With a glittering career and a happy family life, Daniel Day-Lewis has found ‘joy’, he tells LA correspondent Patricia Danaher.

There's a lightness to Daniel Day-Lewis today as he sits down to talk to HQ about starring in the musical Nine in which he plays Federico Fellini's alter ego, Guido Conti. There is none of the brooding intensity of There Will Be Blood or terror of Gangs of New York in this role as the blocked creative with the complicated love life. The two-time Oscar winner positively beams as he recalls the fun he had with Sophia Loren who plays his mother in the movie.

"Being with Sophia Loren was like being on a date," he laughs. "Apart from being sublimely beautiful and sharp as a tack, she makes me laugh too. She's a very funny woman and a real girl, by which I mean she's ageless and full of the joys of life. My wife Rebecca's parents were like that too, and it was a real example to me to spend time with people at the later stages of their lives who are like children."

There was less need for the intense method approach, for which Day-Lewis is famous, in preparation for this role. Looking ruggedly handsome and surrounded by some of the biggest female stars in the business, such as Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson and Judi Dench, Day-Lewis will be the envy of many a red-blooded man.

He won't be drawn on who was the biggest diva or even the sexiest of them. Instead, the thing that scared him the most was having to sing.

"I sang when I was a choirboy, but singing in church is not the same as trying to tell a story through music. I've always enjoyed singing, but as a journeyman. In Ireland, of course, it's a great tradition and, growing up, if you went to somebody's house for the evening, at some point after drink had been taken, somebody would say, 'It's your turn to sing.' That would have been the closest I ever came to any kind of public performance up 'til then, and luckily no one would remember the next day!"

Life in Wicklow with Rebecca Miller and their two boys, Ronan and Cashel, is where most of his time is spent for the long breaks he takes between projects. It is the place where he feels most at ease, is rarely hassled and largely ignored.

"It continues to be among the many things I love about Ireland. I find people to be, on the whole, very gracious and unassuming. Even if they do feel the need to say something to you or ask you for something, it really is not an intrusion on my life to the extent that it makes any difference whatsoever. I'm very happily left alone to go about my business."

His long, brilliant collaboration with Jim Sheridan, dating back almost 20 years with My Left Foot, which won him his first Oscar and catapulted him on to the world stage, is be renewed sometime over the next 18 months in Black Mass, the story of the notorious Boston-Irish criminal Whitey Bulger.

"We don't have a definite date to begin, but I would do anything with Jim. Anything. We've made three great movies together that I'll always be proud of and grateful for."

The mantelpiece in the Miller/Day-Lewis house must be chocca with awards. So what does it mean to him these days, given how many he has garnered?

"I don't think there's anybody in the world, no matter what their protestations, who doesn't get pleasure from being given a beautiful recognition of the work they do. The hard thing about this work, which is kind of pivotal to our story, is that you begin again each time. And you are a child each time that you go back to work, and there's no reward in the world, no collection of awards, no trophy room, no nothing that is going to save you or help you when you confront this new reality that you're trying to understand."

It's nearly 25 years since Day-Lewis ran off the stage at the Old Vic in London during a performance of Hamlet when he thought he saw the ghost of his own late father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis. Judi Dench was one of his co-stars in that production. Today, he laughs heartily at his own expense as he recalls hearing she was also to star in Nine.

"I've loved and admired her for as long as I can remember, so that chance to work with her again was so exciting that I sent her a note promising that I wouldn't run out on her this time!"

Surely there must have been some tensions and tantrums on the set with so many large female egos around? After all, wasn't Penélope Cruz Tom Cruise's major love after divorcing from Nicole Kidman ...

"If you set up a rehearsal process and put a group of performers together with directors and choreographers, there's no room for any kind of diva nonsense. And nobody's going to try it on. It just doesn't happen. It's work."

At 52, with nothing to prove professionally and a happy family life, Day-Lewis seems more at home in his skin than ever.

"It's certainly about joy. But where does that joy come from? Probably most of our satisfaction as beings during the course of our time here comes from curiosity and the pursuit of that curiosity, the satisfying of it." HQ

Nine is out on St Stephen's Day

- Patricia Danaher