Leonardo Di Caprio (1974) is an American actor and film producer. Di Caprio began his career by appearing in television commercials in the early 1990s, after which he had recurring roles in various television series such as the soap opera Santa Barbara and the sitcom Growing Pains. He gained public recognition with leading roles in The Basketball Diaries (1995) and the romantic drama Romeo + Juliet (1996), before achieving international fame with James Cameron's epic romance Titanic (1997), which became the highest-grossing film of all time until Cameron's science fiction film Avatar (2009) overtook it.