DiCaprio: 'I nearly quit after Titanic'

Leonardo DiCaprio has admitted that he considered walking away from acting after his career skyrocketed in the late '90s.

The 35-year-old said that he disliked being positioned as a heartthrob in the wake of Titanic's record-breaking box office success.

"At first I hated the way I was turned into a pretty boy, as if that was all that was expected of me. It made me almost want to stop acting for a while because the attention that was focused on me was not where I wanted to take my career," the Daily Mirror quotes him as saying.

DiCaprio, whose new film Shutter Island opens today, added that he did not want to feel "exploited" in his acting choices.

"I didn't want to do romantic films or anything which just exploited my image or appearance," he remarked. "I also kind of had to be more careful about the friends I was hanging out with. I was living a pretty big life for a while and then that just gets tiresome."

> Click here to read our review of 'Shutter Island'