News: Leonardo DiCaprio

Up for the Best Actor Oscar for his work on this week’s Blood Diamond, DiCaprio is continuing his recent trend for tip-top performances in major movies, and beginning to well and truly shake off his late-90s useless pretty-boy image. If all goes according to plan he could be up for another Oscar nod for his fourth team-up with director Martin Scorsese, playing the titular future US President in biopic The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. With a backdrop of late-19th century New York politics and the Spanish-American War of 1898, it sounds like it has all the epic scope Scorsese will need to produce yet another film the Academy will find some excuse to overlook, and all the drama to allow Leo to run wild. It’d due 2008.

In the meantime, DiCaprio is also signed to star in Blink, based on a series of short stories about how first impressions
affect people’s judgement, for Syriana writer/director Steven Gaghan, which sounds both interesting and promising, and looks all set to start his own action franchise by taking on the mantle of Peter Chancellor in the big screen adaptation of Robert “The Bourne Identity” Ludum’s political thriller The Chancellor Manuscript. Looks rather like DiCaprio is going from strength to strength at the moment.