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 Rector of that parish, and Kathleen Blake (née Squires; died 1906). Some of his family were from England (Hertfordshire and Canterbury). His father took the surname "Day-Lewis" as a combination of his own birth father's ("Day") and adoptive father's ("Lewis") surnames. In his autobiography "The Buried Day" (1960), Day-Lewis wrote, "As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results". After the death of his mother in 1906, when he was two years old, Cecil was brought up in London by his father, with the help