Life Of Leonardo DiCaprio

He gained international fame for his role as Jack Dawson in Titanic, and has starred in many other successful films including Romeo + Juliet, Catch Me If You Can, Inception and Blood Diamond, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Another Academy Award nomination came for his role as Howard Hughes in The Aviator, directed by Martin Scorsese. He has also worked with Scorsese in Gangs of New York, The Departed, and Shutter Island. This working partnership brought comparison to the earlier working relationship between Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro, who also benefited from roles in Scorsese films early in his career.
DiCaprio was born in Los Angeles, California, the only child of Irmelin (née Indenbirken), a former legal secretary, and George DiCaprio, an underground comic artist and producer/distributor of comic books. His mother moved from Oer-Erkenschwick at the Ruhr, Germany, to the U.S. during the 1950s, while his father is a fourth-generation American of half Italian and half German descent. His maternal grandmother, Helene Indenbirken, who was born Yelena Smirnova, was a Russian immigrant to Germany. His paternal grandmother, Olga Anne Jacobs, was also German-born. DiCaprio's parents met while attending college together and subsequently moved to Los Angeles. He was named Leonardo because his pregnant mother was looking at a Leonardo da Vinci painting in a museum in Italy when DiCaprio first kicked. His parents divorced when he was a year old and he lived mostly with his mother, although his father was around intermittently. During his childhood, DiCaprio was interested in baseball cards, comic books, and frequently visited museums with his father.