Louise Chipley Slavicek - Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo DiCaprio attends the AFI Fest 2011 Opening Night Gala Premiere of his film J. Edgar, held at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood on November 3, 2011.

Source: Shutterstock: s_bukley.

Few people, let alone DiCaprio himself, could have imagined he would attain the extraordinary professional and financial success he enjoys today when he was still a child living with his divorced mother in some of Los Angeles's poorest, most crime-ridden areas. "I grew up in a drug-infested neighborhood," he recalled in an interview with writer Dotson Rader in 2009: "I'd see pushers peddling drugs, and prostitutes on drugs. It was pretty terrifying." Inspired to try his luck at acting after his older stepbrother started appearing in television commercials, DiCaprio persuaded his parents to take him to dozens of auditions before he was finally hired as a pitchman for Matchbox cars at age 14. Small parts in television series, educational films, and a straight-to-video, low-budget horror movie followed, until DiCaprio got his first big break in 1992 when he was chosen over several hundred other young hopefuls to star with acting legend Robert De Niro in the coming-of-age drama This Boy's Life.

In 1997, 22-year-old DiCaprio attained international heartthrob status playing the handsome and heroic Jack Dawson in Titanic, the highest-grossing movie in history until Avatar surpassed it in 2010. Suddenly DiCaprio was a hot commodity in Hollywood. DiCaprio, who had focused on less commercial "art house" films before making Titanic, was flooded with lucrative movie offers, including starring roles in the newest Star Wars and Spider-man films. But DiCaprio has no interest in making mainstream Hollywood movies. Even if it meant taking the occasional hiatus from acting, he was determined to accept only those parts he thought would help him expand his range as an actor. "Choosing movies is the one thing in my life where there's no compromising," DiCaprio recently confided to Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone magazine. "I would be too miserable on a set doing something that I don't believe in."

DiCaprio is clearly very serious about his acting career. Yet he also feels compelled to use the worldwide celebrity and substantial personal fortune his movie career has brought him to work for a variety of humanitarian and environmental causes. "I'm in a position to make a difference, and I really want to. Not only for the future of mankind, but for all living things," he told Scholastic Action magazine in 2006. DiCaprio is particularly committed to promoting green energy and sustainability; public awareness of the causes and dangers of global warming; and the protection of endangered animal species. Over the past decade, he has created his own nonprofit environmental foundation; funded, coproduced, and narrated several environmental documentaries; and donated millions of dollars to a variety of environmental endeavors, including most recently the Save Tigers Now campaign, which he launched in 2010 in conjunction with the World Wildlife Fund.

"I hope I never get cynical," DiCaprio declared in an interview for Parade magazine in 2008:

I think you need youthful energy, excitement, and optimism in life. There is a lot I want to do, and the more cynical you become, the more you sit on your butt and do nothing. The one thing that I would love is to never become cynical about the things I think are really important, like family, like the environment. What I want is to be known as someone who stood for something.

Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio was born on November 11, 1974, in Los Angeles, California. Almost exactly three months earlier, the Watergate scandal had led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the first (and to date) only presidential resignation in U.S. history. Popular films that year included