Inside the strange world of Nicolas Cage who tripped on magic mushrooms and had otters as witnesses at his first wedding
GETTING your fourth marriage annulled four days after a quick-fire Vegas wedding would give most of us pause for thought. But for Nicolas Cage, it is just another day.
The Hollywood A-lister is as well known these days for his rollercoaster personal life and lavish spending as his big-screen performances, which can veer from brilliant to baffling in the course of a single scene.
This is a man who tripped out on magic mushrooms with his pet cat, has bought two castles and a dinosaur skull, eats animals according to their mating habits, was stalked by a mime artist and has arranged to be buried under a 9ft pyramid in a New Orleans graveyard.
The Face Off star, 55, shows no sign of taking things steadier. After a year of dating, he and make-up artist Erika Koike, 34, walked into a Sin City courthouse last Saturday to apply for a marriage licence.
Cage, apparently drunk, gave the straightforward process treatment a trademark twist by telling onlookers his bride-to-be would take all his money and her “boyfriend” was a drug dealer. He was adamant he wouldn’t go through with the wedding. They were married later that day.
Four days on, Cage was back in the same courtroom asking to have the marriage annulled. Documents claim he accepted Erika’s suggestion to get married but was too intoxicated to “recognise or understand the full impact of his actions”.
He said Erika had not revealed the full extent of her criminal past — details of which have yet to emerge — and “the full nature and extent of her relationship with another person”. It is not clear if the pair are still in a relationship. But she will struggle to match the bond Cage had with his cat Lewis.
In one of the more startling revelations ever uttered by a Hollywood star, Cage told how they shared a psychedelic experience after devouring a bag of magic mushrooms. Cage said in 2010: “He ate them voraciously. It was like catnip to him. So I thought what the heck, I’d better do it with him.
“I remember lying in my bed for hours and Lewis was on the desk across from the bed for hours, staring at each other . . . not moving. But he would stare at me and I had no doubt he was my brother.”
The same year, Cage again raised eyebrows after revealing he only eats animals that mate in a “dignified” manner.
He said: “I actually choose the way I eat according to the way animals have sex. I think fish are very dignified with sex. So are birds. But pigs, not so much. So I don’t eat pig meat or things like that. I eat fish and fowl.”
Cage is the nephew of The Godfather’s director Francis Ford Coppola but changed his name to escape his famous uncle’s shadow. He chose Cage in tribute to Marvel comic-book hero Luke Cage.
He partied throughout his twenties before realising drink and drugs “wasn’t for me”. But getting hitched was, though his relationships often didn’t last long. His first marriage to actress Patrica Arquette lasted just ten months. He proposed HOURS after meeting her — but she declined.
She sent Cage on a scavenger hunt of unlikely objects before she would accept — including a wedding dress from the Lisu tribe of Southeast Asia, a black orchid and even the autograph of famously reclusive author JD Salinger.
After a brief split, they eventually married in March 1995 in a wedding ceremony that included OTTERS as witnesses. But they broke up for good in January 1996 and divorced in 2000. He was married to Lisa Marie Presley for 107 days before filing for divorce in November 2002. Some claimed his fascination with her famous father sparked his interest in her.
Cage has a huge collection of Elvis Presley memorabilia, including the King’s 1959 Cadillac Eldorado. His third marriage was his most successful.
In 2004 he wed Alice Kim, who was working as a waitress when they met. In 2005 they had a son, now 13, called Kal-El — named after Superman’s “real” name on Krypton. Cage and Kim divorced in 2016.
Cage’s eldest son is rocker Weston, 28, from his relationship with actress Christina Fulton, 51, who Cage dated in 1988. As well as collecting wives, the actor amassed a huge property portfolio bankrolled by his box-office hits, which included some typically extravagant properties.
e once owned 15 residences, including a £19million waterfront home in Newport Beach, California, a £2.6million mansion in New Orleans which Cage claimed was the “most haunted home in America”, two European CASTLES including Midford Castle in Somerset, which cost him £7.6million and a £4million townhouse in nearby Bath.
In the early Noughties, Cage’s fortune was thought to be around £150million. He paid £230,000 for a pet octopus and paid more than £100,000 for an ultra-rare comic book featuring the very first appearance of his beloved Superman. The comic was later stolen from Cage’s home before being recovered and eventually selling for more than £1.6million.
Another £2.3million went on an island in the Bahamas and in 2007, more than £200,000 on a 70million-year-old tyrannosaur skull.
In 2015, Cage agreed to hand over the skull to Mongolian authorities after learning it had been stolen. Cage was forced to sell most of his properties, including the two West Country piles, after being slapped with a tax bill for millions of dollars in the US.
Ever since, the Oscar-winning actor has cropped up in a bewiledering variety of roles. His filmography is distinctly patchy. As well as his award-winning turn as an alcoholic in 1995’s drama Leaving Las Vegas, he starred in box-office smashes Con Air and The Rock and appeared in 2010’s well-regarded Kick-Ass.
Cage flopped in 2001 literary adaptation Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and his performances were the subject of mockery and puzzlement in a remake of The Wicker Man and Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans. They, at least, were more memorable than rote thrillers such as 2011’s Trespass and Stolen the following year.
Star's hits & misses
IN a career of ups and downs, Nicolas Cage has won awards and been heaped with derision. Here, we pick the highlights and low points.
HIT – Leaving Las Vegas (1995): Cage won an Oscar playing an alcoholic screenwriter, right, drinking himself to death. He forms a friendship with a troubled prostitute played by Elisabeth Shue.
HIT – Face/Off (1997): Cage and John Travolta play sworn enemies who take on each other’s identity in John Woo’s madcap sci-fi action film. Travolta is the buttoned-up FBI agent, Cage the murderous villain Castor Troy.
HIT – Red Rock West (1993): Cage is mistaken for a hired killer by a bar owner who offers him £7,500 to kill his wife. Cage takes half the money up front – before the real killer turns up.
MISS – Trespass (2011): Co-starring Nicole Kidman, they play a couple who deal with a vicious home invasion in a thriller dubbed “more unpleasant than entertaining”.
MISS – Left Behind (2014): This apocalyptic thriller was universally panned by critics, who laid into the “atrocious” acting and “not special” effects. Rotten Tomatoes called it a “further scourge of devastation upon Cage’s once-proud filmography”.
MISS – 211 (2018): Panned by critics as cliched and dull, Cage plays a cop caught up in a heist
His reputation in the industry has taken a battering and his fortune is now said to be around £20million. Cage developed his own acting discipline dubbed “nouveau shamanic” which he uses to get into the heads of his characters.
When preparing for 2007 superhero movie Ghost Rider, Cage donned face paint and a costume composed of Egyptian artefacts to evoke the feeling of being an extra-dimensional spirit. His movie CV could have been very different.
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Cage has turned down roles in some of Hollywood’s biggest hits, passing up the chance to play Neo in The Matrix, a part later taken by Keanu Reeves.
Cage also said no to the role of Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy. That eventually went to Viggo Mortensen. And he was set to play the Man of Steel in Superman Lives, a long-in-the-works project from Batman director Tim Burton, but that never made it beyond pre-production.
Cage currently has eight films in production, all of which are likely to be released over the next two years. But it is unlikely any will be as dramatic or eventful as his life away from the big screen
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