The real Cage unlocked

During his troubled schooldays he would stay with his father's brother in Napa Valley. His uncle was the film director Francis Ford Coppola and the Coppola connection put additional pressure on a young man tempted to act. At 19 he got a part in Francis's movie Rumblefish, on the set of which Nic Coppola (as he then was) was heavily teased for the nepotism. Through his father, it got back to him that Coppola thought he was "too restrained" as an actor.

Nic's response was to change his name to Cage - a move still, apparently, resented by the Coppola clan - and set about building a new identity for himself, choosing for a model, rather unoriginally, James Dean. This meant there would be a lot of clearing up after him.

On the Cotton Club set in 1984 he wrecked his trailer. On Moonstruck, four years later, he threw a chair at the actress Julie Bovasso. Off set, he smashed a bottle of ketchup at a restaurant wall to impress a date. "I worked on that and I wanted it. Part of it was manufactured and part of it was true," he says.

I tell him that John Madden, the director of Corelli, still regards him as a "natural subversive". "He's probably right. I have been somewhat mischievous in some of my choices with the work."

Too true, I say. Fans of his weirder early work, the Coen Brothers' Leaving Las Vegas and David Lynch's Wild at Heart, feel almost betrayed at times. And it seemed perverse for him to follow his Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas in 1996 with two Jerry Bruckheimer movies, The Rock and Con Air.

"Well, when I won the Academy Award, I said to myself that I didn't want to get trapped in the ideology of being, like, the serious actor all the time because I've seen that become very pompous and annoying. Those actors that do that can intense themselves right out of the business. I thought, I want to have some fun, so I went the other way with it, which was, I guess, angering to some people.

"But my public has always been important to me. My fellow actors have been less so, you know. Their opinions and my opinions of what they do with their work or what I do with my work is our own business."

He must be referring to Sean Penn's contribution to the open season on Nic Cage. It is obviously a sensitive subject: the interviewer before me gets the thumbscrew treatment from Mrs Shackleford for luring her client into answering the criticism.

But it seems there is another method to the madness with which he picks his parts and that method is called therapy. "Absolutely. Acting to me is therapy. It is medicine, and that's why I think I act - out of need and necessity as opposed to just want. I think in a lot of ways it's saved me. I know that sounds dramatic but if it wasn't for it, I think I might have really had problems with the law, or anything. I could have gone the wrong way but, because I had this place to release my feelings, it kept me on track.

"I found a way to surf my emotions so they correlated with the picture I was making at the given time, meaning if I was really in an angry mood, I'd find an angry movie. If I was in a sad mood, I'd find a sad movie."

His new resolve is simply to take the best scripts available. It led to a harsh clash between life and art as he made Corelli. After five years and an on-off relationship dating back to 1987, his marriage to Patricia Arquette finally came to a spluttering end last year. First he filed for a divorce. Five weeks later he changed his mind. Then she decided to divorce him. In the middle of it all, in May, Cage arrived in Cephallonia to film a love story.

"Yes, it was difficult. Phew! I mean that was really hard. I was playing this character that was just very, very happy-go-lucky and, you know, it's a very strange thing to be sad and playing a character like that. That's a really weird business."

Was it finally therapeutic or just tricky throughout? "It was tricky all the way through," he says mournfully. Did he, as everyone says, fall in love with Penelope Cruz, his Pelagia?

"You know, that is private," he says - and I don't even bother to ask him about the rumours that he is now courting Elvis Presley's daughter Lisa Marie. (He will not discuss his marriage at all.)

He says he still writes love songs. Does that mean he is a romantic or a disappointed romantic? "Definitely a disappointed romantic. That's sort of like, what's it called, an oxymoron? Like you can't be a romantic without being disappointed."

Would he bet on his remarrying some day? "Oh, some day I'd love to be able to do that. I'm not very comfortable with the idea of being single. It's not me, no, no. It's not. It's not. It's never really been me."

He talks of how, amid fame and wealth, "when the door is closed and the lights are off" you can still feel alone. He's an anxious person, isn't he? "Yes, I worry. That's always been in my nature. I would say I'm more that than anything else. I'm not a depressed man. I'm an anxious man. I worry about things. You've got to be careful with that because that can lead to depression."

He says he was prone to panic attacks until he gave up coffee six years back. The "fear", however, remains. "I've used fear to work for me. Mike Tyson used to say, 'Fear is fire. It can cook for you or it can burn your house down.'"

But what exactly is it a fear of? "Fear of not getting something, not being able to achieve the right moment truthfully. I don't believe you have to create from fear but maybe, at this point, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Fear for me is like fuel and I don't want to always have that be my fuel. For a while I want it to be love, you know."

I say he may be in the wrong business for that. "Right," he laughs. I think the answer to my question is that he fears whatever's going around. For example, he says when he started his career, anger was a motivation but now he hardly ever loses his temper ... "and I wonder if maybe that is not a good thing. I am a pretty calm, sedate sort of person, you know."

Until he starts kicking the hell out of people in his (dumber) movies? "Well, that's acting," he frowns. "No, I guess if you can be a worried calm person, I am it."

As a self-definition, I'll settle for this actual oxymoron - the word we were looking for earlier was tautology. I cannot be too fussy. Interviewing him at this point in his stardom, I know I am witness to the final stages of an oyster shutting. Between Mrs Shackelford and his own increasing anxiety over his privacy, journalists can expect in future to catch but a few remaining glimpses of the pearl, and the grit, inside the real Nicolas Cage.