Leonardo DiCaprio says that he almost gave up acting following Titanic, lamenting that the wild success of the film catapulted him to sex-symbol status, an image he hated.

DiCaprio was back to being considered a "another piece of cute meat" after the 1997 film's spectacular box office success, an image he had wanted to get away after his days on the cover of teen magazines, he told Newsweek for editions on newsstands Monday.

"It was pretty disheartening to be objectified like that. I wanted to stop acting for a little bit," he said at the magazine's Oscar panel discussion with other actors. "It changed my life in a lot of ways, but at the same time, I can't say that it didn't give me opportunities. It made me, for the first time, in control of my career."

As a guy who took three different dates to see Titanic (that's nine hours of Leo), I can tell you that after that movie I, too, wanted him to quit. In the off chance that any 16-year-old boys are reading this, heed this advice: NEVER take a high school date to see a movie in which the star is handsomer than you, more sexually experienced than you or willing to make sacrifices for love that you can't even imagine. If he's all three and the movie is epic, you're practically begging your lady friend to fall in love with that artistic stowaway and forget that you're the one who just shelled out $35 of your Dad's money for the evening. After all three of the dates I had to deal with tears and a deluge of questions about emotions I didn't even know I had.

I think I speak for everyone who has once been a self-conscious teenage boy when I say that I'm glad Leo has moved on to doing great things like The Departed, and left the date movies to Jack Black.

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