So how close is Lincoln depicted by Daniel Day-Lewis in the current film to what historians believe was the historical personality? Pretty close, actually. The New York Review of Books has published an interesting story about the film. Here is writer David Bromwich on Lincoln’s voice:
“It is a commanding performance and a credible one. Day-Lewis has squeezed his usual voice into a thinner, higher, reedy instrument, with a gravelly roughness under it. The voice curls into a growl: there is hardly a day in January when Lincoln is not taxed almost beyond endurance. We can be sure somebody working on the picture read an account of Lincoln’s speaking voice, for it had some of these properties, yet it showed a strange power: not booming and baritone, indeed not resonant in any obvious way, but by all accounts close to a high alto; it could irritate at first but after a few paragraphs his listeners would stand enthralled.”
