Before there was Christian Bale, Robert De Niro was the king of transformational method acting — and no film establishes this better than the Martin Scorsese classic Raging Bull. In the film, DeNiro plays Italian-American middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta, whose self-destructive behavior is chronicled over the course of several decades, and De Niro takes it upon himself to show those decades of wear through his real, physical appearance.