The son of a dancer and a literature professor, Nicolas Cage is the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola. Cage changed his name so that his career would be judged on merit alone. He chose the name Cage for the cartoon hero, Luke Cage.
He struggled to get started, despite studying acting, and at one point was selling popcorn in a theatre. By the 80s, though, he had completed some memorably quirky and truly outstanding roles and had made a name for himself as a method actor.
He has been linked romantically with the likes of Uma Thurman, married and divorced Patricia Arquette and Lisa Marie Presley and is currently married to Alice Kim, a sushi waitress he met in New York.
Nicolas Cage’s roles are usually flamboyant, eccentric and off the wall. Among the strangest facts about him is that he got Johnny Depp his first acting job, another is that he owns the Shah of Iran’s old Lamborghini. He also collects comic books because they are “today’s equivalent of mythology”.
Cage is one of only 3 actors with an Oscar nomination for playing multiple characters in a film. He attended high school with people like Angelina Jolie, Lenny Kravitz, David Schwimmer and Crispin Glover. He ate a real cockroach in the film Vampire’s Kiss (1988), although it reportedly took three takes. He once said: “Every muscle in my body didn’t want to do it, but I did it anyway.”
He named his son after the comic book character “Kal-el” (aka Superman), he trains in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and is called the “Jazz musician of acting” by David Lynch.
He has said that in order “to be a good actor you have to be something like a criminal, to be willing to break the rules to strive for something new… There’s a fine line between the Method actor and the schizophrenic.”
He has also said: “I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion.”
What I want to know is why he has a tattoo of a monitor lizard wearing a top hat on his back…
