The announcement sent shockwaves through Hollywood, where Day-Lewis is revered as possibly the finest actor of his time…
NEW YORK (AP) — Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the most widely respected actors of his generation and a three-time Oscar-winner, says he’s retiring from acting.
The 60-year-old actor announced Tuesday that he has shot his last film and performed in his last play. That makes Paul Thomas Anderson’s already filmed “Phantom Thread, ” due out in December, his final film.
“Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor, ” his representative Leslee Dart said in a statement. “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 announcement sent shockwaves through Hollywood, where Day-Lewis is revered as possibly the finest actor of his time. But Day-Lewis has also long been an exceptionally deliberate performer who often spends years preparing for a role, crafting his characters with an uncommon, methodical completeness.
“I don’t dismember a character into its component parts and then kind of bolt it all together, and off you go, ” Day-Lewis told the AP in 2012, discussing Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” ”I tend to try and allow things to happen slowly, over a long period of time. As I feel I’m growing into a sense of that life, if I’m lucky, I begin to hear a voice.”
He has stepped away from film before. In the late 1990s, he famously apprenticed as a shoemaker in Florence, Italy — a period he called “semi-retirement.” ”Phantom Thread, ” which Focus Features will release Dec. 25, is his first film in five years, following “Lincoln.”
A five-time Academy Award nominee, Day-Lewis is the only one to ever win best actor three times. He earned Oscars for “My Left Foot, ” ”Lincoln” and “There Will Be Blood.”
Day-Lewis, who is married to writer-director Rebecca Miller with three children, broke through with 1985’s “My Beautiful Laundrette, ” by Stephen Frears. His films since then have included “The Last of the Mohicans, ” ”The Age of Innocence, ” ”In the Name of the Father” and “Gangs of New York.”
His last play was in 1989, a National Theatre production of “Hamlet, ” in London. Day-Lewis infamously walked out in the middle of a performance, and never returned to the stage again.
