Who is Irmelin Indenbirken? Leonardo DiCaprio’s mom, 79, who is the only woman over 25 he's ever loved, fled Nazis during WWII
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Leonardo DiCaprio 48 has enjoyed a string of high-profile relationships, always catching the eyeballs for dating women not more than 25 years of age. It is now rumored that his newest girlfriend is Israeli model Eden Polani, 19 who was not even born when Titanic hit the box office.
Nina Agdal, Kelly Rohrbach, Blake Lively, Rihanna, Gisele Bündchen, and Bar Refaeli are some of the women he was in a relationship with, but the only woman over 25 who has a special place in his life is his mother Irmelin Indenbirken, 79. Leonardo attributes a lot of his success to her unfailing love and support for him.
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Who is Irmelin Indenbirken?
Born in the German village of Oer-Erkenschwick in 1943 in an air raid shelter during a bombing during World War II Irmelin Indenbirken did not have an easy childhood. "Those were hard times. We emigrated to America in 1955 – not in 1943, as some newspapers have reported,” Helene Indenbirke, her mother told the German magazine Hellweger Anzeiger in 1998. They resided in New York with the German community where Irmelin was raised as a teenager before Anzeiger eventually left America along with her husband in 1985.
'My mom and dad were separated'
Although Leonardo's parents split when he was one, her mother who worked as a legal secretary brought him up single handily, in East Los Angeles, however, the couple bought homes next to each other so that he doesn't feel he comes from a broken family and it also didn't affect him. "My mom and dad were separated before I could talk properly, so I never knew any different," he said back then in an interview. "We weren't the hippy family that everyone imagines. You couldn't call us apple-pie-and-Republican but we didn't meditate or live on organic food", he further added.
DiCaprio didn't like the neighborhood and in 1998 regarding that, he said, "It was definitely a rough neighborhood, but it was cool. I got to see a lot of stuff. It’s good to grow up like that, I think. It’s good to see that side at a young age." Indenbirken enrolled DiCaprio in a high school in a nicer neighborhood and drove him there every day—making a three-hour round trip—in an effort to provide her son a better life.
'My mother is a walking miracle'
George DiCaprio a comic distributor and Indenbirken named Leonardo when on a date in Italy. “My mom felt me kicking while they were looking at a Leonardo da Vinci painting in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and they took it as a message,” the actor told The People in 1998. My mother is a walking miracle,” DiCaprio has told The Telegraph.
DiCaprio explained onstage after winning Best Actor at the BAFTAs in 2016 for The Revenant. “I would not be standing up here if it wasn’t for this person,” he told of Indenbirken. "She’s the only reason I’m able to do what I do," he told Access Hollywood in 2014. Indenbirken who has been there with his son on red carpets celebrating his achievements together had even been fiercely protective over her son in the early years of his fame, often putting herself between him and camera-wielding paparazzi, the Daily Mail notes.