Information about Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage posing for photos with fans on the set of at the University of Maryland.
Birth name	Nicholas Kim Coppola
Born	January 7 1964 (1964--) (age 43) Long Beach, California, U.S.
Other name(s)	Nikky Cage
Years active	1986 - present
Spouse(s)	Patricia Arquette (1995-2001) Lisa Marie Presley (2002-2004) Alice Kim (2005-present)
Awards Academy Awards Best Actor 1995 Leaving Las Vegas Golden Globe Awards Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama 1996 Leaving Las Vegas Screen Actors Guild Awards Best Actor - Motion Picture 1995 Leaving Las Vegas

Nicolas Cage (born January 7, 1964) is an Academy Award-winning American actor. He has also worked as a director and producer, through his production company Saturn Films.^[1] As of 2007, Cage has been nominated twice for an Academy Award as Best Actor in a Leading Role, winning the award for his performance in Leaving Las Vegas.

Biography

Early life

Cage was born Nicholas Kim Coppola in Long Beach, California.^[2] His father, August Floyd Coppola, is a writer, comparative literature professor and a pioneer of studies for the blind, while his mother, Joy Vogelsang, is a choreographer and ballet dancer who suffered from chronic depression.^[3][4] The two divorced in 1976. Cage's mother is of German descent and his father is Italian American, with his paternal grandparents being Carmine Coppola and Italia Pennino, an actress. Through his father, Cage is the nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, as well as the cousin of director Sofia Coppola and actors Robert Carmine and Jason Schwartzman. Cage's two brothers are Christopher Coppola, a director, and Marc "The Cope" Coppola, a New York radio personality. Cage was raised Catholic.^[5]

Cage, who went to Beverly Hills High School (the same high school as fellow entertainers Albert Brooks, Angelina Jolie, Lenny Kravitz, Slash, Rob Reiner, Bonnie Franklin and David Schwimmer), aspired to act from an early age. His first (non-cinematic) acting experience was in a school production of Golden Boy. He is also good friends with fellow actor Johnny Depp, whom he advised to get into acting.

Career

As a teenager Cage, facing rejection in the jobs he applied for, appropriately suffered a sustained period of unemployment. In order to avoid cries of nepotism as the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, he changed his name from Nicholas Coppola to Nicolas Cage early in his career.^[6] The assumed surname is inspired by Marvel Comics character Luke Cage, a streetwise superhero. Since his feature film debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in which he had a minute role opposite Sean Penn,^[2] Cage has appeared in a wide range of films, both mainstream and offbeat.

Cage is known as a very versatile actor, possessing the ability to play almost any type of role. He has been nominated twice for an Academy Award, and won once, for his performance as a suicidal alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas.^[2] His other nomination was for playing real-life screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and Kaufman's fictional twin Donald in Adaptation. Both of those films were offbeat, low-budget films to which Cage lent his superstar clout. Despite these successes, most of his lower-profile films have performed poorly at the box office compared with his more mainstream, action-filled efforts. In 2005, for example, audiences ignored two offbeat, non-mainstream films he headlined, Lord of War and The Weather Man. Despite good reviews for his acting and nationwide releases for both films, neither found a significant audience. Poor reviews for the film The Wicker Man did not, inversely, create a hit; to further buck the trend, the critically-panned Ghost Rider (2007) was a significant hit, earning more than $45 million during its opening weekend (landing in the top spot) and over $208 million worldwide through the weekend ending on 25 March 2007. More recently he also starred in the 2007 movie Next.



Most of his financial successes have come from his forays into the action-adventure genre. In his second highest grossing film to date, National Treasure, he played an eccentric historian who goes on a dangerous adventure to find treasure hidden by the Founding Fathers of the United States. Other action hits in which Cage has starred include The Rock, in which he played a young FBI chemical weapons expert who infiltrates Alcatraz Island in hopes of neutralizing a terrorist threat, Face/Off, a John Woo film where he played both a hero and a villain, and World Trade Center, director Oliver Stone's film regarding the September 11, 2001 attacks. He also had a small but notable role as the Chinese criminal mastermind Dr. Fu Manchu in Rob Zombie's fake trailer Werewolf Women of the S.S. from the critically-acclaimed B-movie double feature ''Grindhouse.

In recent years, Cage has experimented in other film-related fields besides acting. He made his directorial debut with Sonny, a low-budget drama starring James Franco as a male prostitute whose mother (Brenda Blethyn) serves as his pimp.<ref name="saturn" /> Cage had a small role in the grim film, which received poor reviews and a short run in a limited number of theatres.

Cage's producing career has seen more success. Shadow of the Vampire, the first film produced by Saturn Films,<ref name="saturn" /> the company he founded with partner Norm Golightly, was nominated for an Academy Award. He also produced The Life of David Gale, a death penalty-themed thriller with Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslet.

In early December 2006, Cage announced at the Bahamas International Film Festival that he likes to dance. Accordingly, he has eight films currently in the works. Cage said, "I feel I've made a lot of movies already and I want to start exploring other opportunities that I can apply myself to, whether it's writing or other interests that I may develop".^[7] Cage is listed as the executive producer of the The Dresden Files on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Personal life

In his early 20s, he dated E.G. Daily for two years, and was later involved with Uma Thurman. In 1988, Cage began dating Christina Fulton, mother of their son, Weston Coppola Cage (b. 26 December, 1990); Weston appeared in Cage's film Lord of War as Vladimir, a young Ukrainian mechanic who quickly disarms a Mil Mi-24 helicopter.

Cage has been married three times:

• Patricia Arquette (married on April 8, 1995 – divorce finalized May 18, 2001) Cage proposed to her on the day he met her in the early 80s. Arquette thought he was strange, but played along with his antics by creating a list of things Cage would have to do to "win her hand", including obtaining the autograph of reclusive author J.D. Salinger. However, when he seriously started working through the list of demands, Arquette became scared and avoided him. They met again many years later and went on to marry.
• Lisa Marie Presley (married on August 10, 2002 and separated after four months in December 2002; their divorce was finalised on May 16, 2004) — the daughter of Elvis Presley, of whom Cage is a fan and based his performance in Wild at Heart on. He later said they shouldn't have been married in the first place.
• His third (and current) wife, Korean-American Alice Kim, is a former sushi restaurant waitress, with whom he has a son, Kal-El (born October 3, 2005). She had a minor role in the 2007 movie Next which he produced.

Cage had a Malibu home where he and Kim lived, but in 2004 he bought a property on Paradise Island, Bahamas. In 2005, he sold his Malibu home for $10 million. In May 2006, he bought a 40-acre island in the Exuma archipelago which had been on the market for $3 million, some 85 miles southeast of Nassau and close to a similar island owned by Faith Hill and Tim McGraw.^[8]

On July 19, 2006, Cage bought the old medieval castle of Schloss Neidstein (see ) in the Oberpfalz region in Germany. His grandmother was German, living in Cochem an der Mosel.^[9]

In August 2007, Cage purchased a home in Middletown, Rhode Island. The 24,000-square foot, brick-and-stone country manor, on 26 secluded acres, has 12 bedrooms, 10 full bathrooms and sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean from its perch bordering the Norman Bird Sanctuary. Cage sale ranks in the state’s most expensive residential purchases, eclipsed by the $17.15 million sale last December of the Miramar mansion on Bellevue Avenue in Newport.

The name of his second child, Kal-El, is also the birth name of Superman in the DC Comics universe. Nicolas said in a radio interview with Ryan Seacrest that he liked the name Kyle, but his wife wanted a more unique name. Cage is a long-time fan of comics and considers them to be the modern equivalent of mythology. He was once attached to play Superman in a film to be directed by Tim Burton. Cage even did costume fittings, but the project died due to budget and screenplay concerns. Nicolas was director Sam Raimi's first choice to play Norman Osborn/Green Goblin in the movie Spider-Man. (Apparently this was before he met Willem Dafoe.) Cage has a tattoo of Ghost Rider on his body (which, in an ironic twist, had to be covered with makeup when he played the character in a big-budget film adaptation). He has even created a comic book, with his son Weston, called Voodoo Child, which is published by Virgin Comics.

Filmography

Year	Film	Role	U.S. box office gross
1982	Fast Times at Ridgemont High	Brad's Bud	$27,092,880
1983	Valley Girl	Randy	$17,343,596
	Rumble Fish	Smokey	$2,494,480
1984	Racing with the Moon	Nicky and Bud	$6,045,647
	The Cotton Club	Vincent Dwyer	$25,928,721
	Birdy	Sergeant l Columbato	$1,455,045
1986	The Boy in Blue	Ned Hanlan	$275,000
	Peggy Sue Got Married	Charlie Bodell	$41,382,841
1987	Raising Arizona	H. I. McDunnough	$22,847,564
	Moonstruck	Ronny Cammareri	$80,640,528
1988	Never on Tuesday	Man In Red Sports Car	N/A
1989	Vampire's Kiss	Peter Leow	$725,131
1990	Time to Kill	Enrico Silvestri	N/A
	Fire Birds	Jake Preston	$14,760,451
	Wild at Heart	Sailor	$14,560,247
	Zandalee	Johnny	N/A
1992	Honeymoon in Vegas	Jack Singer	$35,208,854
1993	Amos & Andrew	Amos Odell	$9,745,803
	Deadfall	Eddie	$18,369
1994	A Century of Cinema		N/A
	Red Rock West	Michael Williams	$2,502,551
	Guarding Tess	Doug Chesnic	$27,058,304
	It Could Happen to You	Charlie Lang	$37,939,757
	Trapped in Paradise	Bill Firpo	$6,017,509
1995	Kiss of Death	Little Junior Brown	$14,942,422
	Leaving Las Vegas	Ben Sanderson	$32,029,928
1996	The Rock	Dr. Stanley Goodspeed	$134,069,511
1997	Con Air	Cameron Poe	$101,117,573
	Face/Off	Castor Troy/Sean Archer	$112,276,146
1998	City of Angels	Seth	$78,685,114
	Snake Eyes	Rick Santoro	$55,591,407
1999	8mm	Tom Welles	$36,663,315
	Bringing Out the Dead	Frank Pierce	$16,797,191
2000	Gone in Sixty Seconds	Randall "Memphis" Raines	$101,648,571
	The Family Man	Jack Campbell	$75,793,305
	Welcome to Hollywood	Himself	N/A
2001	Italian Soldiers	Himself	N/A
	Captain Corelli's Mandolin	Captain Antonio Corelli	$25,543,895
		Jacob Marley (Voice)	N/A
2002	Windtalkers	Sgt. Joe Enders	$40,914,068
	Adaptation.	Charlie and Donald Kaufman	$22,498,520
	Sonny	Acid Yellow (Also director)	$30,005
2003	Matchstick Men	Roy Waller	$36,906,460
2004	National Treasure	Ben Gates	$173,008,894
2005	Lord of War	Yuri Orlov	$24,149,632
	The Weather Man	David Spritz	$12,482,775
2006	The Ant Bully	Zoc (Voice)	$28,142,535
	''The Wicker Man	Edward Malus	$23,649,127
	World Trade Center	John McLoughlin	$70,236,496
2007	Ghost Rider	Ghost Rider (Johnny Blaze)	$114,824,199
	Grindhouse	Dr. Fu Manchu - segment Werewolf Women of the S.S.	$25,031,037
	Next	Cris Johnson	N/A
	The Cage	John Cage	pre-production, coming Christmas 2007
	Bangkok Dangerous
	''	Ben Gates
	''The Dance	Billy "The Kid" Roth
2008	''Time Share
2009	The Sorcerer's Apprentice	Yen Sid

Awards
Preceded by Tom Hanks for Forrest Gump	Academy Award for Best Actor 1995 for Leaving Las Vegas	Succeeded by Geoffrey Rush for ''Shine

See also

• Coppola family tree

References

External links

• Nicolas Cage at the Notable Names Database
• World Trade Center Interview with Nicolas Cage From IGN FilmForce
• Nicolas Cage Ghost Rider video interview with stv.tv/movies

Persondata
NAME	Cage, Nicolas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Coppola, Nicholas Kim (birth name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American actor and film producer
DATE OF BIRTH	January 7, 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH	Long Beach, California
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH