Today is Nicolas Cage’s birthday, but how much do you know about the Hollywood star? Here are some surprising facts you might not know about him.
Nicolas Cage has been a fixture on screen for more than 40 years now. From early roles in cult movies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982 right through to Longlegs in 2024.
At his peak in the late 1990s, Nicolas was one of the top-earning stars in Hollywood, and he won a Best Actor Oscar in 1996 for his performance in Leaving Las Vegas. Since then, he has maintained a successful career and has regularly appeared in lists of the best actors of all time.
As he turns 62 today, here are some facts you might not know about Nicolas Cage.
He’s part of the Coppola family
While he is known as Nicolas Cage, he was born as Nicolas Coppola, and his uncle is film director Francis Ford Coppola. He is also a cousin of Sofia Coppola and Jason Schwartzmann.
Cage’s father, August, was a noted university professor, including serving as Dean of Ceative Arts at San Francisco State University, where he developed a reputation for championing the arts on the campus and the local community.
Nicolas took the stage name of Cage to try an ensure any success he got was on his own merits and not through being the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola.
He pioneered his own acting style
Actors all have their own methods of inhabiting the character they are playing, but few go as far as naming it, but Nicolas had. He developed the Nouveau Shamanic style, which involves increasing one’s imagination so that you feel like that you actually are the characters – in Nicolas’ words “You don’t feel like you’re acting, you feel like you’re being.”
Nicolas Cage tried to find the Holy Grail
One of Nicolas’ more famous roles was as treasure hunter Benjsmin Franklin Gates in National Treasure, but it turns out that he has done some treature hunting in real life too.
In a 2019 interview in the New York Times, Nicolas said he once went on a quest to find the Holy Grail
Nicolas said he had started following the mythology of the Holy Grail and started tracking down properties linked to it. This included going to the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, England, where Joseph of Arimathea is said to have hidden the Holy Grail.
Did Nicolas find the Grail? No. As the man himself said: “What I ultimately found is: what is the Grail but Earth itself?”
He’s donated millions to charity
Nicolas is known as one of the most generous stars in Hollywood. For instance, he has donated $2 million to Amnesty International to help the organization provide shelters, medical services and the like to children forced to fight in conflicts.
He also donated $1 million to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the cyclone that hit New Orleans in 2005 and killed more than 1,300 people.
He’s a huge fan of comic books
Nicolas will be starring as Spider-Man in the upcoming series Spider-Man Noir, which sees an alternative version of Spidey, set in the 1930s and written and films in the style of film noir and hard-boiled detective novels.
This is an ideal role for Nicolas who is a huge fan of comics. Over the years, he has owned comics such as Action Comics number 1, as well as first editions of Fantastic Four and Green Lantern comics. In 2002, he auctioned 400 vintage comics, which sold for $1.6 million.
He has owned vast amounts of real estate
Nicolas has invested money in property for many years and has owned multiple castles and mansions – and even an island. He at one point owned “the most haunted house in America” in New Orleans, Louisiana. The house, commonly known as the LaLaurie House, was once owned by Delphine LaLaurie, a socialite and alleged serial killer of the 1830s.
He invested in property believing it would be a better investment than stocks, but after the real estate bubble burst, he ended up selling most of his properties at a loss.
