What makes Daniel Day-Lewis tick

Every few years, Daniel Day-Lewis erupts onto our screen like a cinematic volcano, each dramatic explosion more overwhelming than the last. The actor, who has just won a Golden Globe for his ferocious performance as a greedy oilman in There Will Be Blood, is surely on his way to winning an Oscar after yesterday's Bafta nomination.

He has already won one Oscar, playing cerebral palsy victim and artist Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989) and has been nominated twice since, as an Irishman wrongly convicted of terrorism in In the Name of The Father (1993) and for the brutal Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002).

But it's hard to imagine what Day-Lewis might ever do in the future to better his astonishing performance in There Will Be Blood. He

embodies brutal oil prospector Daniel Plainview with such savage intensity that you fear the screen will be torn asunder. From the first moment he appears, silently digging in the near darkness of a mine, you sense you are witnessing one of the greatest performances ever captured on celluloid.

"The actor seems to have invaded Plainview's every atom, filling an otherwise empty vessel with so much rage and purpose you wait for him to blow," says Manohla Dargis, film critic for the New York Times.

Exactly how he achieves this impact is as inexplicable as how, for example, his broken nose adds to, rather than detracts from, his beauty. But young actors could do worse than follow his lead in three ways that clearly help him distill his performances to their essence.

First, he works very sparingly. Now 50, he has made just four