Background

Ethnicity: DiCaprio's father is of half Italian and half German ancestry, while his mother, a German immigrant, is of German and Russian descent. In an interview in Russia, DiCaprio referred to himself as "half-Russian".

Leonardo DiCaprio was born on November 11, 1974, in Los Angeles, California, the United States, to Irmelin and George DiCaprio. Leonardo's story begins before he was even born. His mother Irmelin was admiring a DaVinci painting in Italy when she felt him kick, and hence the name for her baby boy. His parents divorced when he was still a toddler. DiCaprio was mostly raised by his mother, a legal secretary born in Germany. Despite his parents' early divorce, Leonardo DiCaprio remained close to his father, a comic book artist, and distributor.

His father was a well-known figure in LA's hippy circles and closely involved in the underground comic scene which proliferated in California during the Sixties. Writer Charles Bukowski, beat poet Alan Ginsberg and the legendary LSD guru Timothy Leary were all family friends. It was against this backdrop that Leo first ventured into acting, with the full support of both parents.

DiCaprio's father is of Italian (from Alife) and German (from Bavaria) descent. DiCaprio's maternal grandfather, Wilhelm Indenbirken (1913-1995), was German. His maternal grandmother, Helene Indenbirken (born Yelena Smirnova; 1915-2008), was a Russian-born German citizen. DiCaprio spent part of his childhood in Germany with his maternal grandparents, Wilhelm and Helene. He is conversant in German and Italian.

Education

DiCaprio attended Seeds Elementary School (now UCLA Lab School) and John Marshall High School a few blocks away, after attending the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies for four years. He dropped out of high school following his third year, eventually earning his general equivalency diploma (GED).

Career

DiCaprio first acted at age five, performing on the children’s television show Romper Room, and, as a teenager, he 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 in This Boy’s Life (1993). Proving he was more than a just good-looking teenager, DiCaprio starred opposite Robert De Niro. The film delved into the difficult relationship between a young boy and his abusive stepfather in this adaptation of Tobias Wolff's memoir. DiCaprio impressed critics, holding his own on-screen against acting heavyweight De Niro.

DiCaprio turned heads again with his performance in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993), co-starring Johnny Depp. His portrayal of a child with mental disabilities earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The accolades he received from this film solidified DiCaprio's reputation as a talent to watch out for.

DiCaprio continued to pursue interesting and diverse film projects: He starred in the 1995 coming-of-age drama The Basketball Diaries and worked with Russell Crowe, Sharon Stone, and Gene Hackman in the Western The Quick and the Dead that same year. In Romeo + Juliet (1996), Baz Luhrmann's modern retelling of William Shakespeare's tragic love story, DiCaprio played Romeo to Claire Danes' Juliet.

It was another tragic love story that helped propel DiCaprio's career to a new level in 1997. He co-starred with Kate Winslet in James Cameron's Titanic, about the sinking of the titular ocean liner. In the film, he plays Jack, a poor artist who falls for the rich and beautiful Rose (Winslet) on board. The couple faces danger not only from Rose's fiancé (Billy Zane) but the ship itself after it strikes an iceberg. With a production budget that topped $200 million, it was the most expensive film ever made at the time.

Titanic became both a critical and commercial smash hit. It garnered 14 Academy Award nominations and won 11, taking home such distinctive honors as Best Picture and Best Director. It was the first film to reach the billion-dollar mark in international sales.

The success of the film also showed that DiCaprio could handle traditional Hollywood leading man roles. He quickly became a world-famous celebrity with a growing following of admirers, his charm and youthful good looks landing him on People magazine's list of the "50 Most Beautiful People" in 1997 and 1998.

After Titanic, DiCaprio had a bit of a career slump, as The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) and The Beach (2000) proved to be disappointments both financially and artistically. However, DiCaprio soon bounced back. He demonstrated his range as an actor in two noteworthy features from 2002, Steven Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can and Gangs of New York. The latter film served as the first of many projects DiCaprio would work on with famed director Martin Scorsese.

In Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), DiCaprio took on the challenge of playing one of America's most famous businessmen, receiving another Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of the eccentric and reclusive Howard Hughes. In 2006, he starred in a pair of well-received films, Blood Diamond and The Departed. DiCaprio earned his third Academy Award nomination for Blood Diamond, a dramatic thriller about the pursuit of a precious gem in war-torn Sierra Leone. For the compelling Scorsese-directed crime saga The Departed, he co-starred with Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson.

In 2008, DiCaprio reunited with Winslet in Revolutionary Road, a tense film about a 1950s suburban couple facing a myriad of personal problems. He explored a fantastical future in Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), where technology allows people to invade the dreams of others. That same year, DiCaprio starred in the Scorsese thriller Shutter Island.

DiCaprio took on another famous figure in the 2011 biographical drama J. Edgar. Directed by Clint Eastwood, the film explores the life of J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI for nearly five decades. To prepare for the role, DiCaprio conducted extensive research and visited many of Hoover's haunts in Washington, D.C. "I do love playing historical figures simply because there's so much incredibly diverse, interesting information about a character when you can research their life. A lot of the stuff you'd never be able to make up as a writer." - said DiCaprio.

In 2012, DiCaprio appeared as a slave owner in Quentin Tarantino's Western Django Unchained, co-starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, and Christoph Waltz. The following year, he re-teamed with Luhrmann to play one of literature's most intriguing characters, starring as Jay Gatsby in the adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby.

DiCaprio again joined forces with Scorsese in the 2013 drama The Wolf of Wall Street, based on the memoir by Jordan Belfort, who gained notoriety for defrauding investors while lining his own pockets in the 1990s. DiCaprio's portrayal of Belfort earned him a Golden Globe for Best Actor, along with Academy Award nominations for Best Actor and Best Picture. Jonah Hill and Matthew McConaughey also starred in the film.

Wolf later sparked legal problems, with a former Belfort associate, Andrew Greene, claiming that the film's character based on him was "portrayed as a criminal, drug user, degenerate, depraved, and/or devoid of any morality or ethics." He filed a lawsuit against the production companies associated with the feature, including Paramount Pictures, Red Granite Pictures, Scorsese's Sikelia Productions and DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions.

In late 2015, DiCaprio starred in The Revenant as Hugh Glass, a 1820s frontiersman forced to endure the wilderness after being left for dead. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the film was difficult to shoot due to frigid weather but immediately generated major awards buzz, earning a slew of Golden Globe nominations. Upon winning for Best Actor, the popular DiCaprio received a standing ovation from his peers and praised Iñárritu for his vision while also calling for support to indigenous communities and the protection of natural environments.

"Making The Revenant was about man's relationship to the natural world. A world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history... Climate change is real, it is happening right now," he said. "It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people out there who would be most affected by this."

In early 2018, DiCaprio signed on to star in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, said to be based on the events surrounding the notorious Charles Manson murders of 1969. Although many of the characters in the film are based on real people, including actress Sharon Tate (portrayed by Margot Robbie), DiCaprio wound up playing the fictional Rick Dalton, a floundering actor who confides in his longtime stunt double, played by Brad Pitt.

On August 10, 2015, it was announced that Martin Scorsese will direct an adaptation of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, which will star DiCaprio with a screenplay to be written by Billy Ray. In 2017, Paramount announced that it has acquired the movie rights for an English language adaptation of The Black Hand. The new film, due for release in 2020, will star DiCaprio as Joe Petrosino and will be partly based on Stephan Talty's novelization of Petrosino's assassination. In August 2017, Paramount won a bidding war against Universal Pictures for the rights to adapt Walter Isaacson's biography of Leonardo da Vinci. The studio bought the rights under its deal with DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions, which said that it planned to produce the film with DiCaprio as the star. As of September 2018, DiCaprio is set to star in Roosevelt, a biopic of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt; Martin Scorsese will direct and Paramount Pictures will distribute, with DiCaprio's Appian Way producing. The film does not yet have a release date. In October 2018, he was cast in the Martin Scorsese-directed film adaptation of the David Grann's New York Times bestseller book Killers of the Flower Moon.

Achievements

• Since 2000, DiCaprio has received critical acclaim for his work in a wide range of film genres. DiCaprio's subsequent films include The Man in the Iron Mask (1998), the biographical crime drama Catch Me If You Can (2002), and the epic historical drama Gangs of New York (2002), which marked his first of many collaborations with director Martin Scorsese. He was acclaimed for his performances in the political war thriller Blood Diamond (2006), the neo-noir crime drama The Departed (2006), the espionage thriller Body of Lies (2008), the drama Revolutionary Road (2008), the psychological thriller Shutter Island (2010), the science fiction thriller Inception (2010), the biographical film J. Edgar (2011), the western Django Unchained (2012), and the period drama The Great Gatsby (2013).
  
  DiCaprio's portrayals of Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004) and Hugh Glass in The Revenant (2015) won him the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama. His performance as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) won him the Golden Globe award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. He also won the Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Actor for his performance in The Revenant. DiCaprio is the founder of his own production company, Appian Way Productions.
  
  France's Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres described DiCaprio as an 'icon, little Hollywood prince, bad boy from Los Angeles, modern romantic hero, Peter Pan of American cinema' and honored DiCaprio with the title of the Commander of the Order of the Arts and Letters in France in 2005.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • The Man in the Iron Mask

    (When the selfish excesses of France's arrogant King Louis...)

    1998
  • Gangs Of New York

    (Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, and Daniel Day- Lewis st...)

    2002
  • Revolutionary Road

    (Based on the bestseller by Richard Yates, this mesmerizin...)

    2008
  • Romeo + Juliet

    (The classic Shakespearean romantic tragedy gets a stylize...)

    1996
  • Blood Diamond

    (Directed by Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai) this u...)

    2006
  • The Great Gatsby

    (Aspiring writer Nick Carraway goes to New York City at th...)

    2013
  • The Basketball Diaries

    (Based on the autobiographical journals of poet Jim Carrol...)

    1995
  • Before the Flood

    (Featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Fisher Steven...)

    2016
  • Hubble

    (Hubble, narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, takes moviegoers o...)

    2010
  • J. Edgar

    (As head of the FBI through eight presidents and three war...)

    2011
  • The Departed

    (Martin Scorsese's crime drama "The Departed" is set in So...)

    2006
  • Critters 3

    (In the third film in the franchise, the fanged, furious f...)

    1991
  • The Beach

    (Not quite ready to surrender himself to responsibility or...)

    2000
  • Once upon a Time in Hollywood

    (The 9th film from Quentin Tarantino features a large ense...)

    2019
  • The 11th Hour

    (Academy Award winner Leonardo DiCaprio presents more than...)

    2007
  • The Aviator

    (An epic biopic depicting the early years of legendary dir...)

    2004
  • What's Eating Gilbert Grape

    (Taking care of Arnie is mostly Gilbert's task which can b...)

    1993
  • The Quick And The Dead

    (Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman star in this updated Americ...)

    1995
  • Ice on Fire

    (This documentary explores the many ways people around the...)

    2019
  • Catch Me If You Can

    (From three-time Oscar winning director Steven Spielberg, ...)

    2002
  • Marvin's Room

    (A leukemia patient attempts to end a 20-year feud with he...)

    1996
  • This Boy's Life

    (Set in 1950s, this moving drama is a story of a young boy...)

    1993
  • Inception

    (Leonardo DiCaprio plays a thief who steals corporate secr...)

    2010
  • Django Unchained

    (Winner of 2 Academy Awards including Best Original Screen...)

    2012
  • Titanic

    (Experience James Cameron's Titanic like never before. Leo...)

    1997
  • The Revenant

    (Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy star in Alejandro G. Iñár...)

    2015
  • Body of Lies

    (Roger Ferris is the best man U.S. Intelligence has on the...)

    2008
  • Total Eclipse

    (Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar, Inception) and David Thewlis...)

    1995
  • Shutter Island

    (When U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels arrives at the asylum for...)

    2010
  • The Wolf Of Wall Street

    (Sex. Money. Power. Drugs. Brace yourself for an outrageou...)

    2013

• TV series

  • Greensburg

    (On May 4, 2007, a deadly tornado struck Greensburg, Kansa...)

    2008
  • Growing Pains

Religion

DiCaprio was raised a Roman Catholic. He later said: "Death freaks me out. I don’t know about an afterlife. I’m not religious, you know. I’m not an atheist, but I’ve never had a religion." DiCaprio considers himself an agnostic.

Politics

During the 2004 presidential election, DiCaprio campaigned and donated to John Kerry's presidential bid. DiCaprio gave $2,300 to Barack Obama's presidential campaign in the 2008 election, the maximum contribution an individual could give in that election cycle, and $5,000 to Obama's 2012 campaign. In 2016, DiCaprio endorsed Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential election.

Views

As reflected by his Globe and Oscar speeches, DiCaprio has long demonstrated his passion for environmental issues. In 2000, he hosted an Earth Day celebration and interviewed former U.S. President Bill Clinton for a television segment about global warming. DiCaprio also wrote, narrated and produced The 11th Hour, an environmental documentary that was released in 2007, and was heavily involved in the production of the 2016 documentary Before the Flood, about climate change.

The actor is one of the founders of The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (LDF), a nonprofit that supports and brings awareness to numerous environmental causes. He's also served on the boards of the World Wildlife Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

In March 2018, DiCaprio served as an executive producer of the History Channel's eight-part docuseries The Frontiersman, a look back at America's most iconic pioneers who helped shape the country.

DiCaprio donated $1,000,000 to earthquake relief efforts in 2010, the same year he contributed $1,000,000 to the Wildlife Conservation Society. He also donated a Banksy painting from his art collection for the amfAR Gala charity auction in Cannes, where it fetched $1 million. The painting was introduced by Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender.

DiCaprio bought an island in Belize and built the world’s first eco-restorative resort that restores the island’s over-fished waters, coastline, and forest.

DiCaprio is an activist for gay rights and in April 2013 he donated $61,000 to GLAAD, an organization which promotes the image of LGBT people in the media.

Quotations: "The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it. It's a great outlet. As for myself, I'm not sure who I am. It seems that I change every day."

"It's a really obvious thing to say, but the more people know too much about who you really are, and it's a fundamental thing, the more the mystery is taken away from the artist, and the harder it is for people to believe that person in a particular role."

"Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people out there who would be most affected by this. For our children's children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed."

Personality

Leonardo DiCaprio has never done drugs and had to get taught how to play being high by drug experts.

At the young age of 10, Leonardo was advised to change his name to "something more friendly and American" such as Lenny Williams. He obviously refused.

In his acting debut, Leonardo DiCaprio was kicked off the set of the long-running, popular children’s TV series Romper Room at age 5 for being disruptive.

DiCaprio adopted a South African girl on the sets of Blood Diamond. He doesn’t actually raise her but sends her money for monthly expenses and talks to her over the phone.

Physical Characteristics: Leonardo DiCaprio has a height of 6 ft or 183 cm, and a weight of 82 kg or 181 pounds. He also has blonde hair and blue eyes.

Interests

• Writing poetry and short stories

• Politicians

  John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton

• Writers

  The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway

• Artists

  Banksy, Salvador Dali

• Sport & Clubs

  Basketball, Baseball

• Music & Bands

  Rap music, Harry Connick Jr., Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin

Connections

During much of his career, DiCaprio has found himself in the media spotlight for his personal life. His on-again, off-again relationship with supermodel Gisele Bündchen was fodder for celebrity magazines and websites from 2000 to 2005. DiCaprio then dated model Bar Refaeli for several years. In 2011, he was briefly linked to actress Blake Lively. Since then, he's reportedly dated various models.

Father:

George Paul DiCaprio

Mother:

Irmelin Indenbirken

Friend:

Bradley Cooper

ex-girlfriend:

Gisele Caroline Bundchen

ex-girlfriend:

Bar Refaeli

ex-girlfriend:

Blake Lively

colleague:

Cate Blanchett

colleague:

Vera Farmiga

colleague:

Michelle Williams

colleague:

Cillian Murphy

colleague:

Naomi Watts

colleague:

Samuel Jackson

colleague:

Will Poulter

colleague:

Brad Pitt

References

• Leonardo DiCaprio: The Biography
  2013