Leonardo DiCaprio

Actor

• Born: November 11, 1974
• Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California

Actor

Actor. Leonardo DiCaprio is a critically acclaimed actor who has received numerous awards and nominations from the Screen Actors Guild, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, among other professional organizations. In 2016, he won his first Academy Award. He is also heavily involved in environmental and political activism as well as wildlife conservation.

DiCaprio began his acting career with roles in commercials and educational television programs. As a teenager, he began to take on small roles in television programs such as Parenthood and Santa Barbara. For his work on those shows, DiCaprio was nominated for the Young Artist Award. He was nominated for the same award in 1992 for his work on the sitcom Growing Pains.

The young actor made his film debut in the horror film Critters 3 (1991), but it was the drama This Boy’s Life (1993), in which he starred alongside Robert De Niro, that garnered DiCaprio significant attention from the motion picture industry. He soon began to take on bigger roles, including a major role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He became a household name with his performance in Titanic (1997), which won eleven Academy Awards and eventually earned over $2 billion worldwide. Beginning in 2002, with his starring role in Gangs of New York, DiCaprio’s career was greatly shaped by his working relationship with acclaimed director Martin Scorsese. He went on to star in several Scorsese films, earning numerous accolades and awards along the way.

Background

Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio was born on November 11, 1974, in Los Angeles, California. His father, George DiCaprio, was an artist and distributor of underground comic books. His mother, Irmelin Indenbirkin, was a legal secretary who had immigrated to the United States from Germany. DiCaprio’s parents divorced when he was very young, but they both participated in raising him in the Echo Park and Los Feliz districts of Los Angeles.

DiCaprio showed an interest in acting at an early age. His parents supported his interests and hired a talent agent, who advised their son to take on the stage name Lenny Williams—advice the young actor and his parents did not follow. As a small child, DiCaprio appeared in the popular children’s television program Romper Room, but the producers soon asked him to leave because of his unruly behavior. DiCaprio attended Seeds Elementary School in Los Angeles and went on to attend the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, a preparatory magnet school.

DiCaprio next pursued work in television commercials, obtaining his first role, in an advertisement for Matchbox toy cars, at the age of fourteen. During this period, DiCaprio attended John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, but academics were not his first priority. At times, he skipped class to perform skits for his fellow students. He did, however, enjoy studying drama and took acting classes during the summer months.

While still a teenager, DiCaprio began to take on small roles in television series, including The New Lassie (1989) and The Outsiders (1990). In 1990, DiCaprio secured a supporting role in the daytime soap opera Santa Barbara, playing a younger version of the character Mason Capwell. The same year, he was cast in the short-lived sitcom Parenthood (1990–91). He was nominated for the Young Artist Award for Best Young Actor for his roles in both Parenthood and Santa Barbara.

Eager to make the transition into film, DiCaprio took a role in the low-budget, direct-to-video horror film Critters 3 (1991). He followed this up with a bit part in the thriller Poison Ivy (1992). While these small roles did little to propel DiCaprio into stardom, he soon captured the attention of the producers of the popular sitcom Growing Pains (1985–92), who cast him as Luke Brower, a homeless teenager. DiCaprio ultimately appeared in more than twenty episodes during the series’ final two seasons and was nominated again for the Young Artist Award for Best Young Actor.

Film Career Takes Off

DiCaprio’s big break came when he was cast in the 1993 drama This Boy’s Life, based on the memoir of writer Tobias Wolff and costarring veteran actor Robert De Niro. The role of young Toby allowed DiCaprio to display his range as an actor. Around that time, he graduated from high school with the help of a tutor. His parents both quit their jobs in order to manage his increasingly busy career.

For his next role, DiCaprio played Arnie Grape, an intellectually disabled youth, in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). The film was a hit with critics and earned DiCaprio Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actor. His next major role was in the 1995 dramatic biopic The Basketball Diaries, in which DiCaprio played former junkie and poet Jim Carroll. One controversial sequence in the film features DiCaprio entering a classroom wearing a trench coat and shooting classmates with a shotgun. This scene was later argued to have influenced the shooters who perpetrated the Heath High School shooting in 1997 and the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. DiCaprio followed this role with a performance as nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse (1995), a film that was controversial among some viewers because of its sexual content.

In 1996, DiCaprio starred as Romeo in director Baz Luhrmann’s modernized adaptation of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Luhrmann’s interpretation, Romeo + Juliet, which costarred Claire Danes as the titular heroine, became a hit with young audiences and won DiCaprio legions of teenage fans. For his portrayal of the tragic Romeo, DiCaprio won the award for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Titanic and Beyond

DiCaprio next won critical praise for the drama Marvin’s Room (1996) before starring alongside Kate Winslet in one of the most popular films of the decade, Titanic (1997). Titanic became the highest-grossing film of all time, a record it held into the following decade, earning over $2 billion worldwide. The film won eleven Academy Awards, including the award for best picture.

Following the tremendous success of Titanic, DiCaprio appeared in several films that proved less successful than his earlier projects, including The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) and The Beach (2000). In 2002, however, DiCaprio starred in another hit, Gangs of New York, which marked the actor’s first collaboration with acclaimed director Martin Scorsese; he would go on to star in four more Scorsese films over the next twelve years. The same year he played the lead in the comedic crime biopic Catch Me If You Can.

DiCaprio's next film, The Aviator (2004), was a biopic of business tycoon Howard Hughes and his second collaboration with Scorsese. The film was a hit with critics and earned DiCaprio the Golden Globe for best actor. In his third partnership with Scorsese, DiCaprio starred as an undercover police officer in the crime drama The Departed (2006). Also that year, he starred in the political drama Blood Diamond (2006), for which he earned an Academy Award nomination. DiCaprio was also nominated for Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards for both performances.

In 2008, DiCaprio reunited with Titanic costar Winslet for the period drama Revolutionary Road (2008), based on a 1961 novel by Richard Yates. Two years later, he starred in two of his biggest hits yet, the Scorsese-helmed psychological thriller Shutter Island (2010) and the science-fiction thriller Inception (2010). In 2011 DiCaprio starred in the biopic J. Edgar, playing Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover. The film received mixed reviews, but DiCaprio was nominated for several awards for his performance.

Following his costarring role in the Western Django Unchained (2012), DiCaprio took on the titular role in The Great Gatsby (2013), an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated 1925 novel of the same name. He finished 2013 with one of the most critically acclaimed roles of his career, starring in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. For his portrayal of stock market manipulator Jordan Belfort, DiCaprio received more than ten award nominations for best actor.

In 2015, DiCaprio starred in the historical revenge thriller The Revenant, following the survival of a frontiersman in 1823 after being viciously attacked by a bear in the uncharted wilderness. For his performance, he won his first Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. He also received a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for the role. He used his acceptance speech for his Oscar to advocate for political leaders that acknowledge and work to fight climate change. In 2019, he starred in the Quentin Tarantino–directed comedy drama Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, which follows DiCaprio as a fading television actor and Brad Pitt as his stunt double as they try to retain their fame in the final years of Hollywood's Golden Age. The film earned nine Academy Award nominations, including a nomination for DiCaprio for Actor in a Leading Role; he also earned a Golden Globe nomination in the same category. He followed that with the Netflix film Don't Look Up (2021), in which he starred as an astronomer trying to protect Earth from a comet hurtling toward the planet. The film was nominated for four Golden Globes and four Oscars. In 2023, he starred in the Oscar-nominated film Killers of the Flower Moon, a fact-based account of a series of murders of Native American landowners in the 1920s. DiCaprio also served as an executive producer of the film, which was directed by Scorsese.

DiCaprio served as a producer on several other films as well, including Live by Night (2016), Delirium (2018), Robin Hood (2018), and the biographical crime drama Richard Jewell (2019). He also produced several documentaries in the early 2020s.

Impact

Over the course of his career, DiCaprio transitioned from small roles in commercials and television series to starring roles in critically acclaimed films. The recipient of numerous major awards and nominations, he frequently earns as much as $20 million for each of his roles. His critical and commercial success has allowed him to be highly selective in his choice of films, and he often opts to collaborate with directors and actors with whom he has previously worked.

DiCaprio has used his celebrity status to help draw attention to several environmental, humanitarian, and wildlife causes that he values. He became concerned about the effects of climate change in the late 1990s after speaking with former US vice president Al Gore about the subject and has since helped raise public awareness about the controversial issue. He served as narrator, cowriter, and coproducer for the 2007 documentary The 11th Hour, which focused on global warming and other environmental issues. By 2018, DiCaprio had produced more than ten environmental documentaries. DiCaprio was also a supporter of LGBTQ rights organizations and supported Democratic politicians.

In addition to raising awareness of various issues, DiCaprio has devoted a significant portion of his earnings to supporting charitable organizations. He established the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in 1998 to help support environmental and humanitarian causes. After the 2010 earthquake that ravaged Haiti, DiCaprio donated $1 million to relief efforts. The same year, he donated another million to the Wildlife Conservation Society to support the organization’s efforts to protect tigers in Russia.

Bibliography

Beggs, Scott. "Why Leonardo DiCaprio's Oscar History Has Everyone Saying 'It's Time.'" Vanity Fair, 23 Feb. 2016, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/02/leonardo-dicaprio-oscars-history. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

DiCaprio, Leonardo. "Satire 'Don't Look Up' Gave Six Months to World Destruction by Comet; Leonardo DiCaprio Puts 9-Year Ticking Clock on Climate Crisis." Interview by Mike Fleming Jr. Deadline, 18 Jan. 2022, deadline.com/2022/01/leonardo-dicaprio-dont-look-up-interview-climate-crisis-1234914243/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Goldenberg, Suzanne. "How Leonardo DiCaprio became One of the World's Top Climate Change Champions." Guardian, 29 Feb. 2016. www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/29/how-leonardo-dicaprio-oscar-climate-change-campaigner. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Keegan, Rebecca. "Leonardo DiCaprio's 'The Revenant' Is a Brutal Test for Awards Voters." Los Angeles Times, 24 Nov. 2015, www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-the-revenant-20151124-story.html. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

“Leonardo DiCaprio.” IMDb, 2024, www.imdb.com/name/nm0000138/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Ryzik, Melena. "Leonardo DiCaprio Explains Wolf of Wall Street." New York Times, 2 Jan. 2014, archive.nytimes.com/carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/leonardo-dicaprio-explains-wolf-of-wall-street/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Wight, Douglas. Leonardo DiCaprio: The Biography. London: Blake, 2012. Print.