奇速英语

②　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 landed his first major movie role, playing opposite Robert De Niro. In that 1993 film This Boy’s Life, virtually no one who saw this performance could believe this kid’s talent. Hollywood knew what it had: DiCaprio was offered life-changing money to appear in the Disney comedy Hocus Pocus; instead, he played a mentally impaired teenager in Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. He has a knack for making the seemingly wrong choice that turns out to be completely right—perhaps just another way of saying he has good instincts and he knows when to follow them.

③　In the years that followed, he solidified his status as a cultural icon with roles blending charm and depth: the pensive, impulsive Shakespearean swain in Romeo + Juliet (1996), and the charismatic Jack Dawson in Titanic (1997). Yet he refused to be confined to heartthrob typecasting, choosing instead to pursue characters that challenged both him and audiences.

④　DiCaprio entered new territory—the start of his great middle era—with his role as the troubled capitalist Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004). The performance earned him a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. From that point, he rushed toward, rather than away from, characters who were more complex and even condemnable than likable. This included his turn as a tension-fueled undercover cop in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) and as a morally compromised African diamond smuggler in Blood Diamond (2006), which landed him yet another Academy Award nomination for his nuanced take on a “gray character.”

⑤　He continued to balance commercial success with artistic risk-taking: leading the high-concept sci-fi thriller Inception (2010) as conflicted team leader Dom Cobb, proving he could anchor blockbusters while retaining dramatic depth; embodying greedy, volatile stockbroker Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)—another Scorsese collaboration that earned an Oscar nomination; and capturing the dazzled social climber Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (2013), where he dug into the dark masculine fragility beneath the character’s glittering facade. In 2015, he finally claimed his long-awaited Best Actor Oscar with his raw, physically demanding performance as a vengeful survivalist in The Revenant, cementing his legacy as one of his generation’s greatest actors.

⑥　It is this unwavering dedication to artistic depth over superficial fame that cements his well-deserved title as TIME’s 2025 Entertainer of the Year.