As long as we believe,
Nothing can come between,
The dreamer and his dream!

From The Juice.net, 1995:

So who else is throwing their vote behind Leonardo DiCaprio, the 20-year-old from the 'burbs of L.A, as the sexiest of the new Hollywood actors? Not Leonardo, that's for sure. "I don't want to talk about it," he says, squirming in his seat in this low-rent eatery. "What about the intellectual aspect of an actor preparing for his role? Doesn't that interest you?"

Well, sure. But the point to make up front in this: more than any of DiCaprio's pretty-boy contemporaries, this boy looks like he'd really enjoy - excuse me being indelicate - he'd really enjoy a good fuck. What's the competition? Brad Pitt? Too one-dimensional. Ethan Hawke? Too sensitive. Stephen Dorff? Too arrogant. Keanu Reeves? Too dumb. Eddie Furlong? Too... well... young.

DiCaprio has an aura of wild intelligence which reaches beyond the phenomenal acting talent displayed in films like This Boy's Life, What's Eating Glibert Grape? and the up-coming Basketball Diaries. And he's the only actor who's managed to carry that out of the bland netherworld of teen hunkdom. It has very little to do with what he looks like, although what he looks like doesn't hurt his chances one bit. At 140 pounds on a six-foot frame, he's a pretty face (he ony has to shave once a week) on a stick-thin frame, a male waif who nonethelss stares out at you with a Saturday-night-fuck-or-fight look which is borne out in the whispers of his escapades in the gossip columns of the daily newspapers.

And amidst the gossip is the impression of immense vulnerability he leaves on his co-workers. Sharon Stone, his lead in The Quick and the Dead, described him as a "rare and delicate flower." Lorraine Bracco, who plays his mother in The Basketball Diaries, said he was "as vulnerable as any flower that God's given us."

DiCaprio began his acting life as the vulnerable street urchin Luke in the sickly-sweet sitcom Growing Pains. "When I was doing Growing Pains I had quite a teen following," he says. "For a while, I was third in fan mail or something. I don't like that. All that teen stuff - being in teen magazines and being Hunk of the Month - annoys me, because they bring you in like a piece of meat: 'Here's the next cute kid of the month - his stars, his favourite colour, blah, blah, blah...'

"It annoys me because it can ruin a kid's career. I mean, if someone's trying to be an actor and he gets the teen-hunk Hollywood image following him, not many people are going to want to hire him because after he's faded out he's just washed away. It's not fair to people. But then again, you have to be smart and you have to know what your longevity is in your own mind, and you have to pick good roles."

Yeah - what did happen to Kirk Cameron, teen-hunk Number One from Growing Pains? Or, for that matter, what happened to Scott Baio? And has anyone noticed whether Joey Lawerence is still around? DiCaprio's longevity, in comparison to those who have trodden the same path, is extraordinary. Generally used as window-dressing to pull in younger female viewers, the afterlife of most teen hunks is played out on makeshift stages in shopping malls. To bring it closer to home, Guy Pearce looked to have little choice but to dress up in a frock following his departure from neighbours - it was dumb luck that The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was suck a freak hit, paving the way for Pearce to become a gay pin-up boy. Hey, it's better than nothing.

DiCaprio put his success down to choice: "I look for scripts which have a certain kind of truth to speak, a message about life," he says. "It's easy in this business to let common sense slip away from you, and it's important to hang on to your sense of who you are."

He's given to these sweeping statements of moral and ideological purity. And if you ignore his role in Critters 3 ("Oh God!" he exclaims. "Why does everyone know about that! It drives me mad, it drives me nuts! no Critters!") his celluloid history can pretty much back them up. Pretty much. Let's bypass The Quick and the Dead - its name pretty much sums up its shelf-life in American cinemas. "It's a big commercial production," says DiCaprio, "and commercial films tend not to be original or take risks. But I hadn't worked for a year, so I said yes to it." Instead, let's talk about him playng bisexual junkie hustler in The Basketball Diaries. Or his follow-up to that, playing a drug-fucked, queer-loving Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse. Or his follow-up to that, being slated to play James Dean, American cinema's favourite bisexual son. Asked about all of these bisexual roles, he says: "It just seems to come up in films I'm interested in."

Fair enough. So when did you lose your virginity?

There is a steely silence. "That's actually a very private question," he says finally. "I don't want to talk about it."

Leonardo DiCaprio was born on Noember 11, 1974, the only child of Irmelin and Geroge DiCaprio, who seperated during Irmelin's pregnancy. She was a German immigrant, reportedly born in a German bomb shelter during World War II. She grew up poor and sick, and left Germany at the age of 11.

DiCaprio still lives with his mother in Los Felix, L.A. Growing up though, he spent a fair amount of time with George (although his parents are separated, they never divorced). George and Irmelin met in New York, then they went to L.A. in the early '70's, escaping the New York underground where George had shared an apartment with the Velvet Underground's Sterling Morrison and dated Laurie Anderson (now the girlfriend of Lou Reed). He was working as a distributor of underground comics, tattoo magazines and beatnik books to bookstores.

Leo grew up surrounded by counter-culture icons. Abbie Hoffman's son, America, was a good friend. Charles Bukowski was a neighbour. Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb were frequent house guests. Surrounded by adults who made a living out of rebelling against social mores, young Leonardo had to find his own way to make a mark.

"I was really more of a performer," he says now, "but performing like that in school did make me popular. Sometimes it backfired in my face and they'd turn on me and say, 'Hey, you just want attention, why don't you just shut up.' And I did a lot of impressions, that was my big thing. I would imitate people in front of my friends. I guess I was already creating characters... But I became serious about acting when I was 14. Then it became about the work, not the attention.

Despite this, playing the class fool was vey much about attention for DiCaprio. "It was in my nature, " he says. "I wanted attention more than any other kid. Even if I didn't know what the hell I was saying, I would raise my hand to answer a question, just so everyone would look at me."

The idea to take up acting came about when he realised rebellion just wasn't working for him. "Whatever I did would be something my parents had already done," he explains. "I mean, my dad would welcome it if I got a nose ring." His passion at that time was for oceanography, something that still has meaning for him. "I'd like to help the whales, the otters and the dolphins. I was really fascinated by them for a while, and I wanted to study them and look into them because there's so much to learn about all that. When I'm acting and I want to take a break, that's the first thing on my list, spending time by the sea."

Then his elder step-brother Adam landed a part in a cereal ad, Leo saw the pay check and re-evaluated his career. Back then, his mum was working as a legal sectretary and they were living in a small hourse in Echo Park, the lower middle class heart of Los Angeles. Even at that tender age, Leonardo was faced by the demands of Hollywood. And even at that age, he stared them down, preferring to do things on his own terms. He still remembers the time when an agent asked him to change his name.

"Lenny Williams!" he says. "They wanted to call me Lenny Williams. I didn't want to be called that. They said my name was too ethinic. I mean, I already look like a full-blooded German boy, and my name shows my Italian roots, and I'm not going to back away from that. I was ten or something. I just said no."

He was also realistic about his job prospects in the world's most fickle industry. "I always wanted to become an actor, but I knew there wasn't a very high success rate as far as actors go - most people can't make a living out of it," he says. "So I decided I wanted to and I would carry it as long as I could. And it just kept on getting better and better. I decided that if I ever got sick of acting I could go on to something else... but now I've matured and I know it's something I want to do for the rest of my life."

This is what Liz Smith, notorious New York gossip columnist, had to say about Leonardo DiCaprio whilst the lad was in town filming The Basketball Diaries: "He seldom sleeps, so intense is his partying." This is what one of the principles on the set of the same film said when DiCaprio consistently fudged his lines in one scene: "He could have memorised the speech last night if he wasn't out club hopping." This is what the word-about-town said of the young actor's behaviour after hours: Bar room brawls, they whispered. Heroin use!

This is what DiCaprio has to say about the situation: "I wasn't using heroin and I wasn't getting into brawls." End of story. He suspects the rumours about young-actors-about-town using heroin and beating people up started around the time River Pheonix ingested a few too many drugs that evening at the Viper Room. He knows it's a misconception.

And having said that, he's gone and accepted a part which parallels neatly River Pheonix's role as a narcoleptic junkie hustler in My Own Private Idaho. The Basketball Diaries is based on Jim Carroll's 1978 autobiography of the same name. Combining poetry, basketball and heroin - the three big themes of the '90s - the film, which co-stars former Calvin Klein pin-up boy Marky Mark (who is surprisingly good as one of Carroll's friends), eschews some of the more lurid eroticism of the book, although the same can't be said about the violence. Whilst we get to see Leo beaten senseless by a disappointed drug client, the moment when he starts turning gay tricks for money is watered down through his character's disgust at his own actions - in the book, a series of excerpts from the author's '60s diary, Carroll found the experience a bit of a turn-on.

While director Scott Kalvert - a video clip graduate - gives the early, pre-junk scenes vitality, his treatment of Carroll's cold turkey are ham-fisted and predictable. Nonetheless, DiCaprio's portrayal of Carroll is incredibly well-etched, with more natural acting ability than most of his collegues put into an entire movie.

The film acts as a follow-up to This Boy's Life, where the young Leo was beaten senseless by Robert DeNiro and enjoyed a kiss with a boy. Despite this, he doesn't want anybody making a big deal about the sexual preferences of his characters. "I'm not a spokesperson on any of it, really, and I'm not a practicing - I'm not a part of that," he says. "I just want to do some pretty crazy stuff - play a lizard man. I like what Gary Oldman did in True Romance. That kind of stuff."

"I don't have a problem with doing a film about a relationship of love with another man," he qualifies later. "That's just acting, do you now what I mean? But as far as the kissing stuff, that's really hard for me, I'm not kidding. But I've faced the fact that I'm going to have to do it, and I'm going to do it because I supposedly love the guy."

And has he ever done it in real life?

"I'm not uncomfortable," DiCaprio laughs. "No, I've never kissed a guy. But when I have to do that scene, I'll tell you want I'm going to do. I'm going to go in there, and I'm going to walk over to him, and I'm going to stick my tongue down his fucking throat and probably swerve it around a bit. That's it, end of story. On that day I will have fears or qualms about it."

Does he have any vices?

"I'm a good person, but you don't want me to be good," he says. "you want me to be corrupt, a little Hollywood brat. If we're talking about my devious side, I like to pick fights. If I see a weakness in somebody, it's fun for me to pick at it and see a side they wouldn't normally show. If I were to meet you in a bar, I would probably be rude to you. I don't like being an adult all the time."

It can be off-putting, this sudden switch to confessional mode, especially when DiCaprio's confessing something he shouldn't be proud of. Asked for an example of this penchant for punch-ups in practice, he mumbles, "I sort of got into a fight in L.A. a couple of months ago..."

Uh huh...

"I really was looking for a fight, and I sort of hurt the kid a little bit. It was a mistake, and I felt so guilty afterward."

Strangely, when it comes to talking about girls, DiCaprio is a little more circumspect. Yes, he does have a girlfriend, and no, he's not going to say what her name is. He learned how to put moves on women from Alan Thicke, who played the father in Growing Pains. As to which moves they may be precisely, he's keeping very quiet. He describes groupies as "one of the nice things about the game of movies" but is scornful of them trying to out-cool him. "Girls approach me damn well knowing who I am, and pretend like they don't." he says. One assumes he doesn't do much more than walk away from such women.

Anyway, there's only so much you can do when you live with your mum. For roughly half the year they share a two-bedroom place with his Rottweiler, inappropriately named Baby. The other half of the year he's working. Their place is decorated in black leather, chrome and leopard-skin prints. His bedroom's as messy as any other 20-year-old guy's, crowded with toys, a large TV, a Nintendo system, a modest book collection, a Salvador Dali clock by the bed and african masks hanging on the walls.

He doesn't get an allowance: "What allowance? I'm in control of my own money. Nobody could tell me how to spend it. I bought a Cherokee Jeep when I turned 18, and I could go ahead and buy a house now if I wanted to..."

But of course, he doesn't want to. He likes living with mum. "It's nice to be taken care of," he says, "to not come home to a cold place. I have my mother and my Rottweiler, and I can kiss 'em both."

If there is a way of summing up this boy's life, it'd be by saying that Leonardo DiCaprio the actor would rather fuck with your head than with your girlfriend. He's balanced enough in himself, helped in no small part by the ongoing support of his family and friends. "My parents and friends are still treating me the same way, and that's good. I like that, because I'd feel really alienated if my mother or my dad or my friends started kissing my ass - I wouldn't want to act as if that's going to happen.

"My friends are still the same, even after they've seen the movies. They think I'm talented and they thing it's great, and that's it. It's just a phase in my life, but as far as my career goes, that's a different story. What's happening to me is a big deal as far as my career goes, but in life I have to put it in perspective. I don't think I'm going to change as a human being just because of that. But as an actor I'm sure going to have more confidence now."

And having said that, he will proceed to fuck with our head. One reporter once found himself sharing quality time at a Hollywood eatery with DiCaprio when the young actor picked up the teapot on the tabe and began to pore the hot water out of it, all over the street. Then he picked up a glass of water on the table and poured that out too. Then he began picking up bits of dessert off his plate and throwing them out into the street. "You know," he told the guy at the time, "I do shit like that all the time. It's impulsive. I don't know where it comes from."

"The thing I like to do is to get into different characters," says DiCaprio, and I'm not entirely sure whether he's talking about the movies or reality. "And you find with each one there are things that make you uncomfortable. That's the part I like, to get past the unease."

Unlike everyone else on the face of the planet, DiCaprio distinguishes between acting in Hollywood films and being a star (a luxury, I might add, that only Hollwood stars can afford). "Who cares about being a star?" he says. "I don't care about that. I mean, they can make anyone a star - just put a little make-up on them, get a music video out... But being an actor is very different - and that's what I'm concerned about. I want to be an actor. and I know that if I keep doing good films with good people, people will still be interested in me."

From Juice.net