'I'm not telling people how to live'

I first met Leonardo DiCaprio in 1996. Or rather, one should say, "encountered" for such was the impossibility, even then, of penetrating the wall of an actor for whom giving nothing away has since become an art form.
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Deep in the heart of colourful, crazy Mexico City, shooting the funked-up Shakespeare, Romeo + Juliet, it was left to excitable Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann to chirrup the superlatives about young Leo (nobody, but nobody, calls him Leonardo).

Hailed as one of the new breed of earnest young thesps, there seemed little evidence of DiCaprio's preference for the Method, supposedly acquired from just having made a movie with Robert De Niro. Here, his only demand was that mid-way through a huge set-piece a masked ball attended by the Montagues and Capulets someone might fetch him a bowl of restorative, mid-afternoon cornflakes.

Tall (six-foot-one), adolescently skinny, then just 21, DiCaprio was quirkily handsome, but someway adrift of Matinee Idol. How wrong could one be? Less than 18 months later, DiCaprio was a doomed Romeo again, headlining Titanic, the most successful screen epic of all time. Teenage girls screamed his name, Leo-mania was in full swing. It was everything, you imagined, that a young actor dreamed of.

But no. "Fame comes at a terrible price," he mused in the film's aftermath. "After Titanic, my life was being turned over, on public display, without me having any control... I was portrayed as the world's No 1 poster boy, a heartthrob. It wasn't what I wanted to be." Along the highway labelled Actor, he had inadvertently zipped off on the exit marked Film Star. He would never make that mistake again. And which is why the films afterwards have not bought into the celebrity image, whether as The Aviator's reclusive millionaire, Howard Hughes, as the Rhodesian mercenary of Blood Diamond, or the forthcoming supernatural thriller, Shutter Island (again with Scorsese), as a 1950s US marshal.

DiCaprio's girlfriend, model Bar Refaeli pics/Dan Kitwood, Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images

Titanic's sudden tabloidisation of DiCaprio's life had a profound affect. No interview since has been complete without reference to him scuttling off the minute he has discharged his obligation, pulling on his baseball cap and shades his "anti-paparazzi repellent" to speed off into the sunset. To which end, his green campaigning has become a useful foil, enabling him to run down the clock with meditations on pal Al Gore, the eco-island he bought off Belize, or his personal patronage of Greensburg, Kansas, a town he helped re-found after it had been flattened by a tornado.

"The more you define who you are personally, the less you are able to submerge into the characters you do," is his professional mantra. Though one would be forgiving were he just to come out slugging, like some of his contemporaries.

Born in Los Angeles, DiCaprio lived part of his youth a stone's throw from the footprints outside Mann's Chinese Theatre. But DiCaprio was never your typical Hollywood kid. Save for some alleged Entourage-type behaviour in his twenties, when he, magician David Blaine and actor pal Tobey Maguire were said to have styled themselves the Pussy Posse (which he denies), DiCaprio quit the party scene to squire Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bu00fcndchen. They were a couple for three years.

Rather than the all-American boy of popular perception, this only child of divorced parents has roots deep in the heart of Old Europe his father, George DiCaprio, of Italian extraction; his mother, Irmelin Indenbirken, who brought him up, being a native of Germany by way of Russian lineage. As legend has it, the name Leonardo was hit upon when Frau Indenbirken felt her first in utero kicks while mooching around Florence's Uffizi gallery.

DiCaprio carries the middle name Wilhelm, and was extremely close to his grandmother (his "Oma"), Helene his "barometer of truth" who died in August at the grand old age of 93.

A semi-hippie youth was spent in LA's Echo Park, a neighbourhood since gentrified, but then a den of crack cocaine, heroin and prostitution. "I would walk to my playground and see a guy open up his trenchcoat with a thousand syringes inside," he recalled once. "I saw some major homosexual activity from my friend's balcony when I was five. I saw all sorts of stuff at an early age."

Acting intrigued DiCaprio, but it seemed the preserve of the Beverly Hills set. "I didn't know you could just go out and get an agent and go on auditions, I thought it was like a Masonic thing," he remembered, as a kid he had ended up in some commercials. By 13, he had cracked the process. "I realised it was the one thing I know I want to do for the rest of my life." Via a stint in a sitcom, he quit school at 16 to pursue his trade full-time, achieving early notices with films like This Boy's Life, The Basketball Diaires and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, for which he was Oscar-nominated playing an autistic youth. The rest, as they say, is history.

Greater focus of late seems to have fallen on his love life again now that one of the world's most eligible bachelors linked in the past with beauties like Eva Herzigova, Helena Christensen, Cameron Diaz and Demi Moore, as well as Bu00fcndchen may at last be looking to settle down. The object of his affection in recent months has been stunning 24-year-old Israeli model, Bar Refaeli, who is said to have moved into his new, spectacular waterfront apartment in New York. The pair, often seen at LA Lakers basketball games, have reportedly met each other's families. Some have hinted at wedding bells. Though with daily break-up rumours there too, the only certainty is that, when it comes to Leo, the path of true love never runs smooth.

DiCaprio won't talk any of this, of course. "People seem to make up stuff anyway." But maybe the prospect of turning 35 has had an impact after all. "I was thinking how little of my life has been lived normally and not spent on some far-off movie location," he reflected. "I absolutely believe in marriage. Yes, I want to get married and have children... We're all after love, aren't we? Love is what people are hungry for."

On the science-fiction film he's currently shooting in London, Inception, he has been accompanied by the inevitable tabloid foisting upon Leo of rumoured away-from-home comfort, this time in the shape of Anne Vyalitsyna, another swimsuit model. But Refaeli is said to be furnishing the Manhattan waterfront apartment he has purchased for them a special carbon-neutral structure, naturally. Who knows what will happen? At the very least, when it comes to totting up those domestic items, he and Refaeli will be able to double up on the inventory

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