Daniel Day-Lewis Is Abandoning Us All

After becoming the only person to win three Oscars for Best Actor, starring in what the New York Times called the best film of the 21st century, and being knighted for his services to drama, Daniel Day-Lewis is quitting acting, Variety reports.

"Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor," his spokeswoman, Leslee Dart, told Variety. "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."

If the "world's greatest actor" sticks to his word, he'll appear on-screen for the final time in Phantom Thread, a Paul Thomas Anderson film about the world of high fashion in 1950s London. Day-Lewis stars in the film—due out in December—as a dressmaker tapped to design for the upper echelons of British society and the royal family, according to IMDb.

The actor has a reputation for going to extremes to get into character. He lived in a tent on a desolate Texas oilfield while filming There Will Be Blood, Anderson's epic about a maniacal oil baron. He confined himself to a wheelchair for his role as an artist with cerebral palsy in My Left Foot. He continued to walk, talk, and look like Abraham Lincoln even when he wasn't filming Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. So perhaps there's a chance this retirement announcement is just a method-acting rouse.

Day-Lewis, now 60, has also been known to spend long stints away from the screen between roles. He'd reportedly been living like a hermit and working as a cobbler for five years before Martin Scorsese convinced him to star as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, which earned the actor an Academy Award nod. If we're lucky, years after Phantom Thread hits the big screen, some monolithic director will approach Day-Lewis with a script so good, a role so demanding, the actor won't be able to say no.