Happy Birthday, Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh How We’ve Loved You

A child actor, Leo only made a proper dent on our consciousness in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Cast against a wide-eyed Claire Danes, he was just as pretty as her and grinned and babbled through his way through Shakespeare like he knew what he meant. Plus, he never quite knew how to button a shirt.

The Beach probably isn’t as good as All Saints’ Pure Shores, the song which helped soundtrack it. But we fancied him in it, too, even though it went on to legitimise every twat’s gap yah trip to Thailand as soul-searching mission.

Titanic, released in 1998, helped solidify Leo’s reputation as an utter heart-throb. It made loads of money and even though Kate Winslet let him go at the end, there might always be a part of us that clings onto the image of Jack’s frozen curtains as she prises his cold dead hands off of him.

Apart from paparazzi shots of Leo looking a little tubby on a beach in his downtime and that shocking moment a woman shoved a glass in his face at a bar, endangering those precious good looks, Leo kind of disappeared from the public eye in the mid-00s. He was probably hanging out with David Blaine and Toby Maguire somewhere. They were part of the charming 'Pussy Posse' you see.

Around this point, we liked to re-visit his older, edgier films, like The Basketball Diaries and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Though we’re conflicted about how pretty he was in these, because, after all, he is pre-teen when they came out.

By about 2006, The Departed, brimming with loads of other big bloke actors, cemented that Leo could still act. He was a brilliant anti-hero in Blood Diamond, too, managing to be a quasi-action star and do some strong accents in the process (Bostonian and South African)

Sorry, that was mean. Meme-Leo is our favourite thing about Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, and the way Kate Winslet is still lovely about him after all these years, recently saying: 'We needed each other to lean on because we were very young and working all kinds of crazy bloody hours' which is kind of nice, isn't it?

The best part is, young Leo totally lives on right now, as female model Erika Linder (@richiephoenix on Instagram) looks exactly like him!

Leo’s modelising ways have seen him date all manner of obscenely leggy blondes, we’re just very grateful it hasn’t defined him or his sartorial manner. The flat-cap, combat pants and vape-stick combo has become almost as important to him as the measurements of whichever woman will join him on his next jet plane to give a talk on the environment.

Our favourite part of latter-day Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t his keenness to play as many psychopaths, schizophrenics and delusional blokes as possible (Inception, Shutter Island, The Wolf Of Wall Street, The Great Gatsby) in hope he might delude the Academy into giving him an Oscar. Oh no wait, perhaps it is.