Before there was film school, there was Leonardo. While other actors learned to perform, he learned to vanish. He has been a cowboy, a stockbroker, a pioneer, a Pope — and once, for forty-six days, a bear. The bear footage was never released. The bear remembered.

He does not chase awards; the awards form a polite queue outside his trailer. Casting directors lower their voices when they say his name. Robert De Niro, asked once, declined to comment. Critics call him the actor of his generation. He himself prefers "a man with a job to do."

Browse our Insights for the monastic preparation diets, the red-carpet diplomacy, and the brief, brilliant arcs of the muses who join him on those carpets — always at the unrepeatable start of their twenties, always thanked sincerely in the credits.