Daniel Day-Lewis

“Three Oscars and the two most intense mustaches in film.”

88STACH SCORE

✂ Handlebar Celebrity Era: 2000s Born 1957

Is this a Legendary Stach?

Stach Stats

Stash Power90

Ruggedness88

Curl Factor60

Legend Status86

Stats are for entertainment purposes. The mustache committee's decisions are final and occasionally arbitrary.

Style: Handlebar
Peak Era: 2000s
Born: 1957
Fan Votes: 0 legendary · 0 meh

The Story

About Daniel Day-Lewis

Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis was born in London in 1957, the son of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon. He trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and came to wide attention in 1985 with two very different films, My Beautiful Laundrette and A Room with a View, released within months of each other.

He is the only performer to win the Academy Award for Best Actor three times: My Left Foot (1989), There Will Be Blood (2007), and Lincoln (2012). His deep preparation is legendary: he stayed in a wheelchair for My Left Foot, learned to track and skin game for The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and apprenticed as a butcher for Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (2002).

That last role and Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood gave him two of the most menacing mustaches in cinema. He retired from acting after Phantom Thread (2017), then returned in 2025 with Anemone, directed by his son Ronan.

The Verdict

Why the Stach Became Iconic

Day-Lewis grew two historic mustaches in a single decade. Bill the Butcher's waxed, upswept handlebar in Gangs of New York was pure 1860s menace; Daniel Plainview's thick, bristling oil-man mustache in There Will Be Blood looked like it drank your milkshake personally.

Because Day-Lewis famously stays in character, these mustaches are among the few in film history to have been worn, full-time, for months on end by an Oscar winner who was pretending to be someone else the entire time.

On the Record

Appearances

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
My Left Foot (1989)
The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Gangs of New York (2002)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Lincoln (2012)
Phantom Thread (2017)
Anemone (2025)

Fun Facts

He is the only actor to win three Academy Awards for Best Actor.
He apprenticed as a butcher to prepare for Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York.
He trained as a shoemaker in Florence during a break from acting in the late 1990s.
He was knighted in 2014 for services to drama.
He announced his retirement after Phantom Thread (2017) and returned eight years later in Anemone, directed by his son.