You could be excused for thinking that Daniel Day-Lewis' best actor win for his incendiary turn in Paul Thomas Anderson's oil epic "There Will Be Blood" seemed foreordained. Never mind that Day-Lewis swept every honor leading up to the Oscars, beginning with the award he won from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in early December. Simply put, when the choosy Day-Lewis decides to work, which is rarely, he does so with a single-minded commitment and spectacular skill rarely matched in the history of film.

BY GLENN WHIPP >LA.COM

---

At the podium Sunday, Day-Lewis was handed his award by last year's best actress winner, Helen Mirren, and mused that the trophy was "the closest I'll ever come to getting a knighthood," and thanked voters "for whacking me with the handsomest bludgeon in town." He dedicated his trophy to his grandfather, father and his three sons.

This is his second best actor Oscar, following his win for playing the paralyzed Christy Brown in 1989's "My Left Foot."

Of course the process, the joy that comes with creating a character, is reward enough for Day-Lewis, who at the moment has no plans beyond helping build sets for the spring shoot of wife Rebecca Miller's next movie, "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee."

"There always seems to be an inevitability to the parts I play," Day-Lewis says. "It's expressing something that needs to be expressed. There's a joy in that.

"With Paul's script, it was wondering if we could pull off something this mad," the 50-year-old actor adds. "On the surface, the movie had the makings of a disaster, which apart from the beauty of the writing, is probably why it appealed to me."

Anderson didn't begin writing the character of Daniel Plainview with Day-Lewis in mind, but when the San Fernando Valley-born filmmaker heard the actor had liked his last movie, "Punch-Drunk Love," he felt confident enough to approach Day-Lewis with his script-in-progress.

"That was the start of it," Anderson says. "We spent some time together. We got to know each other. At that point, I decided to write Plainview in such a way that only Daniel could play him, which was liberating as a writer."

"Of course, it would have been a problem if his interest cooled once I finished," Anderson adds with a rueful laugh.

"Fortunately, it worked out."

> Glenn Whipp