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Leonardo DiCaprio will play artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci in a upcoming biopic for Paramount. DiCaprio has been portraying real people in movies for much of his storied career. His third film role was as a young Tobias Wolff in This Boy’s Life. Just two years later he played author, poet, and musician Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries, and gay poet Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse. From con man Frank Abagnale Jr. to billionaire Howard Hughes to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to criminal Jordan Belfort to his Oscar winning role in The Revenant as frontiersman Hugh Glass — DiCaprio has time and again brought actual people from the past and present to life in film.

Through the years, there has been one real-life historical figure that DiCaprio has especially wanted to play. Artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci. According to DiCaprio’s mother, she was looking at a painting of da Vinci’s while pregnant with the future Oscar winner, and felt the baby kick so hard that she named her son after the painter whose work she was admiring.