One of my favourite movies from my younger years, Romeo + Juliet, was screened on TV on Thursday night, in honour of Valentine's day.
It stars my teenage crush: Leonardo DiCaprio. When I first saw this movie in 1996, aged 13, I fell hard for DiCaprio and developed a crazy obsession with him, which lasted throughout my teenage years.
Re-watching the film, I could see why he tickled my fancy back in the day. In the scene where Romeo appears for the first time, he is filmed at sunset looking dark and brooding. I remembered that it was at that very moment that I first fell for him and my obsession with tragic romance was born.
Compared to him, no other boy could measure up. Even though his side-parted "curtains" hairdo became the look du jour among the boys at my high school, none of them carried it off with aplomb like DiCaprio. None even came close, frankly.
My crush strengthened a few years later when a trip to the cinema to watch DiCaprio play Jack Dawson in Titanic turned into an absolute sob-fest. The role turned DiCaprio into a bona fide A-list heart-throb.
And then DiCaprio did something surprising and turned his back on me and his hordes of teenage fans and opted for arty films and character roles. His choices included critically acclaimed films such as The Departed, Revolutionary Road and Inception.
DiCaprio lost his boyish good looks somewhere along the way but gained something even better: talent and industry respect. Now he has taken on another big tragic romance role by playing the part of Jay Gatsby in the new film version of The Great Gatsby, which will be released in May. Maybe, just maybe, in this film he will succeed in capturing my heart once again.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article