About the importance of being alive, good and not rewarded.

There is a movie-related question the overstated American meritocracy tends to ignore: why most people in Hollywood would kill to get an Oscar, while a few have died over and over again, but without being rewarded?

Leonardo DiCaprio was just 20 when he gained his first Academy Award Nomination as Best Supporting Actor, for his impressive work in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape; that time it remained just a nomination, and, on that occasion, the Oscar went to Tommy Lee Jones for his role in The Fugitive.

Afterwards, DiCaprio was put forward twice as Best Actor, respectively for Blood Diamond and The Aviator, but always in vain.

So far, he has starred in 27 movies (28, including the upcoming The Wolf of Wall Street), and died nine-and-a-half times in the most colourful and picturesque ways.

He started to snuff it at the age of 19 in The Quick and the Dead, killed by his own father; then he became Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse just to die from a cancer in his right knee; afterwards, he famously died in Romeo + Juliet and then, even more famously, was frozen to death in Titanic – much to the chagrin of millions of fans, who were left in tears.

Not content with this, reached the age of 24, he surprisingly managed to do a spectacular half-death in The Man in the Iron Mask, only to be shot in the head a few years later in The Departed.

But it still was not enough, and in the 2006 film Blood Diamond, DiCaprio collapsed with a mortal injury during an escape; later on, assuming the role of J. Edgar, he simply died next to his bed, before being shot in both Django Unchained and The Great Gatsby.

A dog’s life, indeed, so who can blame him if he has ended up consoling himself with a blond collection of identical models.