Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio was born on November 11, 1974, in Los Angeles, California. He is the only child of Irmelin Indenbirken, a legal secretary from Germany, and George DiCaprio, an American underground comix artist and distributor. The couple met while attending college and moved to Los Angeles after graduating. George's paternal grandparents, Salvatore Di Caprio and Rosina Cassella, were Italian, while his mother, Olga Anne Jacobs, was of German descent. Irmelin's father, Wilhelm Indenbirken, was German, while her mother, Helene Indenbirken, was a Russian immigrant living in Germany. Some sources have falsely claimed that Helene was born in Odesa, Ukraine; there is no evidence that DiCaprio has any relatives of Ukrainian birth or heritage. DiCaprio got his name because his pregnant mother first felt him kick while she was looking at a Leonardo da Vinci painting in the Uffizi museum in Florence, Italy. When he was a year old, his parents divorced after his father fell in love with another woman and moved out. To raise DiCaprio together, his parents moved into twin cottages with a shared garden in Echo Park, Los Angeles. DiCaprio's father lived with his girlfriend and her son, Adam Farrar, with whom DiCaprio developed a close bond. DiCaprio and his mother later moved to other neighborhoods, such as Los Feliz. He has described his parents as "bohemian in every sense of the word" and as "the people I trust the most in the world". DiCaprio has mentioned growing up poor in a neighborhood plagued with prostitution, crime and violence. He was raised Catholic. DiCaprio attended the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies for four years and later Seeds Elementary School. He enrolled at John Marshall High School, but disliked public school and wanted to audition for acting jobs instead. He decided to drop out of high school, and later earned a general equivalency diploma (GED). As a child, DiCaprio wanted to become either an actor or a marine biologist. He chose to pursue acting because he enjoyed imitating people and impersonating characters, and liked seeing people's reactions to his impressions. According to DiCaprio, his interest in performing began at the age of two, when he went onstage at a performance festival and danced spontaneously to a positive response from the crowd. He was also motivated to learn acting when his stepbrother's appearance in a television commercial earned him $50,000. DiCaprio has said in interviews that his first television appearance was in the children's series Romper Room, and that he was dismissed from the show for being disruptive. The show's host has denied that any children were removed from the show in this way. At age 11, DiCaprio almost quit acting to pursue breakdancing, after winning second place in a breakdancing competition in his mother's native Germany. Starting at age 14, he appeared in several commercials for Matchbox cars, which he calls his first role. DiCaprio also appeared in commercials for Kraft Singles, Bubble Yum, and Apple Jacks. In 1989, he played the role of Glen in two episodes of the television show The New Lassie.