Daniel Day-Lewis the second child of poet Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–1972) and his second wife, actress Jill Balcon (1925–2009). His older sister, Tamasin Day-Lewis (born 1953), is a television chef and food critic. His father, who was born in the Irish town of Ballintubbert, County Laois, was of Protestant Anglo-Irish descent, lived in England from the age of two, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Daniel's mother was Jewish; her ancestors were immigrants to England in the late 19th century, from Latvia and Poland. Day-Lewis' maternal grandfather, Sir Michael Balcon, became the head of Ealing Studios, helping develop the new
Cecil Day-Lewis from poetry by writing a detective novel, "A Question of Proof" under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. He created Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator and gentleman detective who, as the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, has the same access to, and good relations with, official crime investigation bodies as those enjoyed by other fictional sleuths such as Ellery Queen, Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey. He published nineteen more crime novels. (In the first Nigel Strangeways novel, the detective is modelled on W. H. Auden, but Day-Lewis developed the character as a far less extravagant and more serious