The Faces of Daniel Day-Lewis

I just watched The Unbearable Lightness of Being and it solidified an opinion I've formed over my recent years of movie watching: Daniel Day-Lewis is the best actor ever. His body of work includes more diverse and more complete and more convincing characters than anyone else I can think of. To top it off, he has done so with only 17 movies to his credit over the last 25 years.

It's hard to explain, but Day-Lewis doesn't act - he becomes his characters. The voices and body language he uses from role to role are as distinct as the physical changes he undergoes.

I am extremely excited about his next project There Will Be Blood, an adaptation of an Upton Sinclair novel directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love).

Here's a rundown of the pictures above (left to right):

Convict/IRA member/boxer,yet good guy, Danny Flynn in Jim Sheridan's The Boxer.

Fun loving Gerry Conlon caught in the wrong place at the wrong time in In the Name of the Father.

Prim, proper, and slightly annoying Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View.

The menacing, sadistic, racist, strangely honorable Bill "The Butcher" Cutting in The Gangs of New York. In my opinion the second greatest villain in film history (behind, of course, Darth Vader).

His Oscar winning role as severely disabled artist Christy Brown in My Left Foot.

A bi-sexual layabout in My Beautiful Laundrette.

Troubled father Jack Slavin in The Ballad of Jack and Rose.

Womanizing Czech surgeon Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

... another pic from The Boxer because I messed up. So I'll mention his one scene in Gandhi as a bigoted bully who attempted to block the sidewalk.

Upstanding gentleman Newland Archer torn between two women in The Age of Innocence.

Bad-ass warrior Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans.

Salem resident John Proctor whose spurning of a young woman ultimately leads to a lot of accusations and some trials you may have heard of.