We know that Leonardo DiCaprio is an electrifying actor, an ardent environmentalist and a supermodel magnet. What hardly anyone outside his inner circle knows is perhaps the most surprising thing about him. His idea of fun is to sit around with his buddies and make up ridiculous characters and then try to do their voices. “I’m actually an incredible goofball,” says DiCaprio, whose new film, Shutter Island, opens in two weeks. “I do imitations and joke around all day. I keep things light in my life.” DiCaprio tilts his head, lifts his eyebrows and puts on a small, “I know […]

Eleven years after their romance aboard the ill-fated Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are together again in Revolutionary Road. The superstar duo play a married couple with children trying to overcome the monotony of suburban life. DiCaprio credits Winslet with bringing them back together under the direction of her husband, Sam Mendes. Even though you and Kate haven’t worked together since Titanic you have kept in touch haven’t you?We’ve known each other since we were teenagers, and she’s remained one of my closest friends. It was Kate who brought me the novel by Richard Yates on which the film […]

Leonardo DiCaprio on why he became an actor and what he really thinks about marriage. “I feel like a whole era in my life is over,” Leonardo DiCaprio tells me. Tall and lanky, he’s one of the world’s biggest box-office stars, making $20 million a picture. But today he looks more like a young guy who just came in from doing yard work. He looks unhappy and tired. “My grandma died last week,” he says quietly, explaining his pensiveness. “I have no more grandparents. I feel that coming ahead in my life is more stripping away, for sure. I feel […]

Is this 20-year-old actor the next River Phoenix? If not, why do we like pretending he is? The boy with the most beautiful name in Hollywood was once told by an agent to change it to Lenny Williams. More recently, producers have advised him to star in movies about teenagers who strangle their girlfriends, or in tacky, fast-money Westerns like The Quick and the Dead, which opened Friday. In his short career — he just turned 20 — Leonardo DiCaprio has seen all the twisted ways people respond to a prodigy’s gift: change it, own it.  It’s not that DiCaprio […]

Seven years after Titanic made Leonardo DiCaprio the object of global mania – and a $20 Million per picture star – he has finally satisfied a longtime obsession of his own. This month, in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, DiCaprio will play Howard Hughes, the visionary tycoon whose brilliance was swallowed up by madness. Riding up an elevator in a no-frills office building at an unremarkable address, a short, middle-aged man looks up at the young guy in the backward baseball cap. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” the man asks, squinting his eyes. Bingo. “You’re that kid from Titanic.” “Yeah,” says […]

With two confident, unsettling performances, the former boy wonder grows up (finally) and becomes the actor of his generation.  He was already a successful, cheeky, sweet-faced TV actor when Leonardo DiCaprio saw the first two film performances that really turned his head. One was James Dean’s in East of Eden. The other, in Taxi Driver, was by Robert De Niro (whom the teenage DiCaprio had just been cast opposite in This Boy’s Life). “I never said, ‘This is what I’m going to aspire to be,’” he remembers, “because at that age, it’s something that’s so beyond anything that’s a possibility. […]

This is a tale of two Leos. Actually, this is a tale of two pairs of Leos. The first two Leos are the first films in almost three years from movie star and teen idol Leonardo DiCaprio, who cruised to international superstardom on Titanic, a film that broke all the records and rules at the box office. The two films are the dark epic Gangs of New York from Martin Scorsese, which opens everywhere Dec. 20, and the light and breezy Catch Me If You Can from Steven Spielberg, which opens everywhere just five days later. No movie star in […]

Leonardo DiCaprio gawks at celebrities. Not gawks, exactly. He’s hardly awed by them, but he watches them like an outsider. He is lounging in the half-shade on a promenade at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, gazing out toward the hotel’s outdoor restaurant, where celebrated performers are sipping drinks under cream-colored umbrellas and, above those, the high hibiscus that buffers the hotel from the clamor of Sunset Boulevard. “Man, look at that,” he says. “There’s a celebrity at every single table out there! Val Kilmer, Heath Ledger, that guy from ‘Saturday Night Live.”‘ At 28, DiCaprio has already ridden the entire […]

He’s played misfits and half-wits, and scored an Oscar nomination at nineteen. This month, Leonardo DiCaprio is a junkie-poet in The Basketball Diaries and a gunslinger in The Quick and the Dead. But the most fearless actor in Hollywood still lives with his mom. Leonardo DiCaprio is throwing roundhouse karate kicks a few inches from my face. Whoosh. He hikes up his baggy jeans which instantly slide back down his nonexistent butt and kicks again. Whoosh. This one is a bit closer than the one before it. This f**ing great actor, this rising phenom, this valuable celluloid property, still lives […]