A solar-powered house and a hybrid car. Leonardo DiCaprio is a Hollywood heartthrob who has never bought into the celebrity image. The 35-year-old's heart beats instead for the environment

Hollywood has never been short on fads colonic irrigation, dog massages, placenta facials, pet rocks (remember them?). For all its obsessive compulsion, the latest trend to come sweeping in like Malibu wildfire might actually be its most practical. Called the 100 Things Challenge, initiates are implored to subsist on a mere century of personal items in short, by giving away superfluous junk.



You can argue till the cows come home about how to quantify everything do the contents of your pants draw amount to "one" possession? How about that shelf of porcelain knick-knacks?

If there was an absolute given about the movement's celebrity converts, it's that Leonardo DiCaprio would be in the vanguard. Rumour has it he's set his own target at 150 items in order to hang on to some prized comic books inked by his illustrator father. When it comes to Tinseltown eco-friendliness, DiCaprio is The Man what with his Toyota Prius, his modest solar-powered Hollywood Hills home, his Live Earth activism or his planet-in-peril documentary The Eleventh Hour.

Even his personal website is a hybrid the right half devoted to his eco-site, the left bit an apology for the prosaic matter of film news. "It seems now more so than ever we're at a real tipping point," he trumpeted earlier this year, in full tree-hugging splendour. "Certainly global warming is at the forefront of a lot of people's minds. It's galvanised the younger generation more than any other movement in years. It's exciting."

For a man who trousers $20 million a picture, and has been known to take a Learjet or two in his time not to mention working in possibly the most profligate industry known to man this might seem rich. But DiCaprio is no mug. "I also realise people find it sort of patronising," he concedes. "It's not about telling anyone how to live. It's about saying, 'Let's all be aware of these issues.' It's a publicity game for the environment at the end of the day."

Currently, with a body of award-nominated work behind him that has been built on a solid partnership with venerable director Martin Scorsese (Gangs Of New York, The Aviator, The Departed), DiCaprio swings from the top of the Hollywood tree. To boot, he recently reunited with old screen flame Kate Winslet on the suburban drama Revolutionary Road, frolicking around as if the pair were back below decks, simulating carefree coitus in the cargo hold.

What's hardest to credit is that old baby-face turns 35 in November, halfway to his allotted three score years and ten. Age is "just another number," he may dismiss but such is the luxury for one who, despite a little beefing up, might still conceivably get ID-ed were he to load up his shopping trolley with alco-pops (the frequenting of supermarkets being not entirely alien in the frugal world of DiCaprio, the actor known to be a discount card-carrier at Ralph's, the American equivalent of Morrison's).

DiCaprio and Kate Winslet at the European Film Premiere of Revolutionary Road

As late as 2002, he was playing a teenager in Steven Speilberg's con man caper, Catch Me If You Can. "In this business, we get to perpetuate being young or old for as long as we want," he quipped. "That's the great thing about doing movies."

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.

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