How Leonardo DiCaprio was shaped by three iconic actors: “I remember every single detail”
In our woeful age of social media addiction and excessive meme-making, Leonardo DiCaprio has become quite the popular figure.
While people love to joke about the actor’s penchant for women in their 20s, a decade ago, DiCaprio meme-makers decided it was about time they used their rotted brains to desperately campaign for him to win an Oscar, and he actually did. He finally took home the ‘Best Actor’ accolade donning a horse carcass in The Revenant, although he didn’t need a golden statuette to prove his legacy as one of Hollywood’s reigning stars.
Even before he had reached adulthood, DiCaprio was busy building his legendary status by impressing critics and audiences as the intellectually disabled and heartbreaking Arnie in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and high schooler courting lost potential in The Basketball Diaries. The sheer emotional weight of playing complex characters with disabilities and addiction so young is no easy feat, but he did so with a sense of maturity and understanding that contrasted his floppy-haired teen heartthrob image.
But where would such introspective turns come from without the influence of several actors who have shaped his approach to his craft? There are three stars in particular who the actor named for encouraging DiCaprio to become an icon, including one of his close friends and collaborators, Kate Winslet.
The pair first worked together on Titanic, the megawatt blockbuster which propelled both actors to worldwide stardom. James Cameron’s saga of a ship on its maiden voyage meeting an iceberg was one of the biggest cinematic sensations that Hollywood had ever seen, a true phenomenon of epic emotional weight, and here, the two leads formed a friendship that would carry DiCaprio through the industry, if not the Atlantic Sea. The pair have always had each other’s backs, it seems, and DiCaprio even walked Winslet down the aisle.
Citing Winslet as one of his favourite actors of all time, DiCaprio reunited with her in 2008 for Revolutionary Road, and as much as their roads have diverged, with the former even taking on and winning over TV viewers with Mare of Easttown and the latter voicing documentaries, the pair are hopeful for future collaborations.
Meanwhile, DiCaprio also cites elder statemen like Robert De Niro, where you might even argue that he is the De Niro of the modern era, carrying the torch that the classic leading man lit back in the 1970s during the New Hollywood era. They first worked together when DiCaprio was a teenager on This Boy’s Life, which proved to be an incredibly important lesson for the budding star, who remembered the experience of working with an acting legend at such a young age.
He once told Time Out, “I was 15 years old, and I remember every single detail. Everything was so new to me. Watching Robert De Niro on set, seeing his dedication, was one of the most influential experiences of my life.”
Then there’s the legend that is Meryl Streep, with whom he also worked when he was emerging to acclaim during the 1990s on the film Marvin’s Room. Like De Niro, she proved to have the skills to inspire DiCaprio to greatness, and he revealed how incredible it was to learn from her in a 2010 interview with Esquire.
He concluded, “I was 18 when I got to work with Meryl. I remember going over my lines with her off-camera, looking at her and thinking to myself, ‘What is going on here? How is this going to look good?’ Then, when I sat in the theatre, it was, ‘Oh, my God, she’s the only person who looks completely natural’. Meryl may be the greatest actor in the world.”
