Nicolas Cage
Oscar winner one year, action god the next — Nicolas Cage followed Leaving Las Vegas with The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off, then spent the 2000s as the franchise guy in everything. Total commitment to every premise, no matter how preposterous.
Nicolas Cage was born Nicolas Kim Coppola on January 7, 1964 — the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola. He took the surname "Cage" early in his career, drawing it from the Marvel Comics hero Luke Cage and the composer John Cage, specifically to distance himself from the family name and the accusations of nepotism that might have followed.
He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Leaving Las Vegas (a 1995 film, awarded at the 1996 ceremony) — a performance of such darkness and specificity that it could have launched a decade of art-house consolidation. Instead, he turned sharply left. The Rock arrived in 1996; Con Air and Face/Off both hit in 1997 — back-to-back-to-back action stardom, the freshly minted Oscar winner now aboard a hijacked prison transport, then swapping faces with John Travolta in one of cinema's sillier premises, and playing every moment like it mattered completely. His total commitment to the preposterous was exactly what made it magnetic.
The 2000s made him a franchise anchor: Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), National Treasure (2004), Ghost Rider (2007) — Cage in heist films, adventure films, supernatural films, always burning with the same strange intensity. His peak ran from roughly 1995 to 2007, the stretch when he seemed to be in everything and total commitment read as movie-star power. He would later become an internet phenomenon in his own right; but in these years, he was simply the guy who showed up and delivered, every single time.
Similar items
National Treasure
Nicolas Cage as a history-nerd treasure hunter who decides to steal the Declaration of Independence — because the treasure map is on the back. Bruckheimer gloss, a premise played completely straight, and one of the 2000s' great cable-rerun perennials.
Adam Sandler
The SNL goofball who became a box-office machine — Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy. In the '90s his man-child comedies and shouty voices made him one of the most bankable comedians alive.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
The Austrian bodybuilder who became the biggest action star on the planet. The Terminator made him iconic in the 80s; the early 90s — Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, T2, True Lies — made him inescapable. The accent launched a thousand imitations, all of them affectionate.
Bruce Willis
The everyman action hero who proved you didn't need muscles the size of tree trunks to save the day. Bruce Willis went from TV comedy to Die Hard's John McClane, rewriting what a blockbuster lead could be—and spent the next decade proving it with an eclectic run of '90s classics that kept him in the conversation.