Leonardo said of the night: ‘I was dreading winning. I didn’t even plan a speech – I was worried that I would slip up or do something terrible. I was shaking in my seat, putting on a posed smile. Inside, I was petrified.’
In the end, the speech wouldn’t have been needed anyway. The Oscar went to Tommy Lee Jones, who added it to the Golden Globe he’d picked up a month earlier.
Leonardo might have missed out on Academy Award glory but in the media that made no difference. Magazines started putting him on their covers. Suddenly, he was being dubbed the next Brando and DiCaprio started to believe it, too.
‘As soon as enough people give you enough compliments, and you’re wielding more power than you’ve ever had in your life, it’s not that you become an arrogant little prick, or become rude to people but you get a false sense of your own importance and what you’ve accomplished,’ he said. ‘You actually think you’ve altered the course of history.’
And if he’d been surprised at the impact his films were having on female fans after This Boy’s Life, this was nothing compared to the reaction to Gilbert Grape.
‘After I did Gilbert Grape, teenage girls became hysterical. What they do is shocking, climbing over walls and stuff. Mind you, I’ve had more fun being famous than I would have done otherwise.’
Another big difference was that, rather than having to attend endless auditions, he was now a sought-after commodity. The temptation would have been to leap into a big blockbuster – something to put backsides on seats and confirm his reputation as a bankable star. Indeed he was offered many high-profile roles, including Robin to Val Kilmer’s superhero in Batman Forever.
‘I just don’t want to be big box-office yet,’ he said at the time, showing a maturity beyond his years. ‘The more you stay low-key at a young age, the more you have room for that stuff in the future, and as long as I can maintain doing films that I want to do, then I’d rather not blow my load on the work. It seems to me that a lot of people who try to do that just disappear.
‘Before I started, I had this view that I was only going to do one film a year and that it was only going to be a really fantastic film,’ he continued. ‘I still think that I want to limit myself to not working all the time, ’cause that’s not good for me and not good for my career, but mainly I’m just trying to be selective and to cut through the bullshit hype about scripts, and what everyone else is telling me to do. It’s a really hard thing to learn, and I haven’t mastered it yet, but I just want to keep on doing stuff that hasn’t been done before.’
Rather than jump into something he would later regret – as Chris O’Donnell discovered to his cost when he took on the role of Robin in two Batman films – Leonardo waited nearly a year before agreeing to a movie after What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Of course this was a risk that might have backfired but so confident was he in his own ability – and of the moviemakers not to find a new kid on the block – that he felt able to take his time.
And there might have been another telling reason why Leonardo felt it important to slow things down. In October 1993, five months before the excitement of the Oscars ceremony, DiCaprio had been at a party when he bumped into another actor who once had the world at his feet.
He explained: ‘I was at a Halloween party two years ago at the house of these twin actors and I remember it was really dark and everyone was drunk, and I was passing through these crowds of people so thick it was almost two lanes of traffic, when I glanced at a guy in a mask and suddenly knew it was River Phoenix.
‘I wanted to reach out and say hello because he was this great mystery and we’d never met, and I thought he probably wouldn’t blow me off because I’d done stuff by then that was maybe worth watching. But then I got caught in a lane of traffic and slid right past him. The next thing I knew, River had died, that same night.’
Tragically, Phoenix collapsed from drug-induced heart failure and died on the pavement outside the West Hollywood nightclub, The Viper Room – owned, coincidentally, by Johnny Depp. The young actor’s death on 31 October 1993 stunned Hollywood and brought home the pressures on the industry’s fledgling stars to live fast.
Leonardo DiCaprio was entering the most crucial phase of his short career and how he handled his next move would have a bearing on whether it would prove to be a lengthy one.
It’s not every 19-year-old boy who has Sharon Stone as his No. 1 cheerleader. And that’s the Sharon Stone, who just two years earlier had caused moviegoers’ jaws to drop in theatres across the globe with her now infamous leg-crossing scene in Basic Instinct (1992). And she was not just cheering from the sidelines, she offered to pay half his salary, even to carry him on her back to the set just to work with him!
Yet that was the crazy situation Leonardo found himself in when Stone started to court him to play alongside her in an unlikely-sounding Western called The Quick and the Dead. Leo’s first, second and third reaction was to reject the offer – ‘I thought it was just going to be a commercial film, Sharon Stone and everything.’ And he added: ‘Commercial films tend to play it safe and are familiar.’
However, as time went on, his refusal to jump into anything suspect, combined with a little misfortune in other roles, meant he was approaching the stage of being out of work for a year since filming wrapped on Gilbert Grape. By then he’d completed high school and was considering his next option. ‘I’m not ready to go to college yet,’ he explained. ‘But if I do anything, it might be taking an acting class. I mean – I’ve never taken an acting class in my life and there are things that might help me with my performances.’
He also reiterated his desire to concentrate solely on worthwhile parts. ‘Anybody can be a star with a little make-up and a music video,’ he continued. ‘I want to do good work in interesting films, with good people. If I set high standards for myself, people will remain interested in my work.’
And he remained confident that he wouldn’t have to chase after adult roles – he wanted to explore more challenging teenage parts: ‘I’m young, young-looking and young at heart – it’s best for me to capitalise on that.’
With this philosophy in mind, his only work during that time was The Foot Shooting Party (1994), an obscure short, where Leo played a rock singer conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War. In the French comedy, DiCaprio’s singer attempts to dodge the draft but when his bandmates gather to shoot him in the foot, they find pulling the trigger is much harder than any of them expected.
For a while it seemed Leonardo’s selection policy might also be: shoot himself in the foot. He turned down a role in Hocus Pocus, the Bette Midler movie, but lost out to Christian Slater when he attempted to fill River Phoenix’s shoes in Interview with the Vampire. And it wouldn’t be the last time his fate was linked to that of the tragic actor.
Eventually, with one day to go before making a decision, he went against his better judgement and signed up with Sharon Stone. Set in the early 20th century, The Quick and the Dead was a tale of revenge centred on a gun-fighting contest in the remote and lawless town of Redemption. DiCaprio was to play ‘The Kid’ – ‘a really insecure kid who puts up this show of bravado to convince people that he isn’t insecure.’