Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio. It is one of the oddest names ever to be uttered in Hollyweird. This peculiar name however has come to personify all that is young, hip and (dare we say it) cool. Hard to believe but, if life had taken a different turn, it could have been Lenny Williams. Lenny who? Apparently, early on in young Leo's career, when he was only ten years old, an agent had the audacity to proclaim that the actor would never make it in Hollywood with such an odd sounding name as Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio - "too foreign." He was counseled to change it to Lenny Williams. However DiCaprio refused to give up and he eventually found an agent daring enough to look past his name. Leo quickly found himself in front of the camera in numerous television commercials.
The commercials soon lead to television shows. DiCaprio appeared on such family fare as The New Lassie Show and Growing Pains before leaving that all behind to pursue a career in film.
Leonardo Dicaprio seems to be most at home on the big screen, playing a variety of challenging characters he never would have found on television. He first won critical attention with his initial outing as Tobias Woolf in This Boy's Life. Unlike many other young actors, who have to struggle for years before finally being taken seriously, DiCaprio managed to wow audiences and critics alike on his first try. More importantly though, he backed it up with yet another solid performance in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, for which he earned himself an Academy Award nomination.
Hollywood and the world didn't know what to make of the unconventional young star. At nineteen years old he was viewed as a new James Dean - the young rebellious youth with a rare ability to captivate audiences. DiCaprio appeared to relish the image, choosing projects that helped to increase the perception. Most notable were The Basketball Diaries, a film based on the book by Jim Carroll, about a young drug addict, and Total Eclipse, a film about the gay love affair between French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine.
The end of the nineties has seen a move by DiCaprio towards more mainstream projects. His first attempt, The Quick and the Dead, was a complete debacle and seemed to scare him off. Then came William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. The modern adaptation of the Shakespeare classic hit a nerve with fans and was a huge box office success. DiCaprio has now backed it up with his first blockbuster, the critical and fan favorite Titanic . It is hard to top the most successful film of all time, a film which many young fans went to see nearly twenty times in the theater, and it does not seem like Leo is even going to try. What seems to be the case is that he has chosen to return to the smaller, more credible films which gave him his initial introduction to stardom.
In the wake of Titanic, Leo has taken on a persona which is larger than life. His life is detailed daily in trade magazines and his photo adorns just about everything. This has created some backlash but the nay-sayers are still a small minority. Recently proclaimed the Entertainer of the Year by Entertainment Weekly, he is surely the most prominent celeb to hit Hollywood this decade.
Since Titanic, Leo has only starred in one film, the lackluster Man in the Iron Mask. He also had a small cameo in Woody Allen's Celebrity where many critics hailed him as the only spark of genuine life. It was recently announced that Leo would star in The Beach, about a young man’s journey to find an island paradise.
