Born in Los Angeles, DiCaprio began his career in the late 1980s by appearing in television commercials. In the early 1990s, he had recurring roles in various television shows, such as the sitcom Parenthood. DiCaprio had his first major film role as author Tobias Wolff in This Boy's Life (1993). At age 19, he received critical acclaim and his first Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for his performance as a developmentally disabled boy, Arnie Grape, in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993). He achieved international stardom in the epic romance Titanic (1997), which became the highest-grossing film to that point. After a few commercially unsuccessful films, DiCaprio starred in two successful features in 2002: the biographical crime drama Catch Me If You Can and the historical drama Gangs of New York, which marked the first of his many successful collaborations with director Martin Scorsese.

DiCaprio portrayed Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004) and continued to receive acclaim for his performances in the political thriller Blood Diamond (2006), the crime drama The Departed (2006), and the romantic drama Revolutionary Road (2008). In the 2010s, he starred in the science fiction thriller Inception (2010), the western Django Unchained (2012), the biopic The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), the survival drama The Revenant (2015)—for which he won an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role—and the comedy-drama Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), all of which were critical and commercial successes.