Leonardo DiCaprio tipped to play Frank Sinatra in new Martin Scorsese biopic

Leonardo DiCaprio is tipped to play Frank Sinatra in a new biopic directed by his longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese.

Oscar winner DiCaprio, 49, who last teamed up with Scorsese, 81, for critically-acclaimed 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon, would portray Sinatra alongside Jennifer Lawrence as the singer’s second wife, actress Ava Gardner per Variety.

DiCaprio and Academy Award winner Lawrence previously starred alongside one another in 2021’s Don’t Look Up.

The film is drawing ‘interest from major studios and streamers’ with Sony said to be the frontrunner to acquire the project.

Sinatra’s daughter Tina – whose mother Nancy Barbato was Sinatra’s first wife before he left her for Gardner – controls the icon’s estate and has yet to give the proposed film her blessing. 

DiCaprio and Scorsese are frequent collaborators in cinema, with DiCaprio appearing in six feature films and one short film made by Scorsese since 2002.

These are Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island(2010), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Audition (2015) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).  

The Western true-crime thriller starred DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, who arrived in Fairfax, Oklahoma, and married Mollie Kyle, played by Lily Gladstone at the behest of his uncle, William Hale played by Robert De Niro.

Scorsese and his team worked closely with Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear and his office, the director’s consulting producer Chad Renfro told Time that hundreds of Osage were involved in making the film.

It marked DiCaprio’s first film on the big screen since 2019 Quentin Tarantino Flick Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Ava Gardner was Hollywood’s reigning screen goddess when she first met Frank Sinatra in 1943,

Ava was married to her first husband Mickey Rooney and would go through a second marriage with bandleader Artie Shaw before finally re-connecting with the blue-eyed crooner six years later. 

But Sinatra was still married with three children when the relationship with Ava caught on fire in 1949.

Sinatra wed his Jersey City sweetheart, Nancy Barbato ten years earlier in New Jersey where they both grew up. The couple started a family before his film and recording career moved them out to Hollywood.

But marriage didn’t stop Sinatra from hooking up with other women and Ava was only one of the women he was seeing. But they both knew it was true love on their drunken first date.

Ava was a homewrecker at heart and couldn’t keep her hands off of married men. She also didn’t want to be alone.

Before she dated Frank, she had a lusty affair in 1946 with her co-star, Fred MacMurray in the film, Singapore. 

After twelve years of marriage, Nancy finally filed for divorce and Ava and Frank married in Germantown, Philadelphia, on November 7, 1951. Frank was 35, Ava 28. 

It was a turbulent marriage with many well-publicized fights and altercations. 

Ava aborted two pregnancies with Frank according to her memoirs – leaving him devastated.

There wasn’t going to be a family with Ava.

Her career was always number one and she never quit her nights of wild abandon and one night affairs.

Ava had purchased a home in La Moraleja, Spain, a suburb of Madrid in 1955. She was already separating from Sinatra.

Six years after cutting the wedding cake, they got a Mexican divorce in July 1957.

‘They were too much alike,’ remembered Tina Sinatra. ‘They were the best of friends, they loved each other deeply, but at that point nothing mattered more than their careers’.

Frank’s career was suddenly catching fire when he won an Oscar for his performance in From Here to Eternity and he began having affairs to make her jealous.

Ava had tired of his jealousy, his possessiveness and his oversensitive ego and ‘didn’t want to suppress her own identity for any man’.

She returned to her seductive ways and went after actor Tony Franciosa, her handsome co-star in The Naked Maja, filming in Rome.

A stroke in 1986 paralyzed the left side of her body and briefly took away her speech.

On New Year’s Eve in 1990, beset with lung problems, Ava celebrated with a cigarette and champagne. She died on January 25 from bronchial pneumonia and systemic lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the body.

‘I’m sorry I spent 25 years making films. I wish now I had the things most important to a woman – a good marriage, children, a better education.

‘If I ever got married again it would be a re-marriage’. That could only be Sinatra.

He was devastated when she died. She had been the great love of his life.

‘He never got over it’, Tina Sinatra stated.