A small, historical milestone was reached last weekend, all but unnoticed. It was the opening of an English-language film that was made, for the first time since the movies began to talk, by a woman directing her husband in a leading role. While it hardly warrants a commemorative edition of Ms. magazine, the news will be greeted in many households across the land with a certain amount of wry satisfaction. The couple in question, Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller, have pretty good ancestry for revolutionaries. He's the son of British Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon. She's the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. They met in 1996 at an early screening of The Crucible, a film of her father's play. By that time Day-Lewis, already an Oscar-winning actor (for My Left Foot), had been offered, and had turned down, a role in one of Rebecca Miller's movies. Their new film, The Ballad of Jack and Rose—an unusual love story between a hippie father and daughter who seem to teeter on the brink of incest as they try to create a Utopian life on an island in the Atlantic—is the very one he rejected.
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