Leonardo DiCaprio names the most iconic star in cinema history: “Out of any actor”
Having worked with a laundry list of legends on either side of the camera during a career stretched over more than 30 years, Leonardo DiCaprio is in a pretty solid position to pass judgment on Hollywood’s ultimate icons.
Of course, his credentials are solidified by the fact he’s also one of the industry’s biggest stars, a status he’s held for nearly three decades. DiCaprio doesn’t make a huge number of movies compared to many of his peers, but when he does, it’s almost guaranteed that he’ll be working with the best.
He can count Robert De Niro, Johnny Depp, Gene Hackman, Martin Scorsese, Daniel Day-Lewis, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Ridley Scott, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt, James Cameron, and Kate Winslet among his former collaborators, which makes for an incredible roster of top-tier talent.
That’s only a fraction of the superstars, game-changers, revolutionaries, Academy Award winners, and box office behemoths he’s either acted opposite or been directed by, so it carries plenty of weight when DiCaprio singles out one performer as having a wider range of iconic, indelible, and unforgettable moments onscreen than anyone else.
It’s one of the loftiest tags that can be placed upon anybody in the business, but when DiCaprio was awarding it to someone who branded themselves as the single most successful star that Hollywood has ever seen and was capable of backing it up, then his candidate doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
“Out of any actor, I can’t think of anyone who’s got more memorable moments in cinema than Jack Nicholson,” he said. “Jack never takes a single line straight on. Never takes an emotion written in the script at face value. He brings terror into what you thought was supposed to be a light moment and makes a light moment out of a cutthroat vicious line. He flips everything on its side.”
The two shared the screen in Scorsese’s ‘Best Picture’ winner, The Departed, a performance that saw Nicholson dipping into the very bag of tricks that had left DiCaprio so impressed. When he wasn’t randomly whipping out sex toys in the name of improvisation or considering committing arson to enhance a scene, he knew how to play the quiet moments loud and the loud moments quietly.
He’s the most-nominated male actor in Oscars history for a reason, and what defined his longevity was his ability to do almost everything. Drama, comedy, thrillers, biopics, romance, fantasy, sci-fi, and comic book adaptations were all within Nicholson’s wheelhouse, and even if anyone disagrees with DiCaprio calling him cinema’s most iconic actor of all time, any list that doesn’t have him hovering somewhere near the top isn’t worth the paper it was written on.
