Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis

Daniel Day-Lewis is the only performer to have won Best Actor three times, for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood and Lincoln.

The preparation is legendary and mostly true. He remained in a wheelchair throughout My Left Foot, learned to build canoes for The Last of the Mohicans, and worked as an apprentice cobbler in Florence during one of his retirements.

There Will Be Blood is the performance that dominates: Daniel Plainview is charmless, funny and monstrous, and the voice he built for it has been imitated relentlessly since.

He has retired several times and appears to have meant it after Phantom Thread. The filmography is small and contains almost nothing weak.