Nicolas Cage (born Nicholas Kim Coppola; January 7, 1964) is an American actor, known for collaborating many times with film producer Jerry Bruckheimer. A high school dropout, Cage pursued acting as a career, making his debut on television in 1981. Cage has famously featured in numerous "bad boy" roles, and has won numerous awards, beginning in 1989 with his Independent Spirit Award, and his most recent Toronto Film Critics Association Award in 2002. Cage has starred in over 70 films including Face/Off (1997), Ghost Rider (2007), and National Treasure (2004). Cage has married three times, once to Patricia Arquette, then to Lisa Marie Presley (the only child of Elvis Presley), and most recently to his current wife Alice Kim Cage who was 20 years old when they met and married.

Early life

Cage was born Nicholas Kim Coppola in Long Beach, California. His father, August Coppola, is a professor of literature, while Cage's mother, Joy Vogelsang, is a dancer and choreographer; the two divorced in 1976. Cage's mother is of German descent and his father is of Italian descent (his paternal great-grandparents were immigrants from Bernalda, Basilicata). His paternal grandparents are Carmine Coppola, a composer, 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 directors Roman Coppola and 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 born into a Roman Catholic household and remains Catholic to this day, although he said in the mid-1990s that he was not religious. Cage, who attended Beverly Hills High School (the same high school as fellow entertainers Albert Brooks, Angelina Jolie, Lenny Kravitz, Slash, Rob Reiner, Richard Dreyfuss, Bonnie Franklin and David Schwimmer), aspired to act from an early age. Cage also attended UCLA School of Theatre, Film, and Television. 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.Fact: date=September 2008

Career

In order to avoid the appearance of nepotism as the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, he changed his name from Nicolas Coppola to Nicolas Cage early in his career. The assumed surname is inspired by Marvel Comics character Luke Cage, a streetwise superhero. Since his cameo feature film debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, with Sean Penn, Cage has appeared in a wide range of films, both mainstream and offbeat. He tried out for the role of Dallas Winston in his uncle's film The Outsiders, based on S.E. Hinton's novel, but lost to Matt Dillon. He was also in Coppola's films Rumble Fish and Peggy Sue Got Married.

Other Cage roles included appearances in the acclaimed 1987 romantic-comedy Moonstruck, also starring Cher; The Coen Brothers cult-classic comedy Raising Arizona; David Lynch's 1990 offbeat film Wild at Heart; a lead role in Martin Scorsese's 1999 New York City paramedic drama Bringing Out the Dead; and Ridley Scott's 2003 quirky drama Matchstick Men, in which he played an agoraphobic, mysophobic, obsessive-compulsive con artist with a tic disorder.