Three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis announces retirement

CAIRO – 25 June 2017: Triple Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis has made the decision to retire from acting without announcing the reason, according to a Variety exclusive.

Leslee Dart, representative for numerous actors including Day-Lewis, said in a statement that “Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor,” adding, “He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years. This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject.”

The English actor, winner of more best actor Oscars than anyone in Academy Award history, will end his career with Paul Thomas Anderson’s fashion drama “Phantom Thread,” set to hit theaters on December 25.

The highly selective actor once told the BBC that he only accepts roles that he feels he can serve - intriguing characters with lives that “feel very far removed from my own.”

“I have a slow rhythm,” he told the BBC, acknowledging that he “disappears” from time to time. However, he clarified that such breaks, the escapes from publicity, are what dive him so deeply to his work.

His outstanding performance in playing wheelchair-bound Christy Brown in “My Left Foot” earned Day-Lewis his first Oscar in 1990. During filming for this role, the method actor reportedly never left his wheelchair and was spoon-fed by the film crew.

While preparing for “The Last of the Mohicans,” he lived off the land for weeks, hunting and skinning animals and even sleeping with his rifle, the Guardian reported in a 2002 profile.

The Independent wrote in an extensive profile and interview that he spent nights sleeping in a jail cell before filming “The Crucible,” and in 1997, he trained twice a day as a fighter for almost three years for his film “The Boxer.”

What is perhaps Day-Lewis’s most remembered performance, the role of oil man Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood,” earned his next Oscar in 2008.

Stephen Spielberg’s “Lincoln” featured Day-Lewis in the title role in 2012 – a role which earned the actor his third best actor Oscar. In a 2013 interview with the BBC, he told of the meticulous process including intensive research to perfect the nuances of Abraham Lincoln’s accent for the role.

He was also nominated for Academy Awards for his roles in “Gangs of New York” and “In the Name of the Father.”

During the 1980s, the British-Irish citizen worked in theatre and television, including “Frost in May” and “How Many Miles to Babylon.”

His stage career ended decades ago when he experienced an emotional crisis. “During his performance of Hamlet he walked off the stage claiming to have seen an apparition of his father, the late poet laureate of England Cecil Day-Lewis,” Burhan Wazir wrote in the Guardian in 2002.

Day-Lewis is married to writer-director Rebecca Miller.