Top 12 Best Daniel Day-Lewis Movies

"I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed." As misanthropic, oil-obsessed pioneer Daniel Plainview, Day-Lewis delivered arguably the most ferocious and monumental acting performance of the 21st century. From his booming, sepulchral voice and limping swagger to the volcanic, milkshake-slurping madness in the private bowling alley, Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece earned Day-Lewis his second Best Actor Oscar and immortality in cinematic history.

Armed with a glass eye bearing the carved American eagle and a butcher knife he sharpens on his apron, Bill the Butcher towers over every frame of Martin Scorsese's 19th-century Five Points epic. Day-Lewis apprenticed under real butchers to master meat-carving and famously refused a modern winter coat on set because it didn't exist in 1863. The result is an electrifying, terrifying force of nature that completely steals the entire movie.

Steven Spielberg waited years until Day-Lewis finally agreed to portray the sixteenth president of the United States. Rather than playing a marble monument, Day-Lewis breathed vibrant, fragile humanity into Lincoln, portraying him as a soft-spoken, folksy storyteller wielding sharp political cunning and unbending moral resolve to pass the Thirteenth Amendment. The transformative triumph earned him a historic third Academy Award for Best Actor.

Day-Lewis's international breakthrough and first Oscar victory arrived in Jim Sheridan's moving biopic of Christy Brown, the Irish painter and writer born with severe cerebral palsy who could control only his left foot. Day-Lewis famously refused to leave his wheelchair throughout the months of filming, being carried across soundstages and spoon-fed by crew members. The resulting performance is astonishingly honest, completely rejecting Hollywood melodrama in favor of raw humanity.

In this searing political drama based on the wrongful imprisonment and torture of the Guildford Four, Day-Lewis voluntarily spent three days in an unheated isolation cell subjected to mock interrogations to embody Gerry Conlon. His searing, heartbreaking emotional confrontations with his incarcerated father (played with heartbreaking grace by Pete Postlethwaite) elevate the film into an unforgettable triumph of justice and familial love.

If this exquisite collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson remains Day-Lewis's final cinematic performance, it serves as an aristocratic masterwork of a farewell. As fastidious, obsessive 1950s London couturier Reynolds Woodcock, Day-Lewis displays an intricate, whisper-quiet form of megalomania, creating a chilly perfectionist who only finds true emotional peace when poisoned by his determined young muse (Vicky Krieps).

Sprinting through the dense forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains with flintlock rifles in hand, Day-Lewis proved he could be the ultimate dashing romantic action hero in Michael Mann's sweeping frontier epic. Spending months living off the land, tracking game, and mastering tomahawk combat, his rugged physicality and passionate declaration of devotion ('I will find you!') became legendary.

Trading feral combat for stifling high-society drawing rooms, Day-Lewis channels agonizing repressed desire beneath the stiff collars and velvet waistcoats of 1870s New York aristocracy. In Martin Scorsese's sumptuous adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel, his portrayal of an honorable lawyer torn between social propriety and scandalous forbidden love with Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) is quietly devastating.

Training intensively for three years under former world featherweight champion Barry McGuigan—who noted Day-Lewis could have legitimately turned pro—the actor brought bruising authenticity to this gritty Belfast drama. Playing an ex-IRA prisoner who seeks redemption and rekindles an old romance through an integrated neighborhood boxing gym, Day-Lewis exudes weary, bruised nobility.

"Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!" Arthur Miller's timeless allegory of the Salem witch trials finds its ultimate champion in Day-Lewis's righteous, tortured farmer John Proctor. As religious hysteria sweeps through the Puritan village, Day-Lewis breathes righteous thunder into the iconic text, refusing to surrender his soul and integrity to avoid the gallows.

The groundbreaking British drama directed by Stephen Frears that put Day-Lewis squarely on the map. Playing Johnny, a bleached-blonde former neo-fascist street punk who reconnects with his Pakistani schoolmate (Gordon Warnecke) to open an eccentric neon-lit laundromat, Day-Lewis showcased an astonishing, tender balance of streetwise grit and gentle romance in Thatcher-era London.

Released in the exact same year as his working-class punk in My Beautiful Laundrette, Day-Lewis startled film critics with his complete, comedic transformation into Cecil Vyse, a supercilious, primly pompous Edwardian aristocrat. His priggish mannerisms, pince-nez glasses, and awkward, rigid proposal scene in the woods demonstrated the peerless versatility that would come to define his legendary career.