LEONARDO DICAPRIO

MOVIE BY MOVIE, THE ACTOR HAS CRAFTED A HOLLYWOOD CAREER THAT'S BUILT TO LAST— EVEN IN AN INDUSTRY DEFINED BY CHANGE

- - BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK, SIMMONE SHAH

AT 15, LEONARDO DICAPRIO SAT DOWN WITH A pile of rented VHS tapes and gave himself a crash course in movie history. He'd recently, and miraculously, landed his first major movie role, playing opposite Robert De Niro, and figured he'd better brush up on the classics, fast. He watched film after film, but no performance awed him more than the one James Dean gave in Elia Kazan's 1955 East of Eden, as Cal Trask, the rebellious son of a disapproving, rigidly principled, Bible-thumping father. Craving attention, he's a cutup, a jittery postadolescent clown, a kid perpetually showing off on the monkey bars; if only his yearning could be seared right out of him, the way a teenager burns off calories. Dean's Cal is simultaneously self-protective and exposed—the tenderness he needs is elusive, a nameless butterfly heartbeat he can hear in the dark but can't get close to.

DiCaprio could hardly believe the depth of Dean's onscreen vulnerability. As he says now, “Performances like that, that’s what’s intriguing to me. Showing that or exploring that, and not having that hardened shell.” Could he do that? Could he be that? By that point Dean had already been gone for 35 years, leaving behind only three credited film roles. And still, he’d unwittingly made an investment in the future of movies, and in an actor he’d never meet. As moviegoers or performers—or both—we have no way of knowing where ghosts will lead us, or of measuring their generosity.

DiCaprio, now 51, has built a career many of his peers would envy. In that first film, 1993's