He's the ultimate mystery man. He repeatedly refuses interview requests, doesn't sit for a lot of photo shoots, and his fans have had to satisfy their appetities with his movies and with gossip items from his fellow actors and coworkers. Until now. seventeen has tracked down Leonardo DiCaprio's teachers, costars and colleagues to reveal the man behind the media crush.
First things first: Leonardo had no interest in starring in a blockbuster like Titanic.
And certainly not as the romantic lead. He has made a career out of choosing gritty, quirky roles in independent films like What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (which won him an Oscar nomination in 1993 for playing Johnny Depp's mentally disabled brother) and Marvin's Room (where he played a pyromaniac teenager.) Even his romantic turn in the modernized William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet had a tortured edge. So he was still reluctant when he agreed to meet with Titanic director James Cameron and would-be costar Kate Winslet.
"Jim said that Leo walked in, slumped down in a seat in the screening room and had a cigarette," says casting director Mali Finn. "He just kind of listened and was very laid-back. Jim later said, 'I didn't want to cast him. I thought, Is he not interested in this role?' And then Jim asked him to read some scenes. He said, 'Leo sat up and came to life. He just gave so much in that little reading.' Afterward Kate said, 'If you don't give me the part, you have to give it to him.'"
A smile spreads across Finn's face at the recollection. "He's one of those young men who doesn't want to be a movie star. With Leonardo, it's about the work. He really wants to be known for his acting, not for his looks."
But his looks helped make him bankable. Movie studios now know that the boyish 23-year-old star can sell tickets--many Titanic fans have seen the movie five or six times. But even multiple viewings of Titanic did not give fans enough Leo. They grabbed every available seat when The Man in the Iron Mask opened in March. This double dose of Leo makes him the movie star of 1998, reportedly driving his asking price from $2.5 million (for Titanic) to $20 million.
What's his secret? Leonardo is a thinking, sensitive girl's heartthrob. He exudes a vulnerability that girls crave. "There are so many dimensions to him," says Finn. "There's a gentleness, as in Gilbert Grape. There's a darkness we saw in Basketball Diaries. There's the romantic Leonardo from Romeo and Titanic. We see all of these emotions that women want to relate to in men. Girls want sensitive men, they want strong men, complex men, mysterious men. And Leo has facets of all of that."
Still, he can baffle even those who work closely with him. Claire Danes, who was Juliet to his Romeo, told Vanity Fair, "I spent four months with him and couldn't figure him out. I still can't [tell] whether he's really transparent or incredibly complex. I think he's the latter."
From all accounts, there are two Leos. Colleagues regard him as a hardworking professional who revels in the perks of celebrity. He's a multimillionaire who still looks for street parking instead of valet. He is very close to his parents, having just moved out of his mother's house last November. But he's known as a major prankster who hangs out with models (he has been linked with everyone from Helena Christensen to Kristen Zang, although it doesn't appear that he is seeing anyone steadily right now) and jets a posse of childhood and actor friends to film locations to party during his downtime.
"He's not comfortable with being a major superstar," says Christine Spines, an associate editor at Premiere, who spent several days interviewing Leonardo for a piece about Romeo + Juliet. "It sort of cramps his style, and I think he's really tired of being examined. I think he likes [fame] for dumb reasons--because he can get free things. He doesn't calculate or try to do the right thing to impress people to become a big star. He's not like Tom Cruise, who plotted it out every step of the way. He is honestly just being himself, and he's like, "If you don't like it, forget it.'"
Actors will do anything to work with him. Sharon Stone supposedly gave up part of her salary to pay for Leonardo to join The Quick and the Dead. Meryl Streep, his costar in Marvin's Room, has said, "You can't watch anything else when he's acting." Kate Winslet was so determined to snag him for Titanic that she reportedly tracked him down at the Cannes Film Festival to persuade him.
Once they were working together, Kate and Leo traded sex tips between takes and got on so well that tabloids hinted at a real-life romance, which they've both denied. Kate told Vanity Fair, "He's probably the world's most beautiful looking man, but yet he doesn't think he's gorgeous. To me, he's just smelly, farty Leo." Believe it or not, their love scenes were far from romantic. Winslet has said, "Before we kissed, we were going, 'No tongues, no tongues.' It was like kissing my brother. Very, very odd."
Leo's love scenes with Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet were really very technical. Their kisses were rehearsed 23 times to get the right camera angle. "He'd start giggling and I'd feel his lip tremble, so I'd laugh," the actres told Life magazine. "When you really kiss someone, you never know where it's going to go. But if it's scripted, at some point the director calls, 'Cut!'"
The producers, actors, crew members, makeup artists, hairstylists and assistants who spoke with seventeen talked most about Leo's talent and his penchant for antics. The lanky, six-foot actor is a constant cutup who loves doing celebrity impersonations, dancing around to his favorite music and playing with his pet lizard, Blizzard.
Not everyone, though, is entertained by his stunts. A Titanic crew member reports that Leo disappeared while they were lighting a scene. "Nobody could find him," he says. He was hanging in a trailer off the set. "Jim Cameron got really pissed off. He loves to rattle off numbers. I think Titanic was costing a thousand dollars a minute to film." Cameron gave it to him. "'You just wasted eighten thousand dollars,' he shouted. Or something like that."

But the goofball snaps instantly into character for the camera. "In Marvin's Room, Diane Keaton would have these really gut-wrenching scenes, and Leonardo would come in singing the Beastie Boys, jump in front of the camera and grab his crotch," recalls one of the films assistant producers. "But the minute the camers started rolling, he'd get into very serious mode. It was effortless for him, and everyone commented on it."
This kind of talent is extremely rare, says Mali Finn: "It's a natural gift. I see it in Leonardo, and in [The Client's] Brad Renfro and maybe two or three others in their late teens, early twenties. Leonardo comes alive in front of the camera."
Despite how artistic Leonardo's goals have become, the early driving force behind his acting was money. An only child, Leo grew up in a run-down section of Hollywood and in Los Feliz--these days it's one of the hippest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, but at that time, it was nothing as luxurious as Beverly Hills. His parents, George and Irmelin, split up before his first birthday. His dad, a comic book distributor, lived nearby, but he was raised by his mother, a German-born legal secretary. As their son's star rose, the pair eventually quit their jobs to manage his career.
"He had a very powerful mother who was determined that he was going to be a famous television and movie star," recalls Gerald Winesburg, his drama teacher at John Marshall High School. "He was more than happy to go along with his mother's plans."
Leonardo auditioned for his first commercial at age six and spent the next 10 years working in commercials, television and educational films. In 1991 he made his feature debut in Critters III and was signed to play a homeles boy in ABC's Growing Pains, which starred Alan Thicke, who fondly remembers Leonardo as a "cutup, clown and lighthearted free spirit" on the set.
But the impishness that so delights on camera detracted in class. Teachers recall a bright, precocious and extremely talkative kid--to the point of distraction. "I remember telling him repeatedly to be quiet, but he was disruptive in a charming way," sas Joel Hahn, who taught Leonardo international relations at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES), a magnet school in the Pico-La Cienega neighborhood, which Leonardo attended from seventh to tenth grade.
The other students at LACES gave him a hard time, calling him Leonardo Retardo or Shorty for his then-scrawny size. "He was a lot more articulate than many of the kids in school and not physically big, which is probably why he was not very happy at LACES," says Betty Kazmin, his tenth grade homeroom adviser. "He was the odd man out in that particular population, which is though when you're 15. He'd get teased about being on TV, although they wouldn't be teasing him anymore. None of us dreamed he'd turn out to be a star. It tickles me that he's having this success, because he's a nice guy."
Switching to John Marshall in eleventh grade, Leonardo still bore some adolescent angst. Holly Campbell, a fan of his work who also taught him American literature, thinks of him as a better actor than he was a student. "He was a brat in my class," she says. "He was really cocky and arrogant. He talked back, and I remember sending him to the dean's office fairly often for having attitude problems."
But school soon took a backseat to his career. "He behaved well, but he was just never there because his mother was always taking him on interviews," says Winesburg. "I finally had him transferred out of class." He ended up completing high school with a tutor.
High school's loss was Hollywood's gain. Leo beat out 400 hopefuls to star with Robert DeNiro and Ellen Barkin in the film version of Tobias Wolff's memoir, This Boy's Life. It was his big break. That same year he did Gilbert Grape. In 1995 he played author Jim Carroll, an athlete- turned-drug-addict in The Basketball Diaries, and a gay poet, Arthur Rimbaud, in Total Eclipse. But it wasn't until 1996, with Romeo + Juliet, that he struck a chord as a romantic lead. That image was solidified in neon by Titanic.
Police had to be called in to control the screaming throng of girls at the film's premiere at the Tokyo Film Festival last November. And while filming Iron Mask in France, he was chased from the Louvre by a pack of squealing girls.

Leonardo will next appear as a rock star in Woody Allen's Celebrity and will star in 1999 as a street magician in the MGM action-adventure film Trick Monkey, which will pair him for a third time with DeNiro. He will also play a scientist in Universal Pictures' true-life spy-thriller Bombshell.
Leo clearly picks the most dramatic roles, but some of his co-stars, like Alan Thicke, think he could crack us up, too. "The world has yet to see his comic side, and believe me, they are in for a treat," he says. Claire Danes told seventeen that Leonardo often provided comic relief on the set of Romeo + Juliet.
"When you have people pouring their hearts out, you've got to have a release--otherwise you'll crack--and Leo was great for that. He's hysterical in a slap-stick kind of way."
For the immediate future, Leonardo's plans are to take time off, travel and let the media drama die down a bit. "I think he'll make his way through this," says Mali Finn. "I think, underneath, he really loves it, but I don't think he'd ever admit that. And he certainly doesn't want to admit it to his friends. But he's got to love being that adored."