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He’s Up. He’s Down. He’s Up. He’s Down. He’s Up for Good? : Nicholas Cage’s Movie Career Has Been, Uh volatile. But He Hit the Jackpot in an Alcoholic Love Story Set in Las Vegas. Will Success Stick? Nothing is ever That Simple in Hollywood

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Claudia Puig is a Times staff writer who writes about the film industry. Her last story for the magazine was on Spanish-language radio station KLAX

Initially, the prospect of playing a disgraced writer hellbent on drinking himself to death in the uncommonly downbeat film, “Leaving Las Vegas,” terrified actor Nicolas Cage. “I was completely intimidated by the role of Ben,” he says. “I had never done anything like that before, and I didn’t know if I could. “

Then the process of bringing life to the complex and tragic figure exhilarated him. And eventually, everyone else.

The movie, made on a shoestring budget of $3.5 million, was so dark and grim that it had been turned down by every major studio in Hollywood before United Artists bought it for a song and released it on only a handful of theater screens. Once it opened, however, critics fell all over themselves heaping praise--and later, awards--on the 32-year-old actor. Every national critics’ organization in the country has named him best actor of the year. Cage has emerged in this breakthrough portrayal with a Golden Globe nomination, his first. And amazingly enough, he is a front-runner in the Oscar nomination race--no small feat, given the film’s unconventional style, tiny budget and bleak subject matter: Alcoholic meets prostitute, falls in love and kills himself by drinking [with drink???].

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Most would agree that this is Cage’s year. After about two dozen movies over 15 years, he is at the pinnacle of his career. So where does he go after this heart-wrenching performance? What role has this master of dark portrayals and absurd characterizations taken on next?

A chemical weapons expert in “The Rock,” a big-budget action-adventure, also starring Sean Connery, by the producer team of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, of “Top Gun” fame.

Come again?

Playing an action-adventure hero is not exactly what one would expect from an actor like Cage, known for quirky roles that walk a tightrope between dementia and sanity in some of the more inventive movies of the past decade. And it was a bit startling to watch Cage on the set of the film. Gun in hand, his expressive face impassive, he was snaking--along with legions of extras--through an elaborate serpentine tunnel allegedly on Alcatraz Island.

But Cage defends his choice, saying it is a genre that he has yet to master.

“ ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ was the answer to all my prayers,” he explains. “When it came along, I knew it would allow me to dig a little deeper than some other roles I’ve played--to get back into that crummy old corner in my mind, dust off the cobwebs and see what I would come up with. Well, I’ve done that now. I did this small film and it gave me a chance to take a chance. Now, I’m doing the complete opposite because I like to keep flipping the coin.”

And since he received virtually no fee for doing “Leaving Las Vegas” (though he may make some money after all is said and done, depending on how the film fares at the box office), it must feel nice to be on a $50-million-plus film and be taking home a paycheck. But it does sometimes seem as though Cage’s choice of films are dictated by a pendulum.

Last year he played Little Junior Brown, a malevolent underworld figure, in “Kiss of Death.” Then there was Peter Loew, the sadistic yuppie wannabe bloodsucker of “Vampire’s Kiss”; Sailor Ripley, a petty criminal on the lam in “Wild at Heart,” and the loopy, lovesick baker, Ronnie Cammareri, in “Moonstruck.”

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Then, a few years ago, after playing a series of oddball, dark characters, Cage embarked on three romantic comedies he has affectionately labeled his “Sunshine Trilogy.”

“I had done a string of roles that were considered odd by many people, and the jury was very much out on me as to whether I was sane,” Cage says. “[People wondered:] Was I creating those characters, or is that how I really am?”

It has become increasingly clear that one cannot make assumptions about the man based on his eclectic assortment of film roles.

“The presence that he creates on the screen is so different from his personality, “ said Sarah Jessica Parker, who costarred with Cage in “Honeymoon in Vegas.” “I think his true nature is really different from his roles. Before I worked with him, I was expecting someone who was rather eccentric and dark and brooding and perhaps dangerous. There are so many normal qualities to him, but he also does care a lot about his work which also defies that bad-boy image . . . . You wouldn’t think someone who had that image would be that cultured and analytical and so well-read. He has a great aesthetic sensibility.”

The fruits of that sensibility surround him now, here in the apartment he rents in one of the most unlikely locations in downtown Los Angeles, just blocks away from Skid Row. (He also owns a grand old Victorian house in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco and a castle-style home in the Hollywood Hills). Mahogany-paneled walls, overstuffed leather couches and a grand piano evoke the image of an exclusive men’s club. Vases brimming with pale pink roses fill the high-ceilinged, 1920s-era living room, their heady scent wafting over a recent unseasonably warm January night.

He is partial to roses. They are a personal metaphor.

“I’d like to be able to convey pure happiness in one scene or in a whole movie,” he says. “I would like to do something that has absolutely nothing to do with danger or violence or self-destruction--just something that’s so simple, like that flower. My taste in art has changed. I used to collect really violent Robert Williams paintings, but now I just like a simple Japanese print of a pear. The beauty of a pear, the simplicity of an Eames chair. I love glass, the fire, the color of blown glass. That’s what I really want to be able to do: something that’s very graceful and pure and not scary or disturbing. Something that is just light and whimsical and enchanted. There’s power in that.”

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Maybe it has something to do with becoming a father. His son, Weston, by former girlfriend Christina Fulton, is now 5. The blue-eyed boy, who lives primarily with his mother, knows what his father does for a living but, by his father’s design, has not seen any of his movies.

“I just wanted him to have as normal a life as I could provide, considering I’m no longer with his mother,” Cage says. “I didn’t want the film image confusing things with the real person. I have friends that are children of actors who have said: ‘I saw my father get shot off a horse on television when I was 5, and I remember being really upset and thinking Daddy’s dead.’ So, I just didn’t want to take any chances. I’ll wait till he’s a little older.” Abruptly, he offers a crystal dish filled with Starburst candies. “Would you like one? They’re mighty good,” Cage drawls.

When it comes to ingesting substances, Cage is widely remembered for eating a live cockroach in “Vampire’s Kiss” and, most recently, for gulping down mass quantities of vodka (and virtually the entire contents of a liquor store) in “Leaving Las Vegas.”

But the real Cage’s vice is--chewy candies?

This can’t be the same Nicolas Cage we moviegoers think we know.

That guy seemed alternately a wild man, a deadpan oddball, a bumbling romantic.

This guy seems so sensitive and refined.

Maybe it’s because he plays bent-and-desperate so convincingly that one is taken aback when faced with his calm and focused demeanor.

The need to prove he was acting, not playing himself, led him about two years ago to a trio of movies in which he played more conventional characters: “Honeymoon in Vegas,” “Guarding Tess” and “It Could Happen to You.” “I realized I’d better play in a romantic comedy and show them this is acting, that I’m not this person,” Cage said. “I’m trying to create different characters, because that’s what I think an actor should do.”

Earlier in his career, which began at 17, Cage had different ideas of what an actor should do. “I was charged at 17 with a great deal of anger, a well of passion, and I really wanted to get it out,” he says, his large, mournful eyes--his most distinctive feature--shaded as he gazes off into the distance. “I had an edge. I had a temper. I could do things very spontaneously. If it wasn’t for acting, I probably wouldn’t have been able to channel that.”

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His antics then have been widely documented. He once dangled upside down from a parking lot at the trendy Beverly Center mall with his pal, Johnny Depp. He sported a large lizard tattoo on his back; he kept a pet shark.

“That was the symptom of beginning acting at 17,” Cage says. “I was a Who fan that loved that rock ‘n’ roll edge and the outlaw adolescent image that went with it. Pete Townsend smashing his guitar was what I wanted to sort of embody--that moment. I heard all these incredible stories about Brando and thought: ‘Well, I guess you have to sort of generate those stories.’ And I worked at it. I knew it would get around. Even eating the cockroach in “Vampire’s Kiss”--I did that because I knew then that people would still be asking me about it now.”

These days Cage is as settled as he has ever been, having gotten married last year to actress Patricia Arquette. The feral intensity he spread liberally over his public and cinematic life, is now confined to celluloid.

“My objective is simplicity,” Cage says. “I want simplicity in my life, because the work is chaotic enough.”

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Cage’s sense of peace may be fueled by the unanimously hearty endorsement of his portrayal of Ben Sanderson in “Leaving Las Vegas.” This for an actor who was roundly assailed a decade ago for his performance in “Peggy Sue Got Married.” (It was rumored that costar Kathleen Turner was so enraged at his over-the-top performance as her husband in that film that she demanded the producers fire him.) “I loved their reaction to ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’,” he says, laughing. “I thought it was hilarious. I really thought: ‘If I don’t go out there and get some bad reviews, I’m doing something wrong. I had this sort of arrogant way of looking at things--that to be a great artist, you had to be met with opposition.

“I’d be a liar to say it’s not great to hear people respond favorably,” Cage said. “But the important thing for me is to live in the moment and to be happy with this but not dwell on it. And to realize that I’m probably going to do something again that’s going to p- - - everybody off, and that’s OK. I think the important thing is to try to act for myself. If I’m happy with it, then great. If people get it, even better. If they don’t, fine.”

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“For a lot of people, I think, Nic was a little too rich for their blood,” said Ethan Coen, who, along with his brother Joel, directed Cage in “Raising Arizona.” “But if you do good work for a long time, people will come around. Now the critical acclaim is catching up to him, and he really deserves it.

“He probably is a better actor than he was 10 years ago,” added Joel Coen. “I think that goes along with Nic’s questing for new choices and challenges. He’s not a complacent sort of actor. He’s not happy without stretching, trying new things.”

So, how would an Oscar look next to that vase of roses?

“I think it would be only positive if the movie did well with the Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences],” Cage says modestly. “It would send a signal that the academy is open to small movies, to taking a chance, trying different styles, trying a different structure. It would show that movies can end tragically. I think a good movie is a good movie. It doesn’t matter at the end of the day if it’s a little movie or a sad movie. I think people are smart. I don’t play the game where we’ve got to explain it to people in middle America. That to me is just b.s.”

He went on to defend the film’s bleak ending.

“Tragedy is rarely seen anymore, but it’s a necessary part of the preparation for tragedy in one’s own life,” Cage says. “We’re all going to have to deal with it, with the loss of a loved one. I dealt with it when I was 21 years old, when my cousin died. [Gian Carlo Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola’s son, was killed in a boating accident in 1986.] It was like nothing prepared me for that. Shakespeare wrote tragedies, and they had a medicinal purpose, I think, along with an artistic purpose.”

As part of his preparation for his role in “Leaving Las Vegas,” Cage watched and analyzed what he calls “all the great alcoholic performances”: Ray Milland in “The Lost Weekend,” Jack Lemmon in “Days of Wine and Roses,” Dudley Moore in “Arthur” and Albert Finney in “Under the Volcano.”

“He’s the kind of actor who comes to the set having completely absorbed the script,” said Mike Figgis, who [played a character in the film and] also wrote [its] final screenplay. “He does a colossal amount of research beforehand and comes up with very, very intelligent alternatives to what’s on the page. The bottom line is he’s got a rather beautiful soul, like a great musician, and I think it shows in the way he expresses himself.”

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And Cage is an expressive soul--often pensive, certainly self-analytical--during an interview at his downtown apartment. When he talks about his career goals and motivations for his characters, he appears deep in thought--sitting forward, gazing intently off into space, determined to choose exactly the right words to convey his observations. He cracks a smile occasionally, almost as an afterthought. He speaks, with some hesitation, about the effects his mothers’ institutionalization for chronic manic depression had upon him as a child and how it informs his acting.

The conversation winds down around midnight, and not then at his suggestion, even though he is clearly growing tired and appears grateful when the spotlight is turned off. Unfailingly professional, Cage knows that interviews are part of the bargain, and he dutifully--and engagingly--obliges.

But, when it comes to questions about his craft and how he pulls off his intense portrayals, Cage grows cagey. “I’m not really sure how it works, the whole process, and I’m not sure I really want to know how it works,” he says, staring fixedly toward a wall and running his hands through his dark, thinning hair. “I just want to trust that it’s there and I can access it when I need to. But to analyze it is frightening. I don’t want to break down the process of acting. I think there could be a danger of constipating it.”

He manages to be both reverent and humble about his talent: “I’m beholden to it because it really provides me an opportunity to express myself in a creative way. It’s something that I hold in a sacred place and something that I don’t want to tamper with too much. It’s something to respect and nurture and hone.”

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Cage is clearly ambivalent when he discusses his upbringing. He speaks with pride of his father, August Coppola, a former comparative literature professor, and with warmth about his mother, Joy Vogelsang, at one time a modern dancer. He speaks kindly, though with some reserve, about his director-uncle, Francis Ford Coppola. Cage chose to change his name to avoid riding on the coattails of his famous uncle. His stage name is in homage to avant-garde composer John Cage.

He grew up in Long Beach, the youngest of three sons, exposed routinely to his father’s eclectic taste in art and film. “I can remember him playing movies, really enigmatic stuff: [Fellini’s] ‘Juliet of the Spirits’ and Kurosawa movies,” Cage says. “ I was watching this stuff at a pretty young age. When I was 10 I can remember watching “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Nosferatu.” Although it was terrifying to me at that age, it intrigued me and stayed with me.”

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He was a skinny, lonely kid, the constant victim of bullies’ pummeling, and Cage remembers wanting desperately to be inside his TV. He marks that moment--at age 6--as the start of his acting ambition.

He often retreated into tough-guy characters as an escape from the 12- and 13-year-olds who sought to rough him up in grade school. “I sometimes think of that little boy inside of me, kind of considered different or weird, writing those stories, doing puppet shows, always in an imaginary state, creating characters,” Cage says. “And I remember when I’d had enough of getting beaten up, I would become the Incredible Hulk. I’d commit so hard to it, I remember, I could make bullies run, screaming from me just by acting like I was something I wasn’t.”

His parents divorced when he was 12 and he spent some time living with his uncle Francis and aunt Eleanor in Napa Valley, Calif. At 15, he enrolled in San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre and appeared in school productions. He moved back to Southern California and attended Beverly Hills High School. As he grew up, he resisted his father’s efforts to turn him toward writing, often locking horns with him on his career choice.

He tells a story about convincing his professor father that he was the singer of the Joe Jackson hit, “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”

“Yeah, I lied,” he explains. “There’s a reason why I did that. My father, like anybody, has more than one side. He was very into the creative stuff, but he could also be verbally abusive. To be perfectly honest with you, I needed to believe he believed in me. And if he believed that I wrote that song, then he must have thought I was special. And if he thought I was special, then I could have the courage to get on with what I wanted to do with my life.”

Cage got his start in his uncle’s “Rumblefish” in 1983, followed by a seminal role in “Valley Girl.” Over the years, he has starred in about two dozen movies, including “Cotton Club,” “Birdy,” “Racing With the Moon” and “Red Rock West.”

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But his biggest challenge to date has been the role of Sanderson in “Leaving Las Vegas.” When he read the script, he knew he had to play Sanderson, Cage says. But he was also frightened by the intensity of the part. “It was really a leap off a cliff to have a go at this,” he says.

Some of the action and dialogue of “Leaving Las Vegas” were improvised, giving Cage a sense of exhilaration, as did the entire intense, short 28-day shoot. (Most films are shot over several months, but the tight $3.5-million budget of “Leaving Las Vegas” sped up the process.)

Yet the film’s subject matter would bring his spirits crashing back down after a day of filming.

“There was a sense of joy about it which was paradoxical,” Cage says. “Early on in the rehearsal, I thought the only way to play Ben without becoming maudlin, without people saying ‘Well, why should I care about you? Look at you, you’re just wallowing in your own pain,’ was to make him actually float, make him cut loose from the pain. The analogy I use is going down the river and not struggling to hold on to the branches to stay afloat, but just going. So that was what I hoped would come across. But then there is the pain that brought him there.”

And that pain haunted Cage, particularly after hours.

“The fact that it was a 28-day shoot helped,” he explains. “On the set, I had that exhilarated joy, this feeling that the work was getting done and it was flowing. It was just happening, and I didn’t have to think too much about it. I knew where I wanted to go. Mike [Figgis], Elisabeth [Shue] and I would all connect. At the end of the day, when I would go home, I would think about the character’s head space and why he wanted to die. I would think about how to say lines like ‘Why am I drinking myself to death? I don’t remember. I just know that I want to’ and give them integrity. It started a thought process that became quite morose, and it made me miserable, because I am not that way. I do not want to die. So to try to understand that was creepy to me. And if I’d had to live that for three months, or the normal length of a shoot, it could have gotten old really fast.

“There were some times I would go home from work, and I’d been trying to see the world through Ben’s eyes, and then the street lights on the freeway just suddenly seemed like they were made of cardboard and the freeway itself was made of papier mache, and it made me feel like nothing was real and this is all just so temporary.”

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Cage, unlike Ben Sanderson’s unrepentant alcoholic, seems like a man who has faced down his demons--and won. He hasn’t exorcised them, because they fuel his art, but he has them under control, contained constructively but ready to unleash at any time on the appropriate role.

“It’s OK for me to get wild in the work if I want to, and I often want to,” Cage says. “It’s a good thing to do, but I don’t have to take it home with me. And I don’t think I have to live the part. There’s a little door that I have inside that I can put everything that’s hurt me over the years [into], and I just put it there and leave it until it’s time to let it out.”

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Grooming by Nina Kraft

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