Daniel Day Lewis, Abraham Lincoln movie
In the summer of 2011, the actress Sally Field began receiving text messages from Abraham Lincoln.
“I’d
hear that twinkle-twinkle on my phone, and he would have sent me some
ridiculous limerick,” says Field, who plays the 16th President’s wife
Mary Todd in the new film Lincoln. “He’d sign it, ‘Yours, A.’ I would
text back as Mary, criticizing him for the waste of his time when he
might have been pursuing something more productive.”
In May of
the same year, the director of Lincoln, Steven Spielberg, received a
Pearlcorder tape machine in the mail. “I turned it on, and it was
Shakespeare and the Second Inaugural in this voice,” Spielberg says. The
voice was Lincoln’s. Not the stentorian tone that generations of
schoolchildren have inferred from Lincoln’s gloomy portraits, but the
one described by contemporary observers: a gentle tenor, reedy and
slightly cracked, the accent a frontier blend of Illinois, Indiana and
Kentucky. “A beautiful voice. I wanted that voice to read me a book. It
came with a letter that said, ‘After you listen to this, would you ring
me up and we’ll have a natter?’ I immediately got on the telephone and
said, ‘Who is this?’”