Leonardo DiCaprio and more than 20 years of waiting for the Oscar statuette

From the age of 20 until now, the actor born in 1974 has everything in his hands - career, money, fame, supermodel lovers - but only lacks a golden statue.

To escape the giant shadow of the most popular movie of all time is very difficult, even impossible for some people. Sam Worthington spent 8 years but still had no role enough to make the audience forget "This is the guy in Avatar". But Leonardo DiCaprio overcame the shadow of Jack in Titanic.

Nearly two decades since the film about the doomed ship broke all box office records and DiCaprio became the dream man of millions of girls, this actor has come a long way. DiCaprio's life and career are now so fulfilling that many fans joke that the Oscar jury is refusing to give him the golden statuette to... challenge him.

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

Out of Jack's Shadow

James Cameron’s blockbuster Titanic (1997) turned DiCaprio into a kind of “prince of princes” in the hearts of young girls. The image of the scholarly Jack, with his slicked-back hair and affectionate eyes at the end of the film has been associated with DiCaprio’s name for a long time.

When participating in a film of historical magnitude like Titanic (which grossed $1.8 billion and won 11 Oscars), an actor’s career can completely come to a dead end. The paradox comes from the fact that the film’s huge success will follow the actor until the end of his career and make him forever in the shadow of that film.

When Titanic was released, Leonardo DiCaprio was only 23 years old and quickly became the center of a fever called "Leo-Mania" not unlike when The Beatles first set foot in America in 1964. Everywhere DiCaprio was, girls went crazy and rushed to get their hands on their idol. DiCaprio himself shared that when he went to the Amazon forest to meet the natives in an environmental project, he was stunned when the naked natives pointed at him and whispered to each other: "DiCaprio. Titanic". Titanic truly brought DiCaprio's name to every "corner" on Earth. That was both an advantage and a great challenge for the career of the actor born in 1974.

Di Caprio once turned down an offer to star in the new Star Wars (in 1998), even though the blockbuster would surely earn hundreds of millions of dollars and keep him on the list of top stars. Instead, he waited for the opportunity to work with top directors and create memorable films.

“He wanted to prove himself, to show everyone that he deserved the success he had,” says Leo’s Titanic and later Revolutionary Road co-star Kate Winslet. “I understand that because I’ve felt the same way. When the bar is raised, you have to work 10 times harder to stay at the top.”

As a teenager, DiCaprio was obsessed with classics like Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now and told himself, “One day, I’m going to do something like this.” When he heard that veteran director Martin Scorsese was casting for Gangs of New York (2002), Leonardo DiCaprio immediately tried to get involved in the film. Leo played the leader of an Irish gang and through his performance he proved that he was more than just a pretty face.

After Gangs of New York, DiCaprio became the new "muse" of director Scorsese. If the best films from the 1970s to the 1990s such as Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas or Casino... by Scorsese were associated with the legendary Robert De Niro, then from the 21st century, De Niro's position was replaced by DiCaprio.

The Scorsese - DiCaprio duo has collaborated on a total of five films, including Gangs of New York, The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010) and most recently The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Although these films were not as commercially successful as Titanic, the content and DiCaprio's acting were enough to make the audience forget the scholarly painter Jack and gradually get used to the manly DiCaprio.

Sacrifice for “The Revenant”

The Telegraph called DiCaprio the number one actor in Hollywood that “no one, not even Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt or Matt Damon... can compare to”. Instead of having to wait for a good role, Leo has the privilege of being allowed to choose excellent directors to collaborate with. He once declared: “I would not be happy if I had to do something I did not feel passionate about. When my name alone is enough to get a film noticed, I have to set a standard for myself: 'I will only work with talented directors who can change the history of cinema.'”

For over a decade, Leo has collaborated with the world's leading filmmakers alongside Scorsese, from Steven Spielberg (Catch Me If You Can), Clint Eastwood (J. Edgar), Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained), Ridley Scott (Body of Lies) to Christopher Nolan (Inception). He has constantly shown transformations, from a cold-blooded diamond dealer in Blood Diamond (2006), a rogue slave owner in Django Unchained, a love-sick Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (2013) to a con man with a mouth as fast as a pyramid schemer in The Wolf of Wall Street...

Leo is willing to sacrifice for the role, with the motto "Pain is temporary, movies are forever" that he once shared at a press conference in Korea. At that time, he said: "I always try to devote everything I have and hope to have a great work of art". Those who are fans of DiCaprio have heard that he got so into the character of slave owner Candie in Django Unchained that he accidentally cut his hand while filming. Instead of stopping for medical attention, Leo continued acting with a bleeding hand, making no one in the film crew dare to stop him. Leo's hand was only stitched when he finished his dialogue and director Quentin Tarantino decided to keep the above-mentioned scene of great acting to include in the film.

Not only is he famous in Hollywood as a top actor, DiCaprio is also notable for his environmental protection activities and has met personally with influential figures such as Pope Francis, Russian President Putin and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Mon. At the age of 41, Leo is still the most attractive bachelor in Hollywood, having dated dozens of hot models such as Blake Lively, Gisele Bundchen, Bar Refaeli and Toni Garrn...

Leonardo DiCaprio's harrowing role in "The Revenant" is expected to bring him his first Oscar.

But that huge reputation... affected DiCaprio's chances of winning an Oscar, when he himself became a "brand". Among DiCaprio's acting Oscar nominations, the best role was probably the mentally handicapped boy Arnie Grape in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). At that time, Leo was still just an unknown boy, not the superstar he is today, and the audience simply paid attention to his acting. But over the years, no matter how well Leo acted, the audience still felt that his own shadow was bigger than the character.

Leo himself understood this when he decided to shed his handsome appearance to become a slovenly, dirty hunter in The Revenant. He played Hugh Glass - a real-life character who was abandoned by his fellow fur traders to die in a snowstorm. Instead of giving up on his fate, Glass returned from hell and sought revenge on the person who had harmed him.

The Revenant was directed by Alejandro Inarritu, a perfectionist like DiCaprio himself. Instead of using CGI, he forced the entire crew to “torture” themselves in the US, Canada and Argentina for nine months in “hellish” weather. The crew could only work for a few hours a day because Inarritu insisted on shooting only in natural light. “From the beginning, Alejandro had a groundbreaking idea to make a film that the audience had never experienced before,” DiCaprio said. “You can’t get that result if you don’t push the limits.”

The “limits” that DiCaprio mentioned here include him jumping shirtless into a river at -5 degrees, eating raw beef liver, cutting open a horse carcass to sleep in, and dragging his dirty body in -25 degrees weather. Viewers of The Revenant were able to forget about Leonardo-DiCaprio-the-actor and focus on the character Hugh Glass and his journey of revenge to gain salvation. The audience felt Glass’s pain and felt sorry for him, instead of remembering that they were watching superstar DiCaprio.

Oscar or not, Leonardo DiCaprio has surpassed himself with The Revenant. After more than 20 years, audiences still talk about Leonardo DiCaprio and his films with admiration, the way the teenage DiCaprio once admired his predecessors.

According to VnExpress