LEO’S LINGERIE LADIES
The latest girlfriend of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor Leonardo DiCaprio has lots in common with his previous partners…
LEONARDO DiCAPRIO may not always have led a model life but he has certainly lived a model-filled one. The actor has taken dating to a whole new extreme of physical perfection with the aesthetically perfect stable of ladies who have graced his arm over the years.
Or as American Elle magazine put it in February: “15 models, 15 blondes, four actresses, one pop star, and Leo.”
The latest model to be squired by Leo is the Polish model Ela Kawalec with whom he was seen riding bikes around New York last week as well as enjoying a PDA (celebrity watchers will know this stands for a public display of affection) at the nightclub Marquee where an onlooker helpfully described their “canoodling”: “Leo was dancing with her in his arms. They were doing their thing, bumping and grinding.”
Lovely Ela looks familiar. Perhaps that is because she is of similar standing, or perhaps that should say stature, to the beauties who preceded her.
Kristen Zang, a model who dated Leo for two years in the late 1990s, is said to have been (at that point) the love of his life, but she dumped him because of his immaturity and what she termed disparagingly as his “posse of young model-hounds”.
He may not have been listening. He may be more mature now but the addiction to model girlfriends has shown no sign of waning. And while he was once almost as young as them that is no longer true.
“You do feel that they disappear quietly to be replaced by a new face fairly frequently,” says one Hollywood commentator. And while they are not getting any older, he is, now 18 months into his 40s.
With George Clooney off the market following his 2014 marriage to the high-powered British barrister Amal Alamuddin, Leonardo is arguably Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor but if he wants lasting love maybe he is looking in all the wrong places.
Named Leonardo because his German-born mother was looking at a painting in Italy by Leonardo da Vinci when her baby first kicked, his head may have been turned by the degree of “Leo Mania” that followed his performance in the 1997 movie Titanic, which grossed more than £1billion at the box office worldwide and transformed the art-house actor into a commercial movie star. Naturally, everyone wanted to date Leo and he set to work reciprocating.
AMERICAN model Bridget Hall was the first supermodel linked to him back in 1994, shortly after the actor garnered international attention and his first Academy Award nomination for his performance as a teenager with a developmental disability and brother of Johnny Depp in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Hall was followed the same year by actress Brittany Daniel, whom he met on the set of the movie The Basketball Diaries. In 1995 came a rumoured romance with supermodel Naomi Campbell, to whom he remains close.
He and Claire Danes, his co-star in Romeo+Juliet, are said to have enjoyed an offscreen romance the same year but it was Kristen Zang who accompanied him to the film’s premiere a few months later. After Titanic came reported romances with supermodels Helena Christensen, Amber Valletta (he is said to have spotted her in a magazine and had his “people” arrange a date) and Eva Herzigová, with whom he is said to have had a one-month affair while she was married to Bon Jovi drummer Tico Torres.
Leo was also a “shoulder to cry on” for Demi Moore in 1997 as she went through her split with Bruce Willis (unusually she was 12 years older than him).
Leo dated Calvin Klein model Bijou Phillips in 1998 and helped her launch her acting career but his most serious relationship was with supermodel Gisele Bündchen, whom he dated for five years but she ended it in 2005. The following year she began dating American Footballer Tom Brady whom she married in 2009 and with whom she has two children. Within a few weeks of his final split with Gisele, Leo had moved on to another Victoria’s Secret model, Bar Refaeli, whom he had met in a bar in Las Vegas.
They dated on and off for six years and both shared an interest in activism. During a sixmonth break from Bar in 2009, he wooed both lookalike Victoria’s Secret model Anne V and Pussycat Doll Ashley Roberts.
In 2011 he had a five-month romance with actress Blake Lively and a fling with model Madalina Ghenea. By 2012 he was dating Victoria’s Secret model Erin Heatherton but 10 months later he had replaced her with Toni Garrn, yet another Victoria’s Secret model who dumped him after he was seen leaving a Miami nightclub with no fewer than 20 women.
In 2015 Leo found love again, this time with Sports Illustrated model Kelly Rohrbach, but they split up in early 2016 and he was soon rumoured to be dating pop star Rihanna after the 28-yearold singer was spotted in an intimate embrace with the actor at a party at the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles.
Perhaps, like Mr Clooney, who also sowed his oats widely before settling down to married life, Leonardo is also waiting for a human rights lawyer of international repute to marry. And yet he still seems to think he can find her in the world of lingerie.
One thinks he will be waiting a while yet…