Leonardo DiCaprio is an American actor and film producer.
His full name is Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio.
He was born on November 11, 1974 in Los Angeles, California.
Leonardo is the only child of Irmelin, a legal secretary, and George DiCaprio, an underground comics artist and producer/distributor of comic books.
His father is of Italian and German descent, and his mother, who is German-born, is of German and Russian ancestry.
His parents separated when he was a year old, and he lived mostly with his mother.
From an early age he discovered a love of acting while living in some of the poorer areas of LA.
After signing him up with a talent agent who wanted Leonardo to perform under the stage name “Lenny Williams”, DiCaprio began appearing on a number of television commercials and educational programs.
DiCaprio dropped out of high school in his junior year, choosing to attend a free drama school and pursue his acting instead.
Leonardo was trained by renowned Hollywood Gun Coach Thell Reed, who has also trained such actors as: Brad Pitt, Val Kilmer, Edward Norton, Russell Crowe, Ben Foster and Girard Swan.
DiCaprio began attracting the attention of producers, who cast him in bit part roles in a number of television series, such as Roseanne (1988) and The New Lassie (1989), but it wasn’t until 1991 that DiCaprio made his film debut in Critters 3 (1991), a low-budget horror movie.
His 1994 Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape landed Leo the spot of 7th youngest actor to ever be nominated – at age 19.
He gained public recognition with leading roles in The Basketball Diaries (1995) and the romantic drama Romeo + Juliet (1996), before achieving international fame with James Cameron’s epic romance Titanic (1997), which became the highest-grossing film of all time until Cameron’s science fiction film Avatar (2009) overtook it.
Since 2000, DiCaprio has received critical acclaim for his work in a wide range of film genres.
DiCaprio’s portrayal 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, and his role as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) won him the award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.
He won his first BAFTA award for Best Actor for The Revenant.
He has been nominated for six Academy Awards – five for acting and one for producing – and in 2016, he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Revenant.
Leonardo DiCaprio has an estimated net worth of $245 million.
He makes an average of $20 million a year, with some years better than others.
The part in box office smash Titanic when DiCaprio screams “I’m the king of the world!” at the very end of the ship, looking out across the ocean, was improvised by the actor. James Cameron loved it, it was kept in, and then parodied countless times in the years that followed.
In The Wolf of Wall Street, during the kissing scene between DiCaprio and Joanna Lumley (almost twice his age), he was so nervous that the scene required a reported 27 takes to get it right.
He’s never done drugs. He and the entire cast took crushed Vitamin B tablets for doing the scenes involving cocaine in “The Wolf of wall Street”.
Mentioned in an interview with Katie Couric that while filming The Aviator (2004), it brought back his own obsessive-compulsive disorder that he had as a child.
In bloody scenes in The Beach he stabbed a shark to death during a dramatic struggle. But in real life it was Leonardo DiCaprio who was nearly the victim, after the actor became stuck in a shark cage with a ‘gigantic Great White‘ in a freak encounter. The incident came as Dicaprio filmed Blood Diamond in South Africa in 2006.
Leonard almost died in a skydiving accident when his parachute wouldn’t open. Luckily an instructor swooped in and saved him.
He is an environmental conservationist and often advocates and supports natural causes.
In November 2010, DiCaprio donated $1 million to the Wildlife Conservation Society at Russia’s tiger summit.
In 2013, he donated $3 million to saving tigers in Nepal.
In 2014, Leo’s foundation gave $3 million to saving ocean wildlife.
In 2014 he was appointed as a United Nations representative on climate change, and later that year he made an opening statement to members of the UN Climate Summit.
At a tiger summit in Russia, Vladimir Putin called him a real man. Putin said: “Here, in Russia, we call such a person a real man. If wildlife and tiger conservation is in the hands of people with such character, we are destined to succeed.”
He’s a father. Well,technically. Leo 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.
In 2010, he donated $1 million to relief efforts in Haiti after the earthquake.
Leo purchased a 104-acre island off the coast of Belize in 2005 to build a resort with renewable energy sources. The purchase price for the island, Blackadore Caye, was estimated to be $1.75 million.
Leonardo owns a production company – Appian Way Productions.
He also owns a fair-trade coffee company by the name of La Colombe Torrefaction.
During much of his career, DiCaprio has found himself in the media spotlight for his personal life. In 1997 DiCaprio dated the British singer Emma Bunton. He also dated the actress Bijou Phillips and the models Kristen Zang and Emma Miller.In 2000, he met Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen, whom he dated until 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.
In 2005, DiCaprio’s face was severely injured when model Aretha Wilson hit him over the head with a broken bottle at a Hollywood party. After pleading guilty in 2010, Wilson was sentenced to prison for two years.
In January 1999, his lawyers filed an application to allow DiCaprio to copyright his own name.
He is named after the artist Leonardo da Vinci, as his pregnant mother was standing in front of a da Vinci painting in a museum in Italy the first time she felt him kick.
In 2006 in “The Independent”, he named his ten favorite movies as: Bicycle Thieves (1948), Taxi Driver (1976), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), 8½ (1963), The Third Man (1949), Yojimbo (1961), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Shining (1980) and East of Eden (1955).
His favorite actress of all time is Meryl Streep.
Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson are his favorite actors.
Martin Scorsese is his favorite director.
He loves movie posters. He want to buy a really expensive movie poster, the original for The Thief of Bagdad (1940).
In 2011, he bought a Salvador Dali painting for $1.2 million. At that same auction he was bidding on Picassos but apparently really wanted the Dali.
Leo owns a giant pet tortoise. It can grow as big as 90 kilograms (200 pounds) and live as long as 100 years.
A Russian millionaire paid $1.5 million to go on a space trip with Leo.
Leonardo has a Dutch song about him called “Ik ben verliefd op Leonardo DiCaprio/I’m in love with Leonardo DiCaprio” by Flemish girl band K3.