Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor and a committed environmentalist.
He was born an only child to Irmelin and George DiCaprio in Los Angeles, California, on 11 November 1974. His mother, Irmelin, was a former legal secretary and his father, George, is an underground comic artist and producer and distributor of comic books. His parents divorced when he was about a year old, and from then on he mostly stayed with his German mother and maternal grandparents. He is fluent in German.
DiCaprio started acting at the age of 14, first appearing in an ad for Matchbox cars. Before he became an actor, however, he had dreamt of becoming a marine biologist, according to a speech he gave at the State Department’s “Our Ocean” conference. At the conference, he also spoke about how he had always been very fascinated with the ocean and its wildlife ever since he was a kid.
DiCaprio is also an avid diver. His very first dive was in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and since then he has dived in places such as the Galapagos, Mozambique, Belize, Cocos Island, and the islands of Thailand.
Source: Lacma
The connection he felt with the environment, the ocean and wildlife eventually led him to establish the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (LDF) in 1988, which is “dedicated to protecting Earth’s last wild places and implementing solutions that create a harmonious relationship between humanity and the natural world”.