Daniel Day-Lewis has formally retired from acting

'He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years,' a representative said

Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood

Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the most widely respected actors of his generation and a three-time Oscar-winner, has announced his retirement from acting.

The 60-year-old has performed in his last play and recently finished shooting his last film, Phantom Thread, a reunion with There Will Be Blood collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson that is due in cinemas this December.

"Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor," his representative Leslee Dart said in a short statement. "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."

While the motivation behind his retirement is unclear, Day-Lewis has expressed a desire to step away from acting before.

After starring in 1997’s The Boxer, he disappeared from the big screen for five years until Martin Scorsese convinced him to return for Gangs of New York. During that time, he reportedly took up shoemaking in Italy, explaining to the Guardian: “I didn’t really want to be involved with films. I just wanted some time away from it all. I need that quite often.”

Day-Lewis as the 16th President of the United States in Lincoln (2012)

The announcement of his retirement came as a surprise and sent shockwaves through Hollywood, with Day-Lewis being revered as perhaps the finest actor of his time.

Day-Lewis has long been an exceptionally deliberate performer who often spends years preparing for a role, crafting his characters with an uncommon, methodical completeness.

"I don't dismember a character into its component parts and then kind of bolt it all together, and off you go," Day-Lewis said in 2012, discussing Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. "I tend to try and allow things to happen slowly, over a long period of time. As I feel I'm growing into a sense of that life, if I'm lucky, I begin to hear a voice."

His method approach has perhaps been overstated and simplified however, with the actor joking about his reputation for extreme preparation during a BAFTA acceptance speech in 2013 that he had stayed "in character as myself for the past 55 years."

A five-time Academy Award nominee, Day-Lewis is the only one to ever win Best Actor three times, earning Oscars for My Left Foot, Lincoln and There Will Be Blood.

Married to writer-director Rebecca Miller with three children, he broke through with 1985's My Beautiful Laundrette by Stephen Frears. His films since then have included also included The Last of the Mohicans, The Age of Innocence and In the Name of the Father.

His last play was in 1989, a National Theatre production of Hamlet in London. Day-Lewis infamously walked out in the middle of a performance, and never returned to the stage again.

“I work in a certain way and I never really felt the need to explain it or apologise for it," he said some years later, "but in England they thought I was unhinged.”

Day-Lewis is not an actor who strays into directing (at least thus far), but he has previously suggested that his down-time from acting is still spent creatively.

“My life as it is away from movie set is a life where I follow my curiosity just as avidly as when I am working,” he explained to The Guardian in 2008. “It is with a very positive sense that I keep away from the work for a while.”