Leonardo Dicaprio

• Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio (born November 11, 1974)[1] is an American actor and film producer whose career rose with his role in the television sit-com Growing Pains. His critically acclaimed breakthrough film performance came in This Boy's Life, and was quickly followed by What's Eating Gilbert Grape. His performance as the mentally handicapped brother of Gilbert (Johnny Depp), in the title role, brought him nominations for the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

• He gained fame for his role as Jack Dawson in Titanic, and has starred in many other successful films including Romeo + Juliet, Catch Me If You Can, and Blood Diamond, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Another Academy Award nomination came for his role as Howard Hughes in The Aviator, directed by Martin Scorsese. He has also worked with Scorsese in films such as Gangs of New York and The Departed. This working partnership brought comparison to the earlier working relationship between Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro, who also benefited from roles in Scorsese films early in his career.[2]

• DiCaprio has also been nominated two times for BAFTA, three times for SAG, and seven times for the Golden Globe Awards. He is a Golden Globe and a Silver Bear Award winner

• Early life• DiCaprio was born in Los Angeles, California, the only child of Irmelin (née

Indenbirken), a former legal secretary, and George DiCaprio, an underground comic artist and producer/distributor of comic books.[3] His mother moved from Oer-Erkenschwick at the Ruhr, Germany, to the U.S. during the 1950s,[4] while his father is a fourth-generation American of half Italian and half German descent.[1][5][6] His maternal grandmother, Helene Indenbirken, who was born Yelena Smirnova, was a Russian immigrant to Germany.[7] DiCaprio's parents met while attending college together and subsequently moved to Los Angeles.[1] He was named Leonardo because his pregnant mother was looking at a Leonardo da Vinci painting in a museum in Italy when DiCaprio first kicked.[8] His parents divorced when he was a year old and he lived mostly with his mother, although his father was around intermittently. During his childhood, DiCaprio was interested in baseball cards, comic books, and frequently visited museums with his father.

• DiCaprio and his mother lived in several Los Angeles neighborhoods, such as Echo Park, and at 1874 Hillhurst Avenue, Los Feliz district (which was later converted into a local public library), while his mother worked several jobs to support them.[1] He attended Seeds Elementary School and graduated from John Marshall High School a few blocks away, after attending the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies for four years.

• Career• Early career• DiCaprio's career began with his appearing in several commercials and educational films. He got his break on television in

1990 when he was cast in the short-lived series based on the movie Parenthood. On set, he met another struggling child actor, Tobey Maguire. The two quickly became friends and made a pact to help each other find roles in TV and movies. After Parenthood, DiCaprio had bit parts on several shows, including The New Lassie and Roseanne, as well as a brief stint on the soap opera Santa Barbara, playing the young Mason Capwell.

• His debut film role was Critters 3, a B-grade horror film, which later went straight to video. Soon after, in 1991, he became a recurring cast member on the hit ABC sitcom Growing Pains, playing Luke Brower, a homeless boy who is taken in by the Seavers.

• His breakthrough came in 1992, when he beat out hundreds of other boys for the role of Toby Wolff in This Boy's Life, co-starring Robert De Niro and Ellen Barkin. His performance as the troubled, abused teenager was critically acclaimed and Hollywood soon took notice. Later in 1993, he co-starred as the mentally handicapped brother to Johnny Depp in What's Eating Gilbert Grape. His performance earned him both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for best supporting actor.

• 1995 was an eventful year for DiCaprio. That year he starred in four movies; in the first one, The Quick and the Dead, he played Gene Hackman's alleged son, Fee, starring alongside Sharon Stone and Russell Crowe.

• After The Quick and The Dead, he starred in Total Eclipse, a fictionalized account of the homosexual relationship between Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud. River Phoenix was originally cast as Rimbaud, but died before production.

• The black-and-white film Don's Plum, a low budget drama featuring the actor and his friends (including Tobey Maguire) was filmed between 1995 and 1996. Its release was blocked by DiCaprio and Maguire, who argued that they never intended to make it a theatrical release. Nevertheless, it premiered in Berlin in 2001.

• Also in 1995, he starred as Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries, a life story of drugs and prostitution. Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, again featured DiCaprio as the male lead and was one of the first films to cash in on DiCaprio's future star-status, with a worldwide box office take of $147 million.[9] Later that year he starred in Marvin's Room, reuniting with Robert De Niro and appearing alongside Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton

• Superstardom and "Leo-Mania"• The move from "star" to "superstar" came when

DiCaprio played Jack Dawson in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic, alongside Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater, which soon became the highest grossing film of all time and received 11 Oscars. In 1998, he made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's satire Celebrity. That year he also starred in the dual roles of the villainous King Louis XIV and his secret, sympathetic twin brother Philippe in The Man in the Iron Mask. His popularity at the time was dubbed "Leo-mania", comparing his sudden fame and fan frenzy to that of the Beatles in the 1960s, known as Beatlemania. The Man in the Iron Mask may have benefited from Leo-Mania, considering its remarkably high worldwide box office gross (especially outside North-America) despite mediocre reviews.[10]

• What came with fame were tales in the tabloids of excesses and indulgence. Time summed up the fame superhighway and its trappings in an interview with the actor in 2000, reporting:[11]

• DiCaprio still thinks of himself as an edgy indie actor, not the Tiger Beat cover boy. "I have no connection with me during that whole Titanic Phenomenon and what my face became around the world," DiCaprio commented, adding, "I'll never reach that state of popularity again, and I don't expect to. It's not something I'm going to try to achieve either."

• Acting acclaim• In 2002, DiCaprio starred in Gangs of New York

(directed by Martin Scorsese) and Catch Me If You Can (directed by Steven Spielberg). Both films were very well received by critics. Forging a collaboration with Scorsese, the two paired again for a biopic of American aviation pioneer Howard Hughes in The Aviator, a film that scored DiCaprio a second Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor.

• DiCaprio at the Gangs of New York screening at the Cannes Film Festival with Martin Scorsese and Cameron Diaz

• DiCaprio continued his run with Scorsese in the 2006 film The Departed as Billy Costigan, a smart undercover cop in Boston. His next film was Blood Diamond, released in December 2006. The film itself received generally favorable reviews and DiCaprio was praised for the authenticity of his South African Afrikaner accent, known as a difficult accent to emulate

• Recent work• DiCaprio starred in 2008's Body of Lies, directed by

Ridley Scott and co-starring Russell Crowe, Vince Colosimo, and Golshifteh Farahani. The same year, he appeared in Revolutionary Road, an adaptation of Richard Yates' 1961 novel. The latter reunited DiCaprio with his Titanic costars Kate Winslet and Kathy Bates. DiCaprio was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama for his performance.

• DiCaprio starred in 2010's Shutter Island, a film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane. He will also play in the science-fiction film Inception, directed and produced by Christopher Nolan.

Sources

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