Biography - Leonardo DiCaprio

Published by cactusse

Leonardo DiCaprio broke hundreds of thousands of hearts in the 1997 film 'Titanic', the highest-grossing movie ever, as Jack Dawson.

Born in Hollywood, in 1974, he took his name from Leonardo da Vinci, as his mother felt a violent kick from her unborn baby while taking in a da Vinci painting in the Uffizi Gallery. The young DiCaprio took acting lessons almost as soon as he could speak, by the age of fourteen, he had already made his first TV commercials and taken parts in TV sitcoms in the USA. His first cinema role came three years later, in 'Critters 3', after which he gave an outstanding performance alongside Robert De Niro in 'This Boy's Life', which he followed up with 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape?' later on in the same year.

He took several more cinema roles over the next few years, including parts in 'The Quick and the Dead' and 'The Basketball Diaries'. Mainstream success came in 1996, with Baz Luhrmann's modern version of 'Romeo + Juliet'. A year later came the bockbusting 'Titantic', followed by 'Celebrity' by Woody Allen and 'The Man in the Iron Mask'. In 2002 he took the lead in 'The Beach' alongside French actress Virginie Ledoyen, to great acclaim.

In recent years, he has acted in Scorsese's 'Gangs of New York' and Speilberg's 'Catch Me if You Can', dating supermodel Gisele Bundchen for over four years.