(Photo: Getty Images)
Daniel Day-Lewis turns 65 Friday (April 29), so we're celebrating by making him our British Icon of the Week. The retired actor is known for being a bit of an enigma, but here are 10 things we do know and appreciate about him.
1. He's the only person to have won Best Actor at the Academy Awards three times.
Day-Lewis won the top prize in film acting in 1990 for My Left Foot, in 2008 for There Will Be Blood and in 2013 for Lincoln. He was also nominated in 1994 for In the Name of the Father, in 2003 for Gangs of New York and in 2018 for Phantom Thread. 

2. He has a playful side.
Day-Lewis collected his second Oscar from Helen Mirren, who had won Best Actress the previous year for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen. When he arrived on stage, Day-Lewis knelt down before Mirren as though she were really the British monarch, then joked: "That's the closest I'll ever come to getting a Knighthood." He wasn't quite right about that, though...

3. In 2014, he received a Knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II.
He duly became Sir Daniel Day-Lewis in recognition of his services to acting. He told the BBC at the time that he was "entirely amazed and utterly delighted in equal measure" by the accolade. 
4. He guards his privacy and gives very few interviews.
But, he did make a few TV appearances to promote Lincoln, including this charming and eloquent interview on BBC News. It's a relatively rare glimpse of the man behind the work.

5. He has an interesting relationship with his own Englishness. 
Day-Lewis told W magazine that before Phantom Thread, in which he plays a fashion designer working in post-war London, he had only really wanted to tell "American stories."
"England is deep in me. I'm made of that stuff. For a long time, a film set in England was too close to the world that I’d escaped from: drawing rooms, classic Shakespeare, Downton Abbey did not interest me," he added. "But I was fascinated by London after the war. My parents told stories about living through the Blitz, and I felt like I ingested that. I am sentimental about that world."
6. He lives in Ireland because it reminds him of happy childhood vacations.
His father, Cecil Day-Lewis, was a very distinguished Irish-born British poet, and the family would return there every summer. "Life in England was, by comparison, a little colorless. Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that," Day-Lewis told The Guardian. "It was the place we were all together as a family. And it was like a secret garden. Making a conscious decision to live in a place means you are going to take the mystery out of it to some extent, but you can never entirely do that here. It's one of the great qualities of this place."
7. He left the acting world very much on his own terms.
Day-Lewis revealed after completing work on Phantom Thread that it would be his final movie. "I knew it was uncharacteristic to put out a statement," he told W magazine. "But I did want to draw a line. I didn’t want to get sucked back into another project. All my life, I've mouthed off about how I should stop acting, and I don't know why it was different this time, but the impulse to quit took root in me, and that became a compulsion. It was something I had to do."
8. Before this, he was incredibly selective about his roles.
Day-Lewis only made 21 movies, and just six of them came after the year 2000. However, he has dismissed the idea that he doesn't enjoy acting. "Who doesn't hate the thing that they most love? Acting is an impossibly elusive trade to ply, but the prevailing sense I have when I go to work is one of joy," he told The Guardian. "It is always represented as a kind of self-flagellation for me. It couldn't be further from the truth."
9. And he was renowned for his intense preparation.
According to the BBC, some reports claimed that Day-Lewis stayed in character as Abraham Lincoln during the entire Lincoln shoot. He is also reported to have asked everyone on set, including director Steven Spielberg, to address him as "Mr. President" at all times. "I never once looked the gift horse in the mouth," Spielberg said of working with Day-Lewis. "I never asked Daniel about his process. I didn’t want to know."

10. And he's also a talented woodworker.
Day-Lewis actually studied woodworking as a teenager, before ultimately deciding to focus on acting. "Being in a workshop is like food and drink to me," he told W magazine. "I love that sense of creation."
Do you have a favorite Daniel Day-Lewis performance?