Leonardo DiCaprio (Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio, born 11 November 1974) is an American actor and film producer known for leading roles in Titanic, Inception, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Revenant. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Revenant in 2016 after several earlier nominations. He is also an environmental campaigner, who founded the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in 1998 and was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2014. This biography follows his life and career up to November 2026.
Leonardo DiCaprio at a Glance
| Full name | Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio |
| Born | 11 November 1974, Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Age | 51 (as of 10 November 2026) |
| Profession | Actor, film producer and environmental activist |
| Breakthrough | What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Oscar nomination at 19 |
| Academy Award | Best Actor, The Revenant (88th Academy Awards, 28 February 2016) |
| Golden Globe Awards | Three |
| Foundation | Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (founded 1998) |
| UN role | Messenger of Peace for climate change (2014) |
Early Life
DiCaprio was born in Los Angeles, the only child of George DiCaprio, an American underground comics artist and distributor, and Irmelin Indenbirken, a legal secretary who was born in Germany. He began acting as a child and appeared in television commercials and shows before moving into films. In 1991 he joined the cast of the sitcom Growing Pains for its final season.
Breakthrough in the 1990s
DiCaprio won critical attention for playing a boy with an intellectual disability in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the age of 19. In 1997 he played Jack Dawson in James Cameron's Titanic, which became the highest-grossing film of its time with more than $2.1 billion worldwide. He was not nominated for an Oscar for it, a snub that drew a protest from more than 200 fans.
Working with Scorsese and Nolan
From 2002 DiCaprio worked repeatedly with Martin Scorsese on Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon. He also starred in Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010), which grossed $836 million worldwide, and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). He won a Golden Globe for The Wolf of Wall Street and received Oscar nominations for The Aviator, Blood Diamond and the later Tarantino film.
The Revenant and Recent Films
At the 88th Academy Awards on 28 February 2016, DiCaprio won Best Actor for playing the frontiersman Hugh Glass in The Revenant, which won Best Director for Alejandro González Iñárritu and Best Cinematography on the same night. He returned in 2025 in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, for which he was nominated for Best Actor at the 98th Academy Awards on 15 March 2026. The film won Best Picture, while Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for Sinners.
Environmental Work
DiCaprio founded the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in 1998, and it works on biodiversity, wildlands conservation, ocean conservation and climate change. In 2014 the United Nations named him a Messenger of Peace with a focus on climate change. He produced, hosted and narrated the climate documentary Before the Flood (2016) and in 2019 co-founded the conservation group Earth Alliance with Laurene Powell Jobs and Brian Sheth.
Personal Life
DiCaprio keeps his private life out of the public eye and has never married.
Legacy
DiCaprio is admired for the range of his roles and for the way he has used his fame to draw attention to conservation. His relationship with Scorsese is one of the most productive pairings in modern American cinema, and his long wait for an Oscar became part of film history before he won it in 2016.
