Daniel Day-Lewis (The Last of the Mohicans, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) is the Brett Favre, Sugar Ray Leonard, or Michael Jordan of acting. I say that for two reasons. He’s the best at what he does (and there aren’t many out there who would disagree, and even if they tried, they wouldn’t have much of a foot to really stand on), but also because he threatens to, and often does, retire from his craft, only to, after a non-predetermined set of time, return to peak performance. He retired from stage acting in 1989 when he walked off the stage during a production of Hamlet. After 1997’s The Boxer, he took up cobbling for five years (where he made exactly one pair of shoes before Martin Scorsese pulled him out of retirement to star opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Gangs of New York, a film that netted him his third Best Actor Oscar nomination at the time. He then went into hiding for another three years before The Ballad of Jack and Rose (perhaps only one of two misses in his career…the other being The Nine, which didn’t live up to its hype). Between these two misses, Day-Lewis gave, perhaps, the most memorable performance of his career as oil tycoon Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, a role that won him his fourth nomination and second Oscar for Best Actor. After 2009’s The Nine, he disappeared for another three years before returning as President Abraham Lincoln in Steven Speilberg’s Lincoln, which landed him his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination and third win. That was in 2012. 2017’s Phantom Thread is his return film, and one that he assures us is the last of his career. Will it earn him his sixth Oscar nomination? I am guessing that it will, though he will have no chance of winning acting’s top prize. This year belongs to Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour. But if this is how Day-Lewis will go out, he’ll do so in a role that isn’t as captivating as many of his previous ones, but one that is so subdued that you’ll find yourself comparing against these past masterful roles and wondering how he is so easily able to create characters that are so different from one another when it seems like such a challenge for so many of the other actors of our generation, even some of our better ones.
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