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LEONARDO DICAPRIO BIOGRAPHY |
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Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio (born November 11,
1974 in Hollywood, California) is an Academy Award-nominated
American actor well known for roles in blockbuster movies like
Titanic (1997) and The Aviator (2004), and was famed for his far
reaching global celebrity influence dubbed as 'Leo-Mania' in the
late 1990s.
DiCaprio was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of George
DiCaprio, a half Italian-half German distributor of comic books,
and Irmelin Indenbirken, a former legal secretary who was born
in Germany. His name allegedly came about because his pregnant
mother was standing in front of a Leonardo da Vinci painting at
a museum in Italy when he kicked, which made her decide to name
him after the famous artist. His parents divorced when he was a
year old. He grew up in Echo Park. At age five, he appeared on
his favorite television series, Romper Room, and was almost
fired for misbehaving. He attended John Marshall High School in
Los Angeles. He was rejected by an agent early in his career for
having a name that sounded too foreign, suggesting that it
should be changed to Lenny Williams, but DiCaprio refused. His
acting career began in 1990 when he was cast in the role of
Garry Buckman on the TV version of the hit film Parenthood,
where he met his best friend Tobey Maguire while working on an
episode. In that same year, DiCaprio appeared on the soap opera
Santa Barbara in the role of Mason Capwell (in flashbacks as a
teenager). From 1991 to 1992 he had the role of Luke Brower, a
homeless boy, on Growing Pains. However, DiCaprio is most famous
(and respected) for his roles in motion pictures. His debut role
was as Josh in Critters 3 (1991), a film that was released
straight to video. Two years later, his break-through came with
the role of Toby in This Boy's Life (1993) co-starring with
Robert De Niro and Ellen Barkin, which led the New York Film
Critics and the National Society of Film Critics to name him
runner-up for Best Supporting Actor. In the same year he also
convincingly portrayed a mentally handicapped boy in What's
Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). The role earned him an Academy
Award nomination. The black-and-white movie Don's Plum, a low-budget
drama featuring the actor and some of his friends (including
Tobey Maguire) was filmed between 1995 and 1996. Its release was
later blocked in the United States and Canada by DiCaprio and
Maguire, who argued they never intended to make it a theatrical
feature. Nevertheless, it later premiered on February 10, 2001
in Berlin. In 1996, DiCaprio also played the male lead in Romeo
+ Juliet, a slick and updated modern-day version of
Shakespeare's play, directed by Australian director Baz Luhrmann.
The move from 'star' to 'superstar' came when DiCaprio played
Jack Dawson in Titanic (1997). The highest grossing movie ever,
it tied with Ben-Hur (1959) for receiving the most Academy
Awards. Though DiCaprio himself was not nominated for an Oscar,
over the course of the next few years he would become a
household name worldwide, synonymous first with labels like 'teen
heartthrob' or sex symbol with his dewy cheeked and saccharined
faced looks. With a status that spawned fantasy crushes and
hysteria worldwide, E Online described him as the most gorgeous
celebrity on the planet, while his co-star Kate Winslet said she
agreed with others in deeming him the "most beautiful man on
earth". At the peak of his celebrity in 1998, DiCaprio fronted
scores of magazine covers ranging anything from Vanity Fair to
Rolling Stone, and was once the most searched for personality in
the early years of the Internet. Indeed, thousands of fans would
fill message boards and chat rooms, discussing his romances with
scores of celebrity models like Gisele Bundchen, while sharing
such minutiae as Leo's shoe size or his favorite comic book
characters. Ironically, DiCaprio agreed to play the spoof role
of his real life 'teen idol' persona during this period, in
Woody Allen's satirical parody, Celebrity. Perhaps overrun or
overhyped by fame from what became known as 'Leo-Mania' the
world over- from the shores of Thailand all the way to
Afghanistan (where the government there banned 'DiCaprio style'
haircuts amongst the youth), what came apropos with fame were
tales in the tabloids of excesses and indulgence. Indeed, in
1999, there was not a week without DiCaprio making some form of
scandalous headline or another across the globe. Time magazine
summed up the fame superhighway and its rappings in an interview
with the actor in 2000, reporting: 'DiCaprio still thinks of
himself as an edgy indie actor, not the Tiger Beat cover boy. "I
have no connection with me during that whole Titanic phenomenon
and what my face became around the world.", also commenting "I'll
never reach that state of popularity again, and I don't expect
to, It's not something I'm going to try to achieve either."
Nonetheless, the headlines and controversy failed to let up,
peaking when he starred in a project by Danny Boyle based on
Alex Garland's backpacker culture classic, The Beach that year.
The project was hyped as a result of it simply being DiCaprio's
first movie since Titanic, but due to controversial clashes with
the Thai authorities over the use of the pristine island pairing
of Ko Phi Phi in 1999, the film garnered more bad press than
expected. It was reported that permission granted to the film
company to physically alter the environment inside Phi Phi
Islands National Park was illegal. In the end, the film also did
not score as well as expected at the box office, losing both
mainstream commercial appeal due to its content and also the
purists and fans of the original novel, who claimed it did not
do justice to Garland's work. Nonetheless, according to an
article by Stephen Thanabalan for Lonely Planet Travelogues, the
film's ensuing influence did commercialize and place a
confirmation stamp on the phenomenally increasing popularity of
backpacking, and served to market it to a mainstream audience
who were the next generation of young people eager to trot the
globe by means of this adventurous, cheap and (by now) exciting
rite of passage. |
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