Nicolas Cage's Tragic True Life Story

For the past 30 years, Nicolas Cage has been one of Hollywood's most audacious personalities, with a flair for off-the-wall roles and movies that match his occasionally over-the-top personality. The actor has earned a legion of fans, not just for his talent on screen, but for his down-to-earth demeanor off it. He's lived a rollercoaster life, full of highs and lows, and his frank, earnest interviews make him easy to get behind.

Following a string of blockbuster film roles, Cage became an international superstar. His success, as well as his famous family — he is the nephew of director Francis Ford Coppola — ensured he lived a privileged life. However, he's also faced lots of hardships and low points. Over the years, Cage has made disastrous mistakes, suffered personal loss and private pain, and has always owned up to the problems that were of his own making. From bad career moves to the many lawsuits he has faced and filed, this is the tragic true life story of Nicolas Cage.

Brief marriages, challenging courtships, and problematic relationships are par for the course in Hollywood, and Nicolas Cage is no exception. In the '90s, Cage was married to Patricia Arquette for over five years, but it was later revealed that their relationship had crumbled after just nine months — and they kept up appearances as a couple until their divorce was finalized years later.

While it appears their relationship broke down quickly, it took Cage five years to secure his marriage proposal to Arquette. At one point, she made a list of nearly impossible items for him to acquire to prove his love. This included a black orchid and the autograph of J.D. Salinger, which he somehow fulfilled — though it required bending a few rules, such as spraying a purple orchid with black paint.

Surprisingly, the nine-month romance with Arquette wasn't his shortest marriage. In August 2002, Cage married Elvis Presley's daughter Lisa Marie, but the two were divorced less than four months later, and his marriage to Erika Koike in 2019 lasted a mere four days.

Nicolas Cage grew up on comic books — hence his choice of surname — and had a sincere love of superheroes all his life. As more comic book heroes made their way to the big screen, Cage had his sights set on playing one of them, with his greatest dream being to play Superman. Famously, he came quite close to playing the role when Tim Burton was hired to direct "Superman Lives" in the late '90s, but the project fell apart and never came to be.

In the following years, Cage would keep trying to get his comic book movie role. He was considered for "Iron Man" at one point and almost played Green Goblin in Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man." He was even officially signed on to play the title role in DC's "Constantine" before director Tarsem Singh abandoned the film. He'd finally get the superhero movie he'd been dreaming of when he was cast to play Johnny Blaze in 2007's "Ghost Rider." Unfortunately, this film was lambasted by critics — though it did scrape enough together to get a sequel. 

Cage would go on to play Big Daddy in "Kick-Ass" in 2010 and Spider-Man Noir in 2018's "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse." He eventually got his shot at Superman in 2018, voicing the character in "Teen Titans GO! To the Movies." This was followed by a cameo appearance in "The Flash" in 2023 as the "Superman Lives" incarnation of the character, bringing everything full circle. 

By the end of the 1990s, Nicolas Cage was one of the biggest stars in the world. He was starring in movie after movie and finally had the riches and fame that every actor dreams of when they're starting. In 2009, Cage was listed as one of the top five highest paid actors in Hollywood according to Forbes. Unfortunately, he didn't always spend his money wisely.

Cage went on a spending splurge that included purchasing six-figure dinosaur bones, a horde of expensive cars, four yachts, and even a haunted house. He seemed to enjoy collecting expensive and exotic pets, too, and his home zoo featured rare snakes, a shark, an octopus, and even an alligator. 

His most famous purchases, though, were rare comic books, including "Action Comics" #1, the first appearance of Superman, which he acquired in 1997 for $150,000. It was later stolen from his home in 2000, but Cage would get the last laugh when it was recovered more than a decade later and he sold it at auction for an eye-popping $2.1 million. Despite this profit, Cage went into debt with his lavish spending, reportedly blowing as much as $150 million. This eventually landed him in some serious trouble with the IRS to the tune of more than $6 million in unpaid property taxes (per CNBC).

With his finances depleted, Nicolas Cage also wound up at a low point in his career. By the late 2000s he wasn't quite the box office draw he once was after flops like "Bangkok Dangerous" and "Next," so earning enough to get out of debt was going to take some extra work. That meant accepting just about any offer that came his way, including a string of awful movies that he would never have taken otherwise.

"Work was always my guardian angel," Cage told "60 Minutes" of this dark time when he reluctantly took roles in projects he knew would fail. Yet, Cage insists he never gave anything less than 100% in a performance and he stands by his work. "It may not have been blue chip, but it was still work," he admits. "Even if the movie ultimately is crummy, they know I'm not phoning it in, that I care every time." By the late 2010s, Cage was appearing in three, four, and sometimes five movies a year, most of which were critically derided flops. 

"They didn't work, all of them," he told GQ. "Some of them were terrific, like 'Mandy,' but some of them didn't work." But doing all those movies helped him financially, and by 2022 he was free and clear with the IRS.

Nicolas Cage's financial problems are well-documented in Hollywood. To the actor's credit, he never filed for bankruptcy and he managed to pay back all of his debts by taking on more work. That said, he didn't take sole responsibility for the issues he had with money, filing a lawsuit claiming that his manager was partly to blame. 

In 2009, he filed a whopping $20 million lawsuit against Samuel J. Levin, accusing his financial manager of making excessively risky — and bad — investments that cost him tens of millions of dollars and contributed to his massive debt to the IRS. "[Levin] placed Cage in numerous highly speculative and risky real estate investments, resulting in Cage suffering catastrophic losses," stated the lawsuit (per The Standard). However, Levin countersued, insisting that the real fault lay with Cage himself for "compulsive, self-destructive spending." In 2012, the lawsuit was settled without heading before a judge.

A charge of domestic abuse may have been dropped by police in 2011, but this wasn't the only time Nicolas Cage was accused of bad behavior by the women in his life. In 2018, the actor was hit with claims that he'd been abusive to a former girlfriend, Vickie Park, whom he'd reportedly dated in 2017 following his divorce from Alice Kim (per The Independent). Those allegations, however, came about during a strange legal battle between Park and his ex-wife Kim, who Park claimed had been harassing her.

In the court filing for a restraining order against Kim, Park claimed that Cage suffered from "alcohol addiction, depression, and mental illness" which may have been the catalyst for a pattern of abuse. She mentioned an alleged incident that occurred at a film festival in Vienna, but the worst were allegations against Kim, who repeatedly insulted Park to Cage, and who she claimed was instigating violent encounters between them. "Her jealousy of my relationship with her ex-husband, my youth and physical appearance has drove [sic] her to take these actions of harassment," Park said in the filing. "Her intentions were to subject him into more alcohol abuse and anger towards me while I was alone with him in our hotel room in London, England — right after the abuse incident in Vienna, Austria." Cage and Kim both denied what they called "absurd allegations."