Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo DiCaprio was born November 11, 1974, in Los Angeles, to Irmelin Indenbirken, a German-born legal secretary, and George DiCaprio, an underground comix artist and distributor; his mother named him after Leonardo da Vinci, having felt him kick for the first time while looking at a da Vinci painting in Florence's Uffizi Gallery. His parents split when he was one but co-parented from twin cottages sharing a garden in Echo Park, an arrangement he later called bohemian in every sense. He started in commercials at 14, dropped out of John Marshall High School to chase acting full time, and finished his education with a G.E.D. Critters 3 gave him a film debut in 1991, the same year he landed a recurring role on Growing Pains.

DiCaprio earned his first Oscar nomination at 19 for What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), the same year he first worked opposite Robert De Niro in This Boy's Life. Romeo + Juliet (1996) established him as a teen-idol leading man, and Titanic (1997) turned that into global stardom, grossing roughly 2.1 billion dollars worldwide and making him, at 23, one of the most recognized faces on the planet. He spent the next two decades alternating blockbusters with a run of films for Martin Scorsese, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street, Killers of the Flower Moon, one of the defining director-actor partnerships in American film. After five competitive Oscar nominations without a win, he finally took Best Actor in 2016, for playing a mauled, half-frozen fur trapper in The Revenant.

The film that won him the most box office and the harshest joke about his own hypocrisy is the same one. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) was financed in part through Red Granite Pictures, later shown to have laundered money embezzled from the Malaysian state fund 1MDB; the financier behind it, Jho Low, had given DiCaprio a 3.2 million dollar Picasso, a 9 million dollar Basquiat, and Marlon Brando's own Oscar statuette as gifts meant for his charity auction. DiCaprio was never accused of wrongdoing, and in June 2017 he contacted the Justice Department and returned all of it. The environmental activism defining his public image since the 1990s carries a smaller, more persistent version of the same charge, repeated criticism over the private jets and yachts moving the world's highest-profile climate advocate around it.

DiCaprio, still one of the highest-paid actors working, continues both halves of the public role: another Scorsese collaboration in the works, and a foundation that has funded more than 200 environmental projects with upward of 100 million dollars since 1998. Whether he is remembered chiefly as one of his generation's defining screen actors or as the celebrity face of climate advocacy, and whether the gap between that advocacy and his own travel habits ever gets resolved rather than just repeatedly pointed out, remains an open argument that neither his critics nor his foundation's supporters have settled.

Leonardo DiCaprio's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Titanic film
  Global blockbuster, approximately 2.1 billion dollars worldwide gross 1997
• Gangs of New York film
  First of several films with Martin Scorsese 2002
• The Departed film 2006
• The Wolf of Wall Street film
  Later tied to the 1MDB financing scandal 2013
• The Revenant film
  Academy Award, Best Actor 2015

• November 11, 1974 aged 0 Born in Los Angeles, California
• 1991 aged ~17 Film debut in Critters 3
• 1993 aged ~19 First Oscar nomination, for What's Eating Gilbert Grape
• 1997 aged ~23 Stars in Titanic
• 2002 aged ~28 Begins his collaboration with Martin Scorsese in Gangs of New York
• 2013 aged ~39 Stars in The Wolf of Wall Street
• 2016 aged ~42 Wins the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Revenant
• June 2017 aged 42 Returns the Picasso and Basquiat linked to the 1MDB scandal
• 2023 aged ~49 Stars in Killers of the Flower Moon

• Martin Scorsese b. 1942
  Director and preservation advocate whose films and institutions have shaped both American cinema and understanding of its history. directed repeatedly by
• Robert De Niro b. 1943
  Academy Award-winning actor whose method performances in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull defined a generation. first mentored on screen by
• Samuel L. Jackson b. 1948
  Highest-grossing actor of all time whose prolific career spans blockbusters and indie films. co-starred with in Django Unchained