Before stardom, Leonardo DiCaprio sat through a hundred auditions and refused a new name
His first agent wanted him to become Lenny Williams, a name thought friendlier to American audiences. The boy said no, then went a year and a half without work despite about a hundred auditions. He nearly quit. His father talked him out of it, and Leonardo DiCaprio kept the name his mother had chosen.
That name came from a moment in Florence. His pregnant mother, a German-born legal secretary, felt her baby kick for the first time while looking at a painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Uffizi. His father drew and distributed underground comics. They split when he was one but moved into neighbouring cottages sharing a garden in Echo Park, Los Angeles, so they could raise him together. Money was tight, and the streets around him were rough.
As a child he weighed up becoming a marine biologist, but loved doing impressions and watching people react. At eleven he almost gave up acting for breakdancing after taking second place at a competition in Germany. Toy car commercials, which he counts as his first role, came at fourteen, followed by about twenty more adverts once a talent agent vouched for him. His film debut, in a cheap horror sequel in 1991, is a part he would rather forget.
Things turned quickly. Robert De Niro chose him over roughly 400 other young hopefuls to play his stepson in a memoir adaptation, and his portrayal of a developmentally disabled teenager, researched by studying children with similar impairments, earned an Oscar nomination at 19. When a studio balked at casting him in a Western, his co-star Sharon Stone paid his salary herself.
Titanic, in 1997, briefly became the highest-grossing film ever made, and he spent years afterwards chasing roles far from the romantic lead, many of them with Martin Scorsese. The Oscar for Best Actor finally came for The Revenant, released in 2015. Films he has led have taken about 7 billion dollars worldwide, and away from the camera he runs a foundation devoted to environmental awareness.
Source: Leonardo DiCaprio
