Daniel Day-Lewis

Daniel insists he never really turned his back on films, though. "I don't ever recall announcing my retirement," he said in 2002, "but as I haven't worked in four or five years, I guess it's not an unreasonable assumption."

That break from the limelight is very much in line with the unpredictable approach integral to the double Oscar-winner's life. Born in London on April 29, 1957 to the English poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis and his actress wife, Daniel went to public school in Kent before studying acting in Bristol.

Four years after debuting in the West End in 1982, his status as a rising star was confirmed when he landed the movie A Room With A View. This screen breakthrough was followed by the powerful double whammy of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being and My Left Foot. In 1989, nearly 20 years after he first appeared on film as a child vandal in Sunday Bloody Sunday, Daniel received his first Oscar for My Left Foot, the tale of a talented cerebral palsy sufferer.

After "nervous exhaustion" forced him to quit a National Theatre stint as Hamlet in London - he was replaced by understudy Jeremy Northam - Daniel took a few years out. When he returned it was with a trio of well-received films, The Last Of The Mohicans, The Age Of Innocence and In The Name Of The Father.

At the top of his game Daniel retreated from Hollywood for a second time. It was during this period he became a father for the first time, when actress Isabelle Adjani bore him a son, Gabriel-Kane, in 1995. His comeback offerings this time around - The Boxer and a second co-starring role alongside Winona Ryder in The Crucible - weren't so well-received.

It was then he made his lengthiest retreat from the spotlight. Although not true, the shoemaker stories were rooted in fact. After buying custom-made footwear on a trip to Italy he became fascinated with the process, and often returned to watch the craftsmen at work.

Many speculated that his new interest in cobbling was simply the obsessive actor's customary intense preparation for an upcoming film role. After all, he had camped out in the wild before filming The Last Of The Mohicans, taken to the streets of the Big Apple in 19th-century costume for The Age Of Innocence, and learned to paint with his toes for My Left Foot. "I most enjoy the loss of self that can only be achieved through detailed understanding of another life - not by limping and growing a moustache," he says.

His last departure from the limelight could have become permanent had Age Of Innocence director Martin Scorsese not asked Daniel to return to the Hollywood fold to make 2002 flick Gangs Of New York. Since then jobs have been few and far between with only The Ballad Of Jack And Rose making it onto his CV before 2008's BAFTA- and Oscar-winning turn in There Will Be Blood. Instead, the actor favoured a quiet life with his writer and director wife Rebecca Miller - daughter of famed playwright Arthur Miller and their two young sons, Ronan and Cashel Blake.