Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio, born November 11, 1974, in Los Angeles, California, is an actor who has stolen the hearts of many over the years. From his days as a child actor to his recent blockbuster hits, DiCaprio is known all over the world. This heartthrob is not just a pretty face, and his acting skills earned him the name of one of Hollywood’s most notorious actors of all time, ensuring his name and his movies will be remembered for years to come. Today, on his birthday, we look back on all that this dazzlingly handsome and brilliant actor has achieved.
FAST FACTS
Full Name:
Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio
Nickname:
Leo
Birth date:
November 11, 1974
Age:
49
Zodiac Sign:
Scorpio
Height:
5' 9"
Relationship Status:
In a relationship
Net Worth:
$260 million
Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio is a renowned actor and film producer who has won numerous awards within the film industry. He was born on November 11, 1974, in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, United States.
DiCaprio is an only child of Irmelin Indenbirken, a secretary born in Germany, and George DiCaprio, an underground comic artist and producer/distributor of comics. On his father’s side, he has half-Italian (from Naples) and half-German (from Bavaria) ancestry. On the other hand, on his mother’s side, his grandfather Wilhelm Indenbirken was German and his grandmother Helene Indenbirken was a German citizen born in Russia under the name Yelena Smirnova.
He was named Leonardo because, while his pregnant mother was looking closely at a painting by the great artist Leonardo da Vinci in a museum, DiCaprio gave a strong kick inside her belly. His parents divorced when he was only one year old, and they shared custody of Leonardo until 1997.
Studies, beginnings in acting.
As for his education, he did not attend university and only took basic courses at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles. His career in the world of image and acting began when he followed his older stepbrother, Adam Farrar, in television advertising, starring in a commercial for the Matchbox car brand at the age of fourteen and subsequently participating in educational films. At the age of five, he was also part of the children’s television series “Romper Room”, but had to leave it as it was detrimental to him.
1990 – 1991: Debut in television and cinema”
In 1990, he made his true television debut when he was cast to be a part of the “Parenthood” ensemble, a series based on the film of the same name. He then landed minor roles in several series, including “The New Lassie” and “Roseanne,” as well as a brief part in “Santa Barbara.” His work in “Parenthood” and “Santa Barbara” earned him a nomination for the Young Artist Award for Best Young Actor. His big screen debut came in 1991 with the science fiction and horror movie “Critters.” Later on, he became a recurring member of the cast of the ABC sitcom “Growing Pains,” playing Luke Brower. However, DiCaprio didn’t achieve success in the film industry until 1992, when he was selected by Robert De Niro
from among 400 young actors for the lead role in “This Boy’s Life,” which also starred Ellen Barkin and De Niro himself.
1993 – 1996
Later, in 1993, DiCaprio played the mentally disabled younger brother of Johnny Depp in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.” The film’s director, Lasse Hallström, admitted that he initially sought a less attractive actor, but he decided on DiCaprio because he had become “the most observant actor” among all who auditioned. The film was a great financial and critical success, resulting in Leonardo being highly praised for his performance, which led to him being awarded the National Board of Review for Best Supporting Actor and nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. Subsequently, he had roles in films such as “The Quick and the Dead” (1995) and was one of the leads in “Romeo + Juliet” (1996).
But his big break came with director James Cameron, who offered him the lead male role in Titanic (1997), a movie that not only won a considerable number of Academy Awards but also became a social phen
omenon
Afterwards, DiCaprio :
Gained greater acceptance in the cinematic world, so he was part of numerous films such as:
The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)
The Beach (2000)
Catch Me If You Can (2002)
The Aviator (2004)
The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004)
Blood Diamond (2006)
Gardener of Eden (2007)
Body of Lies (2008)
Orphan (2009, as producer)
Shutter Island (2010)
Inception (2010)
Django Unchained (2012)
The Great Gatsby (2013)
Runner Runner (2013)
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
The Revenant (2015)
The Audition (2015).
Curiosities :
Interestingly, he was nominated for an Oscar five times: Best Supporting Actor for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Best Actor for The Aviator, Blood Diamond and The Wolf of Wall Street. This generated a lot of jokes and talk of a supposed “curse” in Hollywood. But in 2015, he finally won the award thanks to his great performance in “The Revenant”.
It should also be noted that DiCaprio is a committed environmentalist who has received praise from environmental groups for choosing to fly on commercial flights instead of private planes like most celebrities, and for driving an electric hybrid vehicle and having solar panels in his home.
Leonardo DiCaprio was , in Los Angeles, California, to parents Irmelin and George DiCaprio. Though his parents separated when he was just a young boy, he remained close to both his mother and his father while growing up. DiCaprio grew up wanting to be in the spotlight, and he had always had a love for movies and television commercials. He loved imitating people and creating unique characters that he could portray. When he was just five years old, the actor received his first acting gig in “Romper Room,” a children’s television show. Over the next few years, DiCaprio would struggle to lock down gigs, and he mostly did television commercials over the following few years.
His rise to fame, however, came a few years after, during the 1990s, when a young Leonardo DiCaprio would become one of the biggest hits in Hollywood. It all started in 1990, when he was just 16 years old, appearing as a guest star in two separate T.V. series, “The New Lassie” and “Roseanne.” This was the beginning of this actor’s rise to fame, and the 1990s would be a tremendous few years for DiCaprio. In 1993, the actor received one of his first parts in a movie in “This Boy’s life,” where he played alongside Robert De Niro. Throughout the 1990s, he played many roles, but none made him more famous than his role in “Titanic” as Jack Dawson. The beloved story is still enjoyed today, over 20 years later.
American actor and producer Leonardo DiCaprio emerged in the 1990s as one of Hollywood’s leading performers. He was noted for his portrayals of unconventional and complex characters. He won an Academy Award in 2016 for his portrayal of a fur trapper in the film The Revenant (2015).
As a teenager, DiCaprio made numerous commercials and educational films. In 1990 he began appearing on a series of television shows, including The New Lassie and Roseanne, and in 1991 he was cast in a recurring role on Growing Pains. That year DiCaprio also made his big-screen debut in Critters 3, a low-budget horror film.
DiCaprio’s breakthrough :
came in 1992 when he beat out 400 other hopefuls to act opposite Robert De Niro in This Boy’s Life (1993). DiCaprio earned rave reviews for his acting. For his next film, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for his realistic portrayal of a mentally disabled teenager. Several independent movies followed, including The Basketball Diaries and Total Eclipse (both 1995). Total Eclipse focused on the relationship between the French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.
In the mid-1990s
DiCaprio began to attract a wider audience with more mainstream films. He became a teen heartthrob after starring in director Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1996), a modern retelling of the classic love story. In 1997 DiCaprio found international stardom with the release of James Cameron’s epic movie Titanic. DiCaprio’s good looks and poignant portrayal of a penniless artist who falls in love with an upper-class passenger (played by Kate Winslet) helped make the movie one of the highest-grossing films ever.
Though flooded with offers to appear in blockbuster films and other mainstream fare, DiCaprio instead embraced roles that featured the complex characters that had come to define his career. In 2000 he starred in The Beach, a dark film about a young backpacker’s search for paradise. Two years later he appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, a period piece about gangsters in New York, New York, in the mid-1800s. That year he also starred opposite Tom Hanks as a real-life con artist in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. Reteaming with Scorsese, DiCaprio portrayed a young Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004), for which he received a best actor Academy Award nomination.
DiCaprio’s
Later works include a third collaboration with Scorsese, The Departed, and Blood Diamond (both 2006). Both films garnered DiCaprio some of the best reviews of his career, and he earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a diamond smuggler in Blood Diamond. In 2008 he starred as a CIA agent hunting down a terrorist on the run in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies. DiCaprio again paired with Winslet in Revolutionary Road (2008), a movie that depicts a young couple struggling to reconcile their unconventional aspirations with a stifling existence in 1950s suburbia. For his next film, Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), DiCaprio portrayed a tormented U.S. marshal sent to a hospital for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of an inmate.
Andrew Cooper
DiCaprio :
Subsequently starred as a corporate spy able to infiltrate people’s dreams in the science-fiction thriller Inception (2010) and as longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in the biopic J. Edgar (2011). In director Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), DiCaprio portrayed a slave-driving plantation owner in pre-American Civil War Mississippi. He then appeared in another grandiose role—the title character in Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. That same year he starred as a stockbroker who swindled millions from his clients in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. For his performance, DiCaprio received his fourth Oscar nomination. In 2016 he won an Oscar for best actor for his portrayal of a fur trapper on a quest for revenge after his companions kill his son and leave him for dead following an attack by a bear in director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2015 film The Revenant. DiCaprio returned to the big screen in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019). For his performance as a washed-up actor, he earned his sixth Oscar nomination.
DiCaprio also became active in a number of causes, most notably those involving environmental issues. In 2000 he hosted Earth Day festivities and interviewed U.S. President Bill Clinton for a television special on global warming. In 2004 DiCaprio joined the boards of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Global Green USA. The 11th Hour, an environmental documentary that he wrote and narrated, premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2007. He later produced and narrated Ice on Fire (2019), a documentary that considers the possibility of reversing climate change.
DiCaprio subsequently starred as a corporate spy able to infiltrate people’s dreams in the science fiction thriller Inception (2010) and as longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in the biopic J. Edgar (2011). In Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), DiCaprio chewed the scenery as a slave-driving plantation owner in antebellum Mississippi. He then appeared in another grandiose role—the title character in Luhrmann’s glitzy 2013 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. That role was echoed in his bombastic turn as Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who swindled millions from his clients, in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013); the film was based on Belfort’s 2007 memoir of the same name. For his performance, DiCaprio received his fourth Oscar nomination. He finally won an Academy Award for his work in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015), in which he evinced an aggrieved fur trapper on a quest for revenge after his companions kill his son and leave him for dead following an attack by a bear.
