This actor, who belongs to one of Hollywood’s most famous dynasties, is a National Treasure but in his personal life, he’s trapped in a “quiet, horrible nightmare.”
The Family Man actor, who once bought a seat on a plane for his child’s imaginary friend, is now living in a “hostile environment” created by his son’s ex-wife, who’s preventing him from meeting his four-year-old twin granddaughters.
Keep reading to learn the identity of the star whose name change was inspired by a superhero!
When this actor was only 15, he was seated in a car with his uncle, one of Hollywood’s leading filmmakers, and begged him for a chance to appear in one of his award-winning films.
“Give me a screen test, I’ll show you acting. There was just silence in the car,” said the star, who’s proudly bizarre both on and off screen.
As a 17-year-old, the actor paved his own path to stardom and earned a minor role in the 1982 hit, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a coming-of age cult favorite.
“I was the brunt of jokes because my name was still Coppola,” says Nicholas Cage, who was born in 1962 as Nicholas Kim Coppola.
“People would not stop saying things like, ‘I love the smell of Nicolas in the morning,’ because of Apocalypse Now…and it made it hard to work and I said, ‘I don’t need this,’ and changed it to Cage,” the star explains of dropping the surname that connected him to his famous relative, Francis Ford Coppola.
Next, explaining why he chose Cage, he says, “It’s a combination of Luke Cage from Marvel comics, who was a character I liked, also named Power Man, and John Cage, the avant-garde composer. Speaks volumes about everything I’ve been up to ever since.”
His first starring role with Cage as his last name came in 1983’s Valley Girl and the anonymity he said made him feel as if he “had this weight come off my body.”
“Wow, I really can do this. And I felt liberated by that experience,” he tells Hollywood Reporter. “And you can see it in Valley Girl that I’m free. Whereas in Fast Times, or even Rumble Fish, I’m somewhat stuck,” he says, referring to his appearance in 1983’s Rumble Fish, a film directed by his uncle.
Over the next several years, Cage worked in back-to-back films, earning the reputation as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actors.
In 1988, he earned Golden Globe nominations for Moonstruck with Cher and Honeymoon in Vegas with Sarah Jessica Parker.
It was also the same year he met actor Christina Fulton, who in December 1990 gave birth to his first son, Weston Coppola Cage, an actor who appeared as the younger version of his dad in the 2014 film Rage.
Cage, who earned an Oscar for his 1995 role in Leaving Las Vegas, also shares a son Kal-El (Superman’s birth name) born in 2005 with his third wife Alice Kim, and daughter August Francesca (born 2022) with his fifth wife, Riko Shibata.
Cage was also famously married to Patricia Arquette (1995 to 2001) and Lisa Marie Presley (2002), whom he filed for divorce only months later.
Speaking with People, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent actor says that family comes “first and foremost.”
“There’s no version of Nick Cage in reality that doesn’t want to spend time with his children…There’s no version of Nick Cage that didn’t put family first over career,” says the star of Raising Arizona.
He adds, “I turned down Lord of the Rings and I turned down Matrix because I didn’t want to go to New Zealand for three years or Australia for three years because I needed to be home with my son Weston, that’s a fact.”
Offering evidence to that, actor Minnie Driver once said: “Was once on a plane with [Nicholas Cage] and his son and a seat had also been purchased for his son’s imaginary friend.”
Weston Coppola Cage
To this day the Adaptation star has a very tight bond with his children, and two of his grandchildren, Lucian (born 2014) and Sorin (2016), who Weston shares with his second wife.
Scientists Say the ‘Soul’ Does Not Die, it ‘Returns to the Universe’
Since the beginning of time, humans have asked the question: “What happens to us after we die?”.
Religious or spiritual people often believe in a heaven or afterlife. Some believe that nothing happens to us; we just die. Others, however, believe that our souls live on after we die. A couple of researchers say that they have the science to that this might be a possibility. (1)
The Soul Doesn’t Die When Our Bodies Do
After extensive research, two experts are saying that while our bodies die, our consciousness – or our soul – lives on forever. Quantum mechanics, they say, makes this possible. Quantum mechanics is the science dealing with the behavior of matter at the atomic and subatomic levels. It accounts for the properties of molecules and atoms, and the things that make them. (2) This includes (2):
Neurons
Electrons
Protons
Quarks
Gluons
Other esoteric particles
Scientists Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose say consciousness is simply information stored at this quantum level. (1)
Orchestrated Objective Reduction
The pair say that this storage process is Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR). This is via a structural component of human cells, protein-based microtubules, that carry quantum information. (1, 3)
“Let’s say the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing; the micro-tubules lose their quantum state,” explains Dr. Hameroff. “The quantum information within the micro-tubules is not destroyed, it can’t be destroyed, and it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large.” (1)
He says that if the person is resuscitated, then the information just goes back into the microtubules, and the person becomes conscious again. This is what we call a “near-death experience.” If, instead, the patient dies, then their consciousness can possibly exist outside of the body as a soul. (1)
Our Physical Universe Is Just Our Perception
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich say that there is an infinite beyond after death. According to them, the world we live in is just our perception and that our souls go into this infinite beyond when our bodies die. (1)
“What we consider the here and now, this world, it is actually just the material level that is comprehensible,” says Dr Hans-Peter Durr from the institute. “The beyond is an infinite reality that is much bigger.” (1)
Hameroff and Penrose’s research shows that consciousness comes from deeper level microtubule vibrations. This not only helps us to better understand what the human consciousness is, but may also help treat mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions. (3)
What do you think? Do you think our souls live on after we die?
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