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Nicolas Cage Reveals He Has Changed His Name

The actor is branching out from his famous family.

Nicolas Cage has changed his name. The National Treasure actor revealed to Variety that he officially took his stage name—Nicolas Cage—last year, abandoning his birth name Nicolas Kim Coppola. The 62-year-old Oscar winner revealed the alteration on Wednesday, saying, “I am Nick Cage. I changed my name legally last year. I’m Nick Cage in life, and I’m Nick Cage on camera. ‘Tis better to be the patriarch of my own little family than the clown cousin on the margins of someone else’s, so I decided I’m going to bring it on and be ‘Cage.’” As for Nicolas or Nick? “I’m both! I think people know me as both.” “I thought, well, I’ll keep the name ‘Nicolas’ because my father named me Nicolas—with French spelling, which has always frustrated me, because everyone adds an ‘h,’” The Face/Off star said of his father, August Coppola. “I don’t know why he gave me the French spelling! But he did.” He is the nephew of legendary Apocalypse Now filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, and said people would approach him and say, “‘I love the smell of Nicolas in the morning.’” “I decided, I don’t need this, and I changed it to Cage,” he previously told Wired.