Leonardo DiCaprio is sparking dating rumours once again! The 48-year-old Oscar winner was spotted at a nightclub in Paris, reportedly partying with 28-year-old models Maya Jama and Rose Bertram.
Leonardo DiCaprio has had one hell of a career. Today, he’s best-known for his performance in such film as Titanic, Romeo + Juliet, The Wolf Of Wall Street and Inception – blockbusters that saw him work with the most decorated director’s in Hollywood and made him a household name in the process. But even at the height of his fame in 2003, Leo still found the time to pay tribute to the actor who convinced him to pursue acting as a career.
DiCaprio began his acting career in the late 1980s, appearing in television commercials before landing recurring roles in sitcoms like Parenthood. At 16, he auditioned for a role in the film version of The Outsiders, but didn’t get the part. It wasn’t until This Boy’s Life came along in 1993 that DiCaprio made his big-screen debut. A decade later, he spoke about the film during a Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony for one of America’s most revered actors.
“I remember the first time I saw Robert De Niro up on screen,” DiCaprio began. “I was 13 years old, and despite what I had learned at career day, I discovered that acting was in fact a profession. “My father and I went to see midnight run and I remember my father, at the beginning of the film, pointing to the screen and saying, ‘You see that guy up there? Now that guy is cool. His name is Rober De Niro. You wanna watch a great actor? You remember his face.”
Three years later, DiCaprio was “in the position where I needed him to remember my face.” He was in the final round of auditions for the lead in This Boys Life. “Now, before this critical audition, I watched as many of his films as I could, and I asked myself over and over again: what is the one quality that he would see in me that he would respect? And then it came to be – menace. I knew that I needed to walk into that audition and be a menacing force to be reckoned with.”
At that point, Leo and Robert were reading through one of the film’s most brutal scenes, in which De Niro’s character is “ramming a mustard jar into my eye and asking me repeatedly, ‘is it empty, is it empty?’ I knew this was my moment. I got up from the couch, looked him dead in the eye, pointed in his face and shouted at the top of my lungs, ‘noooo’. Silence. I knew that I had shaken this room up,” Leo continued. “This De Niro guy was stunned. And then it dawned on me. He wasn’t stone-faced because of my awe-inspiring performance; he was trying to contain his laughter. And the more he tried, the harder it became.
De Niro then gave Leo a bit of advice. He said: “‘Why don’t you try and take it down a notch?’” he told the young actor. “So I did – I took it down a notch. And I learned a valuable lesson that some things are good only to a certain degree.” So many years later, that now-established actor paid tribute to De Niro and thanked him for “taking a chance on me, for giving me the opportunity to work alongside you and observe the underlying mechanisms that make you the consummate actor of our time.”
