Leonardo DiCaprio was selected by Time magazine as ‘Artist of the Year 2025’ for his role in his most recent film ‘One Battle After Another’, by director Paul Thomas Anderson, which this Monday led the nominations for the Golden Globes with nine nominations, including one for the 51-year-old actor.
“When ‘One Battle After Another’ was released, all the supposed box office experts complained loudly that it was not ‘on track’ to recoup its investment. However, it turned out that the film was a great success: by mid-November it had already grossed more than $200 million worldwide,” notes the magazine.
DiCaprio explained to Time that it was “risky for the studio to bet on this film,” but that they were attracted to “the shocking originality” of the project.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about how infrequently ideas for truly original stories like this come about, with no connection to history, no pre-existing characters, no defined genre, no vampires, no ghosts, no nothing,” DiCaprio told the media.
The magazine notes that the American actor has built “a career that many of his colleagues would envy” and that the audience has had “the pleasure of seeing him grow on screen, before he took on roles of extraordinary complexity and emotional delicacy, roles that explore diverse visions of adult masculinity, suggesting the wide range of what men can be, including how they can fail themselves and others.”
His first film that caught the industry’s attention was ‘This Boy’s Life’ (1993), where he played young Toby, who is about to be broken by the cruelty of Robert De Niro’s character, his stepfather.
“Hollywood knew what it had: DiCaprio was offered a sum of money that would have changed his life — undoubtedly for a boy who had been raised modestly, like him, often in difficult neighborhoods in Los Angeles — to appear in the Disney comedy ‘Hocus Pocus’; instead, he played a teenager with intellectual disabilities in Lasse Hallstrom’s independent and deeply realistic drama, ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’ (1993),” the magazine indicates in its note.
The big leap to fame came with ‘Romeo + Juliet’ (1996) and then with ‘Titanic’ (1997), which broke box office records.
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DiCaprio has received seven Oscar nominations in total, winning one for Best Actor for ‘The Revenant’ (2015).
His other nominations include Best Supporting Actor for ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’ (1993) and Best Actor for ‘The Aviator’ (2004), ‘Blood Diamond’ (2007), ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (2014), and ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ (2020).
Other celebrities who have received this recognition in previous years have been singers Olivia Rodrigo (2021) and Lizzo (2019).
