As film academic Kevin Esch notes of the last 50 years of Hollywood, "the opportunity arose for an approach to acting that evoked the Method's behavioural extremes at the same time that it fetishised discipline". That discipline mostly manifested itself through what he describes as actorly transformation, whereby an actor physically alters their body through weight gain or loss. De Niro won best actor for Raging Bull (1980) for which he not only spent months training as a boxer with the real Jake LaMotta, but then, once the fight scenes were shot, gained 60lbs over a further four months so that he could look like the retired Bronx boxing champ in his older years. "What De Niro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly," critic Pauline Kael wrote in her review. "De Niro seems to have emptied himself out to become the part he's playing and then not got enough material to refill himself with… what I found myself thinking about wasn't LaMotta or the movie but the metamorphosis of De Niro."
