Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage, born in 1964, American motion-picture actor known for playing intense roles with an edge of derangement. Cage won an Academy Award for best actor for his performance as a doomed alcoholic in the film Leaving Las Vegas (1995).

He was born Nicholas Kim Coppola, nephew of American film director Francis Ford Coppola, in Long Beach, California. His father taught comparative literature at San Francisco State University and his mother was a jazz dancer and choreographer. A self-styled “teenage intellectual,” Cage dropped out of high school to become an actor. He made his screen debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and the next year changed his surname to avoid trading off his uncle’s fame.

Despite the name change he still received a good early part from Coppola in Rumble Fish (1983), playing (as he put it) “a twisted, left-pocket character.” Such dislocated roles rapidly became Cage’s stock-in-trade, and he earned a reputation as a risk-taking and unpredictable actor. Tall, rangy, and heavy-lidded, he played a Hollywood punk rocker in Valley Girl (1983), a violent gangster in The Cotton Club (1984), Kathleen Turner’s feckless husband in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), a petty crook and baby-kidnapper in Raising Arizona (1987), and a man who thinks he is turning into a vampire in Vampire’s Kiss (1989).

Cage brought unusual twists even to straight romantic roles, such as the blond Italian lover of Cher who has an artificial wooden hand in Moonstruck (1987), or the desperate bridegroom of Honeymoon in Vegas (1992) who skydives as part of a team of Flying Elvises. Trapped in a conventional drama, such as Guarding Tess (1994), he has less chance to shine. However, Cage continues to offer his characteristic wildness and flamboyance. Few other actors could have carried off his role in the self-consciously weird David Lynch film Wild at Heart (1990), or held their own against the hired killer played by Dennis Hopper in director John Dahl’s thriller Red Rock West (1992).

In director Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas, Cage unleashed an unparalleled display of flailing, twitching, off-the-wall physicality that won him his first Oscar. He followed this with a string of performances in fast-paced action films: The Rock (1996), with Sean Connery; Con Air (1997), with John Malkovich; alongside John Travolta in Face/Off (1997); Snake Eyes (1998); and 8MM (1999). He portrayed an angel who falls in love with a mortal in City of Angels (1998), and played a self-lacerating paramedic in director Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Other Cage films include Family Man (2000); Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001), an adaptation of the best-selling novel by Louis de Bernières; Windtalkers (2002), a World War II (1939-1945) drama highlighting the contribution of the Navajo to the war effort; and Adaptation (2002), for which Cage received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of an introverted, neurotic screenwriter. In 2002 Cage also made his directing debut with the film Sonny, about the male escort business. He later starred in Matchstick Men (2003), Lord of War and the comedy The Weather Man (both 2005), before preparing in a sensory deprivation tank to portray police sergeant and 9/11 survivor John McLoughlin, trapped beneath the wreckage of New York City’s twin towers, in World Trade Center (2006). That year also saw him star in the remake of The Wicker Man. In 2007 he played the comic-book motorcycle hero Johnny Blaze in Ghost Rider.