Last night, Daniel Day-Lewis won an unprecedented third Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of great emancipator Abe Lincoln in the Steven Spielberg film named after America's 16th president. No other man has won three Best Actor awards, which makes Day-Lewis officially the “greatest film actor of all time,” a title that’ll look good on the business cards I hope he plans to have made. He made a short, classy speech and then laughed off all the “greatest actor/human ever” talk as "daft," before paying credit to his wife for putting up with all the "very strange men" he has made it his job to embody over the course of his career.
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The trailer forMy Beautiful LaundretteThere are times when Day-Lewis’s acting feels like it's too much—particularly at moments in Gangs of New York and Lincoln—when you can see the mechanics of his total immersion, when you can see all the flawless “great acting” on display and it sort of feels like his jaw is always clenched and there’s a load of Marlon Brando in The Godfather type cotton wool in his cheeks. But more often than not this raging intensity is overwhelmingly powerful. Here, in There Will be Blood, he is a coiled ball of emotion until, at the right moment, he lets loose. Here, in The Last of the Mohicans, he brings the same kind of power to the screen, just with long hair. He even manages to do it in Mohawk.
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