Title: High spirits. By: Daly, Steve, Afanador, Ruven, Entertainment Weekly,  3/15/96, Issue 318 HIGH SPIRITS Section: FEATURES CRITICS ARE GUSHING. SCRIPTS ARE POURING IN. AND NOW OSCAR LOOKS LIKE A GOOD BET. HOW DID AN OFFBEAT ACTOR LIKE NICOLAS CAGE BECOME THE TOAST OF HOLLYWOOD? NOBODY REALLY knows me down here," says Nicolas Cage. He's perched on a red-velvet couch in the 12th-floor penthouse suite he recently purchased in a teemingly pan-ethnic but predominantly Latino section of downtown Los Angeles. Clad completely in textured black clothing--scaly boots, fleecy jeans, and a rumply T-shirt torn at the neck--Cage looks like some dark version of a blank canvas, primed but unpainted. "I can walk around, and it's completely anonymous," he says, his intense gray eyes unwavering. "I can get a chicken soft taco or something and sit there in the market and imagine I'm in South America somewhere." In his other homes--a San Francisco Victorian mansion with custom-made stained-glass windows picturing a dragon and an outlandish, 11-room Hollywood Hills abode fashioned in the style of a German castle--Cage bonds with his wife of 11 months, actress Patricia Arquette, and his 5-year-old son, Weston, whom he had with ex-girlfriend Kristina Fulton. (Arquette also has a 6-year-old son, by musician Paul Rossi.) So isn't this talk of escape pretty bachelor-ish for a family man? Cage considers the question carefully, the way he considers every question. As he weaves his answer, his California-dude accent emerges from a throat so constricted with concentration at times that you want to find the choke control and ease up on it. "I think that having different environments is better, rather than having one huge, you know, space that you reside in all the time," he says, gesturing in a way that makes his T-shirt ride down and reveal his carefully demarcated chest-hair trim line. "I think it's more interesting to have smaller spaces that you can explore and feel like different people." It's that overwhelming hunger to keep shifting his shape that has landed Cage at center stage, putting him at the vertex of a career he still seems to be a bit startled to find thriving. Already lauded with every conceivable award--the Golden Globe, the SAG statuette, citations from the three major critics' groups--for his role as a terminal alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas, his 25th film, Cage is considered the front runner for Best Actor at the Academy Awards March 25. He's just wrapped what he hopes is his first successful action movie, Hollywood Pictures' The Rock, in which he plays an FBI agent opposite Sean Connery and Ed Harris (Cage's paycheck: $4 million). And on the afternoon that we speak, news has broken of two more major movie deals: $6 million to $7 million for Cage to team with John Travolta and director John Woo (Broken Arrow) in the Paramoun t thriller Face Off, and then another action film, Con Air, about a planeload of prisoners. Pretty heady stuff for an actor who had no significant formal training and who, in his teens, couldn't land any good roles under his real name, Nicolas Coppola, because casting agents "would spend the whole audition time asking me about my uncle Francis." (Cage's father, August, a former professor of literature at Cal State Long Beach, is the brother of Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire.) So how does Cage intend to celebrate now that he's scaled the heights of the action-movie A list in Hollywood? By moving on out, he hopes. "I've been looking at places in New York," he says. "The idea of a foot culture, that you are going to observe more people, to me is food, you know, for acting. The idea of not having to rely on a car, and not to be in that space bubble, seems pretty attractive to me right now. It's just that I'm 32 and I've been here all my life, and I think I need to have a change." At this, Cage gestures broadly with his arms raised high while he pulls his neck down and into his shoulders like a beefy tortoise. "I need to meet different people, get different stimulus," he continues. "I think I can get that in Manhattan. I just have to convince everybody to go there with me." By "everybody," does Cage mean Patricia and crew? He looks a bit stricken. "Let's just say that [moving] won't be easy to do. It might take a little while." RAISED IN Long Beach with two older brothers, Nicolas Coppola was 6 when he began to see his mother, dancer Joy Vogelsang, succumb to a string of depressions that put her in hospitals for many years. Cage has said that those places have often given him something to meditate on in acting situations where extremism is required. His mother is "fine now," he has said (she attended the SAG Awards and beamed on camera at her successful son), but the marriage wasn't, and his parents divorced when Nicolas was 12. When his dad traveled on academic forays, Nick often went to San Francisco to live with his wealthy Uncle Francis' clan for months at a time, right around the period that the staggering success of The Godfather was transforming the whole family's dynamic. There were many times, he recalls, that he "really enjoyed going up there," but he didn't exactly fit in with his better-off cousins--or with the students back at Beverly Hills High. He took a general equivalency diploma exam and left school before graduation. After frustrating rounds of auditions during which his uncle's name never stopped coming up, the stymied young Coppola grew tired of being "prejudged" and sat down with his maternal grandmom to fashion a new moniker. "I'd always loved the name Cage because of [the African-American comic-book character] Luke Cage, Power Man," he recalls. At the time, Cage says, he took a lot of guff from Coppola relatives for his decision. "My great-great-great-grandfather came to America from Italy and he, you know, we were paupers struggling, and then my grandfather Carmine developed a talent, which was to play the flute," Cage says, his slender fingers working his jaw. "Carmine married my grandmother, who was a songwriter's daughter, and that began this sort of illustrious life in the arts. With that is a certain kind of competition and pride and a thick kind of passion that I guess by changing my name I ended." Cage has, however, given his son the option of falling back within the family confines. "His name is Weston Coppola Cage. When he gets older, he can choose whichever name he wants. I wanted to give him everything, and he can decide." IN 1982, CAGE'S name change almost immediately jump-started his career. On the first audition he had as Nicolas Cage, director Martha Coolidge handed him the romantic lead in Valley Girl, a sweet wrong-side-of-the-tracks love story. But rechristening himself marked only the beginning of Cage's campaign to continuously make himself over. He tried to change his look, his walk, and his voice in every movie--the latter partly out of simple low self-esteem. "I never felt my voice had any character to it on its own merit," he says. "So I was always trying to experiment." Cage experimented with a vengeance when Uncle Francis talked him into starring opposite Kathleen Turner in the 1986 time-travel comedy Peggy Sue Got Married. The going got very rough--including a visit from TriStar executives who, horrified by his performance, lobbied to dismiss Cage--but Coppola stuck by his actor, promising he'd fix things in the editing room. Cage recalls the stunned look on Turner's face the first day of rehearsals, when she first heard "that helium voice. She came over and said, `Film is a permanent record. Be careful what you do.'" Although Cage took a lot of flak, some good things did come out of his almost universally panned performance. One of the bit players in the high school reunion dance scenes was Jim Carrey, and he and Cage have been friends ever since. The two often talk shop--for instance, regarding Cage's love of silent film actors like Nosferatu's Max Schreck and makeup master Lon Chaney. "Because it was silent film, people were overcompensating in terms of gesture and expression," says Cage. "It seemed to be the one way you could get surreal, like a painter does or a musician does, with acting. How do you do that in modern cinema? The character either has to be insane, drunk, or in a slapstick comedy." Peggy Sue wound up working for Cage too when Cher saw it and championed him for the lead in Moonstruck, even though she thought his work as Charlie Bodell was like watching "a car accident." It didn't stop him from clicking with the Coen brothers either, who gave him his first comedy showcase as a baby-napping redneck in Raising Arizona. "He's a fast and fierce thinker," says Joel Coen. "He's always coming up with new stuff to do--he never takes the obvious choices." LEAVING LAS VEGAS, an inexpensive, relentlessly depressing drama that found French financing when no American studio would touch it, was perhaps the least obvious choice Cage could make. He got the script while shooting "an ordeal that shall remain nameless" (actually, its name was Trapped in Paradise). He agreed to work for $240,000 instead of his usual $4 million-range fee and soon threw himself into research. "The most impressive thing is the extent and depth of his preparation," says Leaving Las Vegas director Mike Figgis. In fact, Cage treats his scripts as the most pressing of take-home exams. One night he rang up Figgis to ask why the director had specified that his character, a washed-up movie exec, would drive a Jaguar. Cage argued that Ben would drive a black BMW like every agent in town. Figgis agreed, and Cage went right on down the fine print, "through the clothes, the words, everything." "He's something of an outsider in his family, and I don't think he's ever completely gotten over some of the hurts," Figgis speculates. "But for an artist, that pain and insecurity is worth its weight in gold. It gives Nick acute powers of observation." Cage read extensively about alcoholism's physical ravages, studied how sanitarium patients endure the d.t.'s, pored over descriptions in the late John O'Brien's novel of his character's convulsing stomach--and, in a somewhat less scholarly mode, went on an all-night liquored-up pub crawl with Figgis, costar Elisabeth Shue, and his manager, Gerry Harrington. His imaginative leaps continued during the 28-day shoot; it was Cage's idea that during his character's first, abortive oral-sex roundelay with prostitute Sera (Shue), he should sing a little tune. "I go to change in the bathroom for this scene," Shue recalls, "and he was out there singing this Batmobile song he'd made up. It was just so odd. I kept laughing and he really got my attention. He drew me in and kept me looking honest." The singing conceit was "a pivotal moment," says Figgis, because "it says [this character has] enough innate grace and humil ity that sex is not his sole agenda. And consequently made it a great sex scene." Despite their successful collaboration, Cage recently passed on reteaming with Figgis for One Night Stand, which the director starts shooting in May from a Joe Eszterhas script. Cage says he felt he didn't quite fit the role; perhaps, too, the prospect of diving into an adulterous character when his own marriage is just approaching its first anniversary was too much. He defends his jump to the action genre as just another typical chameleon turn. "I have to admit that I really enjoy action movies," he says. "It's a style that I have not mastered yet. And for some reason [movie genres] tend to come in threes for me." Figgis' answer to that line of reasoning is to say, gently, "They come in threes if you let them." But even he acknowledges that there is method to every one of Cage's decisions. During the Vegas shoot, he and his star clashed only once--while filming the scene in which Cage arrives at Shue's apartment bloodied from a bar fight, behaving in a part-courtly, part-belligerent manner. "I was not quite prepared for him to say he felt 'like the kling-klang king of the rim-ram room,' which wasn't in the script," recalls Figgis. "So I shouted as we rolled for the next take, 'Good luck with the improvisation.' Well, Nick got a look and said, 'Oh, okay, I'll do a real straight one for ya then.' I had made the mistake of thinking it was arbitrary, when in fact he'd worked it all out very carefully. He's still very sensitive about the perception that he's wacky, because his performance isn't that. It's all hard work. N othing in it is arbitrary."