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Leonardo
DiCaprio
News Leonardo
DiCaprio to star in Casino
Jack News The
Star Casino Hosts Leonardo DiCaprio; Casino VIP Super Whale With Models, by Greg
Tingle Media and
insider reports state Leo is dating Sydney model Alyce Crawford, Murdoch's The
Daily Tele... that Leonardo DiCaprio has been gifted a whole floor at The Star
(formally Star City Casino) to live in during his four-month stay. He's
been bunkered down there since passing on his former Vaucluse digs because of
privacy issues (unwelcome paps), casino spies have revealed that Echo Entertainment
top brass Larry Mullin was so keen to get DiCaprio under their roof that a whole
floor was transformed into a luxury super-suite. "Mountains
were moved," said our friend at The Star, who reckons the famous actor has
a private entrance to his Astral Tower pad to evade the paparazzi. "The
entire thing was refurbished and rebuilt from scratch. It cost a fortune but the
directive was 'spare no expense'." Asked
about the plush situation for 'Our Leo' at Star, Tabcorp: "No comment." DiCaprio
does apparently say G'day on occasion with casino workers and others who cross
his path. "He
was spotted in Black By Ezard and kept his cap on and head down and didn't engage
with anyone. And a few nights later Hugh "Wolverine" Jackman was in
there and couldn't have been nicer," said the deep throat. "He
was chatting to staff and taking pictures and having a great time. It was interesting
to see the difference." His
ex-girlfriend Blake Lively has moved on, as has Bar Refaeli, with the model photographed
in an embrace with Pierre Sarkozy, 25, the son of French Prez Nicolas Sarkozy,
at the Paris nightclub Rasputin. Stay
tuned as Media Man and its ever growing "spy" network. As 'Our Leo'
says, 'Catch Me If You Can' (and no, it won't likely be at The Star casino).
Profile
Leonardo
Wilhelm DiCaprio (born November 11, 1974) is a three-time Academy Award-nominated
and Golden Globe Award-winning American actor who garnered world wide fame for
his role as Jack Dawson in Titanic. DiCaprio has starred in many other successful
feature films including William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), The Beach
(2000), Catch Me If You Can (2002), and Blood Diamond (2006). He has appeared
in Martin Scorsese's recent films, including Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator
(2004), and The Departed (2006), causing people to compare this relationship to
the one actor Robert De Niro benefited from early on in his career. Biography
Childhood Leonardo
DiCaprio was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of George DiCaprio, an underground
comic artist and distributor of comic books, and Irmelin Indenbirken, a former
legal secretary. His mother moved from Oer-Erkenschwick, Germany, to the U.S.
during her childhood, while his father is of half Italian and half German descent.
DiCaprio's parents met while attending college together and subsequently moved
to Los Angeles. He was named after artist Leonardo da Vinci, as his pregnant mother
was standing in front of a da Vinci painting at a museum in Italy when DiCaprio
first kicked. DiCaprio's
parents divorced when he was one year old. He lived mostly with his mother, although
his father was also around. During his childhood, he attended Canterbury Elementary
School. He was interested in baseball cards, comic books and frequently visited
museums, with his father. He also spent part of his childhood in Germany, where
his maternal grandparents, Wilhelm and Helene, still lived. DiCaprio and his mother
lived in several neighborhoods, such as Echo Park. During
his teen years, he lived at 1874 Hillhurst Avenue, Los Feliz district of Los
Angeles, California (which was later converted into a local public library)
and his mother worked several jobs to support them. He attended John Marshall
High School, a few blocks away, before attending the Los Angeles Center for Enriched
Studies. DiCaprio
was inspired to become an actor after Adam Starr, a stepson of his father’s
from his father's re-marriage, began appearing in commercials. DiCaprio began
looking for an agent at the age of twelve, but was initially turned down several
times; one agent suggested that he anglicize his name to “Lenny Williams”,
which DiCaprio rejected.
Early career DiCaprio’s
acting career began in 1989 when he was cast in the role of Garry Buckman on the
TV version of the film Parenthood, where he met Tobey Maguire, with whom he remains
close friends. In that same year, DiCaprio appeared on the soap opera Santa Barbara
in the role of Mason Capwell (in flashbacks as a teenager). From 1991 to 1992
he had the role of Luke Brower, a homeless boy, on Growing Pains. However,
DiCaprio is most famous for his roles in motion pictures. His debut role was as
Josh in Critters 3 (1991), a film with a limited theatrical release, which was
released on video soon after. Two
years later, his breakthrough came with the role of Toby in This Boy's Life (1993)
co-starring with Robert De Niro and Ellen Barkin, which led the New York Film
Critics and the National Society of Film Critics to name him runner-up for Best
Supporting Actor. In the same year he also portrayed a mentally handicapped boy
in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). The role earned him an Academy Award nomination
at the age of 19. In
1995, he starred in Total Eclipse, a fictionalized account of the passionate and
violent homosexual relationship between the two 19th century French poets, Paul
Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio). River Phoenix
was originally cast as the lead in the film, but after his 1993 death, DiCaprio
was cast. The
black-and-white movie Don's Plum, a low-budget drama featuring the actor and some
of his friends (including Tobey Maguire) was filmed between 1995 and 1996. Its
release was later blocked in the United States and Canada by DiCaprio and Maguire,
who argued they never intended to make it a theatrical feature. Nevertheless,
it later premiered on February 9, 2001 in Berlin. In
1995 he starred as Jim Carroll, a heroin addict in The Basketball Diaries. In
1996, DiCaprio also played the male lead in Romeo + Juliet, a slick and updated
modern-day version of William Shakespeare's play, directed by Australian director
Baz Luhrmann. DiCaprio was reportedly so dedicated to the project, he flew coach
class, for free to Australia a year before production started to workshop the
film. Following Romeo + Juliet, in 1996 DiCaprio starred in Marvin's Room along
side Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton. Superstardom
and "Leo-Mania"
The
move from "star" to "superstar" came when DiCaprio played
Jack Dawson in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic, the highest grossing movie ever (in
nominal terms—adjusted for inflation it is the sixth highest in the United
States, while remaining the highest grossing movie worldwide). It also received
eleven Academy Awards. Over the course of the next few years he would become a
household name worldwide, synonymous with labels such as "teenage heart-throb"
and sex symbol. People placed him in their annual "Most Beautiful People"
issue on numerous occasions. At the peak of his celebrity in 1998, DiCaprio fronted
scores of magazine covers ranging from Vanity Fair to Rolling Stone,[2] and was
once the most searched for personality in the early years of the Internet. DiCaprio
agreed to play the spoof role of his real life "teen idol" persona during
this period, in Woody Allen's satirical parody, Celebrity. What came apropos with
fame were tales in the tabloids of excesses and indulgence. In the Japanese media,
he was referred to as Leo-sama (???), with the "sama" suffix given to
show the utmost respect. Time summed up the fame superhighway and its trappings
in an interview with the actor in 2000, reporting:
DiCaprio still thinks of himself as an edgy indie actor, not the Tiger Beat cover
boy. "I have no connection with me during that whole Titanic Phenomenon and
what my face became around the world," DiCaprio commented, adding, "I'll
never reach that state of popularity again, and I don't expect to. It's not something
I'm going to try to achieve either." Nonetheless,
the headlines and controversy failed to let up, peaking when he starred in a project
by Danny Boyle based on Alex Garland's backpacker cult classic The Beach that
year. Because of clashes with the Thai authorities over the use of the island
of Ko Phi Phi in 1999, the film garnered more bad press than expected. It was
reported that permission granted to the film company to physically alter the environment
inside Phi Phi Islands National Park was illegal. In the end, the film also did
not score as well as expected at the box office, losing mainstream commercial
appeal due to its content.
Critically acclaimed acting In
2002, DiCaprio began a shift away from his stereotypical image and moved to engage
himself with critically acclaimed directors by starring in two epic movies: Gangs
of New York (directed by Martin Scorsese), and Catch Me If You Can (directed by
Steven Spielberg).
Both films were very well received by critics. Forging a collaboration with Scorsese,
the two paired again for a biopic of American businessman Howard Hughes in The
Aviator, a film that scored DiCaprio a second Academy Award nomination, for Best
Actor. DiCaprio
continued his run with Scorsese (some claim him to be Scorsese's "new De
Niro") in the 2006 film The Departed as Billy Costigan, a smart undercover
cop in Boston. His next film was Blood Diamond, released on December 8, 2006.
While the film itself received mixed reviews, DiCaprio was praised for the authenticity
of his Zimbabwean Afrikaaner accent, known as a difficult accent of English to
emulate. He is also reported to have purchased the rights to Blink, Malcolm Gladwell's
book on the power and validity of first impressions, in order to produce a film
based on it. Cruise/Wagner
Productions, Tom Cruise's
film production company, is said to be developing a screenplay based on Erik Larson's
New York Times bestseller The Devil in the White City, about H. H. Holmes, a serial
killer at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Meanwhile, DiCaprio's production company,
Appian Way Productions, is also developing a film about Holmes and the World's
Fair, in which DiCaprio will star. In
2006, the Golden Globes and Broadcast Film Critics Association nominated DiCaprio
twice in the same category: Best Actor for Blood Diamond and The Departed, which
is an extremely rare honor for actors. Also in the same year, he received two
nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, a lead actor nomination for Blood
Diamond and a supporting actor nomination for The Departed. He earned an Oscar
nomination for lead actor in Blood Diamond and a BAFTA nod for lead actor for
The Departed. After
working in two Warner
Brothers films, DiCaprio will again star in a WB production for a film about
the collapse of Enron, based on the book Conspiracy of Fools. The film's script
is currently under negotiations. He
is also reportedly attached to a number of other upcoming projects, including
The Chancellor Manuscript, Stephen Gaghan’s Blink, a biopic of LSD-spokesperson
Professor Timothy Leary, and two projects in collaboration with Martin Scorsese,
Shutter Island, an adaptation of a novel by Dennis Lehane, and The Rise of Theodore
Roosevelt. All projects are in the developmental stages. On
March 22, 2007, DiCaprio signed on to re-team with his Titanic co-star, Kate Winslet,
on an adaptation of Richard Yates’s critically-lauded 1961 novel Revolutionary
Road. The film of the same name is being directed by Winslet’s husband,
Sam Mendes and was adapted for the screen by Justin Haythe. They are currently
shooting in New York
City. In
addition to an already impressive career, DiCaprio is currently ranked the 5th
Best Working Actor Today by The Screen Directory. In May 2007, DiCaprio was listed
among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in The World.
Personal life A
committed environmentalist, DiCaprio has received praise from environmental
groups for opting to fly on commercial flights instead of chartering private jets,
which use more fuel. He has also mentioned that he drives a hybrid car and that
his house has solar panels. His actions have inspired other celebrities, such
as Orlando Bloom and Penelope Cruz. In an article in Ukula about his new film
11th Hour (which he co-wrote, co-produced and narrated), DiCaprio cites global
warming as "the number one environmental challenge." DiCaprio and former
vice-president Al Gore announced at the 2007 Oscar
ceremony that the Oscars had incorporated environmentally intelligent practices
throughout the planning and production processes, thus affirming their commitment
to the environment. On July 7, 2007, DiCaprio presented at the American leg of
Live Earth.
During the 2004 Presidential election, DiCaprio campaigned and donated to John
Kerry's presidential bid. In
1998, he and his mother donated $35,000 for a state-of-the-art “Leonardo
DiCaprio Computer Center” at the Los Feliz branch of the Los Angeles Public
Library (1874 Hillhurst Avenue) which happens to be the site of his childhood
home. It was rebuilt after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and opened in early
1999. There are commemorative placards and curious fans are welcomed at the library. During
the filming of Blood Diamond, DiCaprio worked with 24 orphaned children from the
SOS Children's Village in Maputo, Mozambique, and was said to be extremely touched
by his interactions with the children. DiCaprio
owns a home in Los Angeles and an apartment in New York. He bought an island in
Belize where he is planning to create an eco-friendly resort. On
January, 2008, extradition processes began against Aretha Wilson, 37, who escaped
to Toronto, Canada after seriously injuring Leonardo DiCaprio with a broken beer
bottle at a June 20, 2005 Hollywood Hills party. She also has pending aggravated
assault cases. Awards
and nominations
Academy Award
* Nominated: Best Supporting Actor, What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)
* Nominated:
Best Actor, The Aviator (2004)
* Nominated: Best Actor, Blood Diamond (2006)
BAFTA Award
* Nominated: Best Actor, The Aviator (2005)
* Nominated: Best Actor, The Departed
(2007)
Golden Globe Award
* Nominated: Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture, What's Eating Gilbert Grape
(1994)
* Nominated: Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama, Titanic (1998)
* Nominated: Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama, Catch Me If You Can (2003)
* Won: Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama, The Aviator (2005)
* Nominated:
Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama, The Departed (2007)
* Nominated: Best Actor
- Motion Picture Drama, Blood Diamond (2007) (Credit:
Wikipedia). Websites Leonardo
DiCaprio official website Leonardo
DiCaprio Official Eco-site Official
MySpace Official
DiCaprio Environmental Eleventh Hour film site Internet
Movie Database Profiles The
11th Hour Live
Earth
Environmentalists and the environment Mediaman
does not represent Leonardo DiCaprio | 
