Nic cage, birthed as Nicolas Kim Coppola, is an American actor and film producer. He has won an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Golden Globe Award, and has been nominated for two BAFTA Awards.
He is known for his versatility as an actor, and his appearances in various cinema genres have earned him a fanbase.
What were Nic Cage early works and breakthroughs?
Nic Cage made his acting debut in The Best of Times, a 1981 television pilot that ABC did not pick up. He made his cinematic début in 1982, playing an anonymous coworker of Judge Reinhold’s character in the coming-of-age film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, after auditioning for Reinhold’s role.
His experience on the set was hampered by cast members continually referencing his uncle’s films, prompting him to change his name.
Cage’s first starring role was opposite Deborah Foreman in the romantic comedy Valley Girl (1983), in which he played a punk who falls in love with the titular Valley girl, loosely based on Romeo and Juliet.
The film was a moderate box office hit and has become a cult favorite. He auditioned for the role of Dallas Winston in his uncle’s film The Outsiders, which is based on S.E. Hinton’s novel, but lost to Matt Dillon. However, Cage would co-star in Coppola’s adaptation of another Hinton novel, Rumble Fish, later that year.
In 1984, Cage acted in three period pictures, none of which did well at the box office. Cage co-starred alongside Sean Penn in the drama Racing with the Moon (1984), as buddies awaiting deployment to the United States Marine Corps.
In Coppola’s crime thriller The Cotton Club, he played a fictionalized version of mob hitman Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, getting acclaim from critic Paul Attanasio for “artfully [using] his few moments to sketch a brawny, violent thug”.
His final release of the year was Alan Parker’s drama Birdy, in which he starred with Matthew Modine as two close friends who were traumatized by service in the Vietnam War.
Cage lost weight for the part and had two of his front teeth removed to make him appear deformed. Despite its enormous underperformance at the box office, the film and Cage and Modine’s performances earned favorable reviews, with The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin saying, “Mr. Cage very sympathetically captures Al’s urgency and frustration.” Together, these actors do wonders with what should have been unplayable.
Source: www.ghgossip.com
