Boy: angels and demons
Children who come to the movies right from the school bench, rarely grow up - at least in the eyes of the viewer. DiCaprio's situation is aggravated by the fact that he, in general, has nothing more in life than how to portray strangers in front of the camera. These other, more conscious young stars, like Natalie Portman, are bound to get a "normal" education and protect bachelor's and master's degrees. Leo does not even have a theater school or "machine gun courses" for acting. Kindergarten drama circle - and that is not! Leonardo DiCaprio is a self-taught actor who did not even graduate from college. No matter how incredible it may seem.
Everything was like this. Leo's parents are an American of Italian descent George DiCaprio, an underground comic artist, and an immigrant from Germany, Irmelin Indenbirken, a court clerk, divorced when the boy was not even two years old, but his father maintained an even relationship with his former family even after he had safely acquired new. Once at dinner, George boasted of the success of the eldest son of his new wife: "And Adam earned 50 thousand bucks for shooting in a commercial!" - "How much?" - Leo, almost five years old, almost choked on mashed potatoes: that kind of money seemed to him something completely beyond the bounds. For today, there are a lot of films with the participation of Leonardo DiCaprio.
Of course, he was not going to do this with his profession. In his childhood, DiCaprio dreamed of becoming an oceanologist and studying dolphins - he subsequently sublimated the childhood dream into active environmental activities, leading the list of "green" Hollywood stars.
Here it is worth making a couple of clarifications to explain why Leo easily got into the cage of advertising and television business. Firstly, he was born and raised in Los Angeles, in the Los Feliz area, which is called the "Hollywood ghetto". Here, not in the safest place in the crime scene, the loser actors and other unrecognized geniuses who fell victims of the cruel world settled. The air itself Los Feliz consisted of other people's victories and defeats, and only the media success was considered a measure of a person's solvency. Living in such an atmosphere from early childhood, it is impossible not to imprint a huge ambition in your subcortex, which becomes the most powerful engine on the way to real success. In addition, many of the local losers still have the same connections - thanks to them, George easily found a son for the agent. And, secondly, the kid, thanks to a mixture of Italian, Irish, German and Russian blood, turned out to be a real angel from "Sistine Madonna" Raphael: chubby, blue-eyed and gold-haired. For the curls to the shoulders that Mom and Grandmother Leo liked so much (or Dee, as his mother called him in his childhood), the younger DiCaprio on the street was teased with "a girl" and "noodles" - but the TV men of such kids simply adored.
And George DiCaprio was advised to show his "ill-bred" child to a psychiatrist. To Leo's credit, he quickly took himself in hand and learned to behave in auditions: "I just stopped pleasing, to anyone else, except myself. He began to think about his hero, and not about the result of casting. When now children ask me how to become an actor, I answer: "Teach your words, work on a role, do not give up what you started." But in fact, you need to say something else: "The main thing - do not worry about what others think about you."
Purposefulness and perseverance, coupled with a desire to constantly learn new things, did their job: already at the age of 15 DiCaprio constantly flashed on American television screens (in fact, that is why Leo never finished college, he did not have to go to college) . His specialization was the role of difficult teenagers - he needed the devil charm he needed for this role. The names of the projects in which he was involved, our audience will not say anything, except for one: "Santa Barbara". Already after the Titanic, at the peak of Leomania, we were shown an episode of this endless television series in which Leo played the young Mason Capwell. Interestingly, the casting director in general took into account that the adult Mason (Lane Davis) is a brown-eyed brunette, and not a blue-eyed blonde?
DiCaprio's angelic appearance only once nearly served him badly: Laose Halt, director of the movie "What's Eating Gilbert Gray-pa ?," felt that for the role of a teenager, the younger brother of the hero Johnny Depp, the 18-year-old actor is too cute . But the assays convinced him of the opposite. The roles of the mentally retarded are traditionally considered one of the most serious examinations in acting, and his Leo withstood with brilliance, having received his first Oscar nomination. My childhood was over. Leonardo DiCaprio was in the top league, where he had to test the real glory.
Young man: between Rambo and Romeo
Summarizing the combat childhood, we can say that it turned out to be quite happy with Leo. In general, he also thinks so: when on the site of the house where he spent his early years, they built a public library, DiCaprio gave her a computer class. But what kind of Hollywood child without small and large children's injuries? Those of Leo managed to find the whole one: "When I was about five, I saw from the balcony of my friend, as in a neighboring house two homosexuals have sex. For a long time I could not think of anything else, this vile picture always came up. " I wonder if she surfaced with him during the filming of films with the participation of Leonardo Dicprio "Complete eclipse", dedicated to the love relations of French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud? David Thewlis, who played Verlaine, advised the partner (no matter how ambiguous the word sounded) not to penetrate too deeply - after all, it's just a job. Kissing with David, Leo imagined himself in his place one of his girlfriends, and mentally cursed his stupid boyish pride, which forced him to agree to this role only because originally Rimbaud was supposed to play the tragically lost River Phoenix ...
"Total eclipse," although it added a lot of men of the notorious orientation to the number of DiCaprio fans, did not alienate the actor from the girls. Oh, something, and Leo always had a woman's attention - row with a shovel. He started his first girlfriend at the age of 13, and earned his own for ice cream. And having achieved, as they write in legal documents, "the age of sexual consent," our angel, if you believe in tabloids, has launched into all serious. When recently the actor suddenly confessed that, it turns out, he always felt uncomfortable with beautiful girls ("I'm indecisive - this is the weak side of my character"), he, I think, was a great surprise to these very girls ...
Here you need to make another digression, so that you are not very mistaken about Leo. The fact is that he is by no means an intellectual. He does not read smart books, does not look at complex art house movies and does not recite his sonnets Petrarch in the original. A romantic mother named him in honor of Leonardo da Vinci, before the picture of which she first felt the impact of a baby in her belly.
Speaking about the personal life of Leonardo DiCaprio, we step on the unsteady tabloid soil of unreliable gossip and blown scandals. All because he never answers intimate questions in an interview and does not comment on the "sensations" associated with his name. We have to build a picture of indirect evidence - therefore, every appearance of Leo in public with a new lady forces journalists to paint on his fuselage the next star, although the actor himself, of course, never asked them to do it.
In the Don Juan DiCaprio list , Juliette Lewis and Sharon Stone, Liv Tyler and Hilary Swank, Eva Herzigova and Helena Christensen, Kate Moss and Demi Moore, Kirsten Dunst and Jessica Biel, even Britney Spears and Paris Hilton were the presses of the press! Not to mention his partners on the set: Claire Danes (Romeo + Juliet), Virginie Ledoyen ("Beach"), Keith Winslet ("Titanic", "The Road of Change" ...) About Winslet, however, there is and another version: they say, she and Leo became best friends only because she kicked him off. Something seems to me that it is not in his "scorpion" character to forgive such things - so that the friendship between a man and a woman, it seems, still exists. Only Leo is allowed to tease Winslet, calling her "fat woman", and that means something.
The question of the main woman in Leonardo's life was solved once and for all, when DiCaprio said that the only lady to whom he gives diamonds is his mother. The heart of a caring son and grandson is given to his mother Irmelin, and to her beloved grandmother, nee Elena Smirnova (she is the daughter of Russian emigrants, who later emigrated from Germany to America). Unfortunately, in August last year, Leo's grandmother died at the age of 93 years.
As for his success with women, our Romeo, even on the wave of Leomania, treated him philosophically: "I always want to be remembered thanks to your work, and not to the glory of the" titbit of the month ". A new cute face is always there. " Tired of the crowds of young women who even ended up with a great love for the actor, and the very image of the romantic hero, DiCaprio played his most self-ironical role - the scandalous star-party sybarite in the "Celebrity" Woody Allen - and went to the bottom for two long years . The beginning of the new millennium was to show the world a new Leo - not a boy, but a husband. It's time for complex roles and weighted solutions.
Man: on the road of change
Romeo died, long live Howard Hughes! Henceforth, the role of Leonardo DiCaprio is not evil heroes-lovers, but uneasy characters in difficult circumstances. Flippant downshifter, tropical paradise, which suddenly turned into hell ("Beach"). The Avenger, entering the war with the all-powerful mafia ("Gangs of New York"). An eccentric billionaire, swinging between genius and insanity ("Aviator"). Nervous policeman under cover ("The Departed"), "Aviator" and "Blood Diamond" brought DiCaprio two more nominations for "Oscar" - from the former girlish idol, in recent years has lost the youthful ephemeral appearance, serious plans.
Nevertheless , knowing the unpretentious tastes of the actor, I think that he would have liked the role in some adaptation of the comics more than in the next baiopik or political thriller. He really wanted to play Anakin Skywalker in the second episode of "Star Wars" - but Lucas preferred to see in this role an attractive but not familiar Heiden Christensen. And only now, having collected a crop of awards and having fallen in a rating of magazine Time "Most influential people of the world", Leo has closely approached to the dream, having entered in the daily journal preparation for shootings kinokomiksa "Akvamen" and a full-length version of a mystical serial "Twilight zone". However, in his plans there is also quite a serious role for the young Theodore Roosevelt ...
The twin suicide of two girls jumping off the roof, holding in the hands of photographs of Leonardo DiCaprio, was yet another confirmation of the fact that art and life are much closer to each other than it seems at first glance. Leo began to realize this, perhaps, more, when he played a juvenile addict in the movie "Basketball Diaries". In one scene, his hero fantasizes about how he shoots his classmates and teachers. Two years later, 14-year-old Michael Carnil of the provincial town of West Paduc shot eight people during school prayer. At the trial he said that on him
In 2007, after the release of the documentary produced by DiCaprio on the ecological theme "The 11th Hour", the actor was in the hundred most influential people of the world according to the authoritative magazine Time. Commenting on this fact, Martin Scorsese, who took off DiCaprio in the "Gangs of New York", "Aviator" and "The Departed", said fatal: "The kid grew up and became a man."
The latest projects of Leonardo DiCaprio really change the world - at least, make him think about important things. Sam Mendez's film "The Road of Change", incidentally, fell into the hard times of the economic crisis and the collapse of the "American dream." And after the film "Blood Diamond", told about the brutal world of clandestine trade in diamonds, these seemingly eternal jewels became the target for journalistic ridicule. Now stars, putting on too many pompous ornaments, risk being accused of bad taste and support of the "diamond mafia".
In terms of personal life, the "last playboy of Hollywood" is also more than serious. He set a personal record for the duration of the romantic relationship, four years later meeting with supermodel Gisele Bündchen. Pretty woman, wearing the expressive nickname "Body", was already mentally trying on a wedding dress and thinking out what her sisters would wear for the wedding. However, their "Italian" novel, with constant quarrels and reconciliations, in the end, ended with nothing. What only lovers did - say, once Gisselle, angry with her lover, "spitefully" he cut his hair and in this form went to his parents in Brazil, mourn their own stupidity.
About the reasons for their final break, "sources close to the pair," reported that DiCaprio was not really in a hurry with a proposal of the hand and heart (and even rumored to have flirted with Sienna Miller and Cameron Diaz). Is there still a youthful fear of losing personal freedom? Perhaps, it is better to call it self-sufficiency: "I almost always need a close person next to me. But at the same time I always have enough of my own company - this ability makes me really strong. "
DiCaprio and Bundchen parted in 2005, and a couple of years later, the actor suddenly spoke: "Gisselle and I were happy together. Monogamy is the key to a good relationship. " In the light of this recognition, all his romantic escapades look like the search for the ideal woman, worthy to become a companion of the demonic beauty. In July of this year, he parted with another "official" girl - Israeli supermodel Bar Rafaeli - and now again in free flight. How many years old is he - thirty-five ?! As Juliette's mother said, "I was your mother for a long time already."
It seems that we came to the conclusion that the opposite of the beginning of the article: in our time, 35 years for a successful person is not yet an occasion to sum up. By this age, a modern man can only finally understand what he wants from life, and begin to move steadily towards the goal. Leonardo DiCaprio, apparently, understood - which means he will surprise us more than once. Does the new wave of "Leomania" await us in this regard? On this score, our hero expressed categorically: "I will never reach such a level of popularity, and I do not want this. This is not what I want to achieve in life. " And: "Paradise is a false idea. With age you understand that happiness is something that overtakes you only briefly and at the most unexpected moments. "