natasha Spender, wife of the poet Stephen Spender, said Jill was "strikingly beautiful, like the sort of beautiful woman you only see on a Greek vase," while the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard recalls Cecil as "elegant, craggy and irresistibly attractive." But if there's an acting gene, he got it from his mother. She had first caught the eye of film critics as Madeline Bray in a celebrated 1947 screen version of Nicholas Nickleby (a role she had taken in the face of her father's opposition - the studio boss didn't want his only daughter to be an actress at all). Her father also disapproved of her marriage in 1951 to Day-Lewis, a divorced father-of-two 21 years her senior. Once they had children - in 1953, Tamasin, and in 1957, Daniel - her career took second place. She did continue to perform alongside her husband at poetry recitals (Philip Larkin insisted on her reading his verse, and T S Eliot asked for her) and there were occasional roles in TV dramas and a brief Indian summer in Derek Jarman films. But she always made time for radio drama, where her voice, a rich, expressive, finely modulated instrument, remained a favourite with listeners from her early days as a wartime BBC announcer right up to months before her death. After Deadheading the Roses, I asked her what she thought Daniel had learnt from her about his trade. She looked astonished. Nothing at all. I'm just not in his league," she replied. His dedication of his award to her on Sunday night suggests he may think otherwise. Peter Stanford's biography of Cecil Day-Lewis is published by Continuum