Daniel Day-Lewis Takes Home a Record Third Oscar
February 25, 2013
British actor Daniel Day-Lewis received this year’s Academy Award for best actor for the title role in Steven Spielberg’s motion picture Lincoln. Day-Lewis is first man to win the best actor prize three times. He previously received Oscars for My Left Foot (1989) and There Will be Blood (2007). His co-star in the film, Sally Field, who played Mary Todd Lincoln, was nominated but failed to win in the best supporting actress category. Field had previously won Academy Awards for best actress for her performances in Norma Rae (1979) and Places in the Heart (1984).
Lincoln was nominated for best picture of the year, but the prize went to the thriller Argo, which was produced, directed, and starred in by Ben Affleck. In 1998, Affleck shared an Academy Award with Matt Damon for their original screenplay for the drama Good Will Hunting. Argo, which was co-produced by actor George Clooney, tells the story of how in 1980 the Central Intelligence Agency, with the help of a Canadian diplomat, rescued a group of Americans from Iran after they had escaped from Iranian protesters who were taking over the United States embassy in Tehran.
Ang Lee (right), a Taiwanese-born motion-picture director, won the 2013 Academy Award for best director for “Life of Pi.” “Argo,” a movie co-produced by American actor George Clooney (left), won the best picture award. (AP/Wide World)
Affleck was not nominated for best director. Ang Lee won the directing award for Life of Pi. The film was based on a fantasy novel about a boy stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. In total, Life of Pi won four Oscars, more than any other film this year. The award was Lee’s second directing Oscar. The Taiwanese-born director won previously for Brokeback Mountain in 2006.
Jennifer Lawrence won the Academy Award for best actress for her role as a troubled young women in the film romance Silver Linings Playbook. Anne Hathaway won the best supporting actress award for her role as Fantine, a woman broken by poverty and human cruelty, in the movie musical Les Miserables. Christoph Waltz won the best supporting actor award for playing a German bounty hunter in Quentin Tarantino’s slave revenge movie Django Unchained. The Austrian actor previously won an Oscar playing a Nazi in another Tarantino film, Inglorious Basterds, in 2010.
Additional World Book articles:
- Motion pictures
- Iran 1980 (a Back in Time article)
