Leonardo DiCaprio has been nominated in the Best Actor category for the forthcoming Oscar Awards – but how much do you know about the iconic actor?
The wait is over and the nominations for the 98th Academy Awards – better known as the Oscars – have finally been announced. The Best Actor category is always one of the most prestigious and hotly contested and this year will be no different with a stellar line-up for it.
One of the favourites for the gong will be Leonardo DiCaprio, who is nominated for his performance in comedy action thriller One Battle After Another. The actor already has a Best Actor Oscar on his mantlepiece (or wherever he keeps his awards) for The Revenant back in 2016.
But how much do you know about Leonardo DiCaprio? Here are some facts you might not know about him.
He is named after Leonardo Da Vinci
Yes, Leonardo is named after the famous Italian painter. His mother decided on Leonardo as she was looking at a Da Vinci painting in the Uffizi museum in Florence, Italy, when she first felt him kick.
Leonardo started acting in adverts and TV
Leonardo wanted to be an actor from an early age, having first got on a stage at a performance festival age 2 and danced, and got a positive response.
He wasn’t particularly interested in school, preparing to audition for action jobs. One of his earliest TV appearances was a series of adverts for Matchbox cars, followed by commercials for products such as Kraft Singles, Bubble Yum and Apple Jacks.
Then, in 1989, he landed the role of Glen in two episodes of The New Lassie, a TV series updating the classic rescue dog story.
He hates the first film he appeared in
While Leonardo’s big break came in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape in 1993, his first film role came two years earlier, in the largely forgotten low-budget horror movie, Critters 3.
In Critters 3, Leonardo played Josh, the stepson of an unscrupulous landlord. Josh accidentally kills his stepfather by shutting him in a room with the murderous critters.
Leonardo has since dismissed the movie as “possibly one of the worst films of all time” and that he prefers not to remember the film. After it, he tried to avoid roles like Josh – what Leonardo described as “your average, no depth standard kid with blond hair”.
He nearly quit acting after multiple rejections
Getting into the acting business wasn’t easy for Leonardo. His name was seen as a barrier and an early agent recommended that he change it to ‘Lenny Williams’ to appeal to American audiences – the idea was rejected and the agent didn’t last long.
At one point, Leonardo attended more than 100 auditions without landing the role once. He did consider quitting at this point, but his father, George, encouraging him to keep trying. That, and the goal of financial security, motivated him to keep going. And it was a good thing he did – as success started to come soon after.
He has been nominated multiple times for the Best Actor Oscar
Since those early struggles, Leonardo has been acting consistently for more than 30 years and has had huge amounts of success. Indeed, over more than 30 years he has been nominated for the Best Actor Oscar on six occasions, although he has only one once (so far). Those films were:
- The Aviator (2005))
- Blood Diamond (2007)
- The Wolf of Wall Street (2014)
- The Revenant (2016)
- Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2020)
- One Battle After Another (2026)
Leonardo once helped rescue a man from drowning
In December 2019, Leonardo was on holiday near St Barts on a boat, when a distress call came in. Leonardo agreed to divert the boat to search for a man who had fallen overboard from his own boat. Leonardo’s boat was the only vessel to respond to the mayday call and, after a search, they found the man – who had been treading water for 11 hours – and his crew rescued him. Their timing was good – a storm hit soon after.
