As Howard Hughes, DiCaprio captured both the swagger of a young aviation pioneer and the private torment that gradually closed in on him.
Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) follows Hughes from the late 1920s into the 1940s, as he builds aircraft, makes films and pushes against the limits of his time. DiCaprio plays the ambition first, then the obsessive-compulsive behaviour that makes everyday life harder, without ever turning Hughes into a simple case study.
It was his first collaboration with Scorsese as a leading man in a period epic, and it set the tone for their later work together: big, serious films anchored by a restless central performance.
Image credit: Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.