The performance has a sharp, desperate intensity from beginning to end." Di Caprio's first effort of 1995 was Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead, a western film.
The New York Times critic Janet Maslin praised Di Caprio's performance, writing "the film's real show-stopping turn comes from Mr.
Di Caprio, who makes Arnie's many tics so startling and vivid that at first he is difficult to watch.
He achieved international fame as a star in James Cameron's epic romance Titanic (1997), which became the highest-grossing film of all time to that point.
Since 2000, Di Caprio has received critical acclaim for his work in a wide range of film genres.
Di Caprio is the founder of his own production company, Appian Way Productions.
He began his career by appearing in several commercials and educational films, following his older stepbrother Adam Farrar into television commercials, and landing an ad at age 14 for Matchbox cars by Mattel, which he considered his first role.It is a biographical film, in which Di Caprio plays Jim Carroll in his teenage years as a promising high school basketball player and writer who developed an addiction to heroin with his misguided friends.In 1996, Di Caprio appeared opposite Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann's film Romeo Juliet, an abridged modernization of William Shakespeare's romantic tragedy of the same name, which retained the original Shakespearean dialogue.The film was directed by Michael Caton-Jones and released in 1993.In 1993, Di Caprio co-starred as the mentally handicapped brother of Johnny Depp's character in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, a comic-tragic odyssey of a dysfunctional Iowa family.The project achieved a worldwide box office take of 7 million.