Leo hits the big 3-0

In precisely eight hours and 46 minutes, Leonardo DiCaprio - who stars this weekend as enigmatic billionaire Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese's epic biopic

Dressed in a blue Ralph Lauren sweatshirt, baggy jeans and baseball cap, his face is broader and flatter than it appears on-screen, baby-soft and smooth, the chin more pointy, the cheekbones less sharp. His pale blue eyes are smaller, less luminous than you expect. When he fixes them on you, as he periodically does to either emphasise a point or to warn you off a hazardous line of questioning, his gaze is discomfitingly cold. But for all his boyish appearance, there is an air of maturity about him. The callow youth of his Titanic days is gone, and the cockiness that was still in evidence two years ago when he was promoting Scorsese's Gangs Of New York has mellowed into a sophisticated strain of self-confidence. 'I kind of feel exactly the same way I always have,' he says, mulling this over. 'I guess 30 means you're a grownup, but I don't necessarily feel like a grown-up.'

Nevertheless, The Aviator, his second film with Scorsese, affords him his most grown-up role to date, miles away from Titanic's tousle-headed toy-boy Jack Dawson, The Beach's dimwit hedonist Richard or even his street punk Romeo in Romeo + Juliet. It's one that might, as his overwrought performance in Gangs was supposed to - but signally did not - bestow on him the mantle of heavyweight screen actor. Which is something that wouldn't go amiss right now, since Gangs fizzled and not even Spielberg's breezy but featherweight Catch Me If You Can could reignite the Beatlemania-style frenzy that surrounded him post Titanic. Whether he feels the pressure of that or not, it's hard to see The Aviator - a project that he instigated and took to Scorsese - as anything but a turning point in his career.

'I read the Howard Hughes book when I was 24-years-old,' he says. 'And he's fascinated me ever since. When you think about Hughes, you immediately think of the old man cooped up in a hotel room with Kleenex boxes on his feet and long hair and long fingernails. But Hughes was the quintessential American tycoon, a product of the 20th century, a product of the machine age. He was a complex, multi-dimensional man, a pioneer in aviation who flew around the world faster than anyone else, who built the biggest plane ever built, who came to Hollywood and

made Hell's Angels, the most expensive movie ever made, the most violent movie, the most sexually explicit movie and who slept with the most amazing women in the world [Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers and Ava Gardner among them]. And more than that, he was a man obsessed... obsessed with perfection, who'd stop at nothing to get what he wanted.'

It's easy to appreciate DiCaprio's attraction to a movie like The Aviator, which focuses on Hughes's life and career from the ages of 19 to 42 and ends as the madness to which he eventually succumbed begins to engulf him. It not only presents him with the kind of grandstanding acting challenge that - dare we say it - often leads to an Oscar, but it also allows him to cement his relationship with Scorsese and thus to tread, albeit tentatively, in the footsteps of his idol, Robert De Niro. 'These are the guys I admire to the utmost extreme,' he says. Moreover, as an ambitious Hollywood player himself, with an independent production company and considerably more than his fair share of beautiful women notched on his

bedpost (in the teen-scream wake of Titanic and The Beach he appeared to be using the Elite model directory as his personal Yellow Pages), his connection to Hughes is palpable.

'I've never had the same approach to women as Howard,' he says. 'I think he looked at women the way he looked at planes. That's why he was such a womaniser. He was saying: "This woman's great, but there's probably another model out there that'll go even faster, that'll be even more fabulous. I've got to go and get her." But I love that he came to Hollywood and challenged the studio system. I admire that he had an idea and would not stop at anything until he achieved it. I can relate to that as far as my own perfectionism goes in making movies.'

The swings and roundabouts of fame and fortune, the treacherous playground that precipitated Hughes's tragic journey round the bend, are not unknown to DiCaprio, who, not so long ago, was keeping the paparazzi in beer money with his late-night carousing.

'Yeah,' he laughs, 'I've been through the worst of that. I've seen it, I've seen how ridiculous it is and I still see how ridiculous it is. But I was never really the wild child they represented me as. I don't think I ever really got out of hand.'

Is his relationship with Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen another sign of his growing up and settling down? 'If it was, I probably wouldn't talk about it anyway,' he says, gimlet eyes flashing a warning. 'I don't know. Sorry, I'm not going to say anything about the relationship.'