Hollywood star Nicolas Cage will be hoping it’s fifth time lucky after notching up yet another wedding – to a woman more than 30 years younger than him.
The actor, 57, confirmed he had tied the knot with Riko Shibata, 26, in Las Vegas – less than two years since he tried to get another Sin City marriage annulled after four days because he was “too drunk” to know what he was doing.
It’s the latest twist in Cage’s rollercoaster life which has proved wilder than the plot of any of his films.
He’s tripped out on magic mushrooms with his cat, only eats animals if he agrees with the way they have sex, had otters as witnesses at another wedding and blew millions on a series of madcap purchases.
Nicolas married Riko Shibata, who is 30 years his junior (Image: Wynn Casino)
Even his relationship with the fifth Mrs Cage has hardly been conventional. First spotted together in February last year, Covid lockdowns forced them apart and he proposed on FaceTime while he was in Nevada and she was in Japan.
Cage got her a black diamond engagement ring and had it couriered 5,500 miles across the Pacific Ocean.
The actor also has a fondness for members of the animal kingdom.
In 2010, he revealed he’d taken magic mushrooms with his cat Lewis. Cage said: “He ate them voraciously. It was like catnip to him. So I thought what the heck, I’d better do it with him.
Nicolas married actress Patricia Arquette in 1995 before they split in 2001 (Image: Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
“I remember lying in my bed for hours and Lewis was on the desk across from the bed for hours, staring at each other…not moving. But he would stare at me and I had no doubt he was my brother.”
He once told how he had acquired two king cobra snakes, a female named Sheba and an albino male named Moby, that he kept behind bulletproof glass in his home next to a syringe of anti-venom.
He said: “They would try to hypnotize me by showing me their backs, and then they’d lunge at me.”
He then had a brief marriage with Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis (Image: AFP/Getty Images)
Neighbours were none too pleased about his pet reptiles and he ended up giving them to a zoo.
Cage has also explained how his diet is determined by animals’ mating habits. He said: “I actually choose the way I eat according to the way animals have sex. I think fish are very dignified with sex.
So are birds. But pigs, not so much. So I don’t eat pig meat or things like that. I eat fish and fowl.”
Nicolas and Alice Kim were married for 12 years – his longest marriage to date (Image: Corbis via Getty Images)
Cage, nephew to The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, has appeared in around 115 films since he started acting in the early 1980s – from action hits such as Con Air and Face/Off to his Oscar-winning turn in Leaving Las Vegas.
His more bonkers performances include last month’s Willy’s Wonderland in which his silent character must survive a night in a restaurant fighting possessed murderous animatronic robots, and the 2006 Wicker Man reboot where he dons a bear suit and screams “not the bees” as the insects are dumped on his head.
Nicolas and Erika Koike were only married for a short spell in 2019 (Image: FilmMagic)
Cage proposed to first wife, True Romance actress Patricia Arquette, just hours after meeting her in the late 1980s. She refused, and so to prove his devotion, Cage asked her to send him on a quest to find impossible objects.
Arquette’s list included a black orchid – which doesn’t exist – and an autograph by reclusive author JD Salinger. They eventually married in April 1995 – with otters and a police chief as witnesses on the day – but divorced in May 2001.
His second marriage was to Elvis Presley’s daughter Lisa Marie. The two tied the knot during a secret ceremony in Hawaii in August 2002 on the 25th anniversary of Elvis’s death.
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Cage married third wife Alice Kim in July 2004 after meeting her while she worked as a waitress in a Los Angeles restaurant and the pair had a son they called Kal-El after Superman’s real name.
They separated in 2016 and in March 2019 he had an ill-fated union with fourth wife Erika Koike. Video footage of the couple applying for their marriage licence showed an intoxicated Cage screaming “She is going to take all my money” and “her ex is a druggy”. He insisted the wedding wouldn’t go ahead, but they married the same day. Four days later he filed for annulment but they settled for a divorce in July last year.
The actor, who has said he was stalked by an “unsettling” mime artist on the set of film Bringing Out The Dead, also has son Weston from an earlier relationship – aged 30, he’s older than his dad’s new wife.
Cage has famously blown a fortune on eccentric and expensive purchases, snapping up a dinosaur skull for £200,000, a pet octopus for £230,000 and a rare comic book for £100,000. After learning the dino skull had been stolen, he agreed to hand it over Mongolian authorities while the pricey comic was stolen and later recovered from his home, going on to sell for £1.6million.
He once owned 15 homes, including a £19million home in California, a £2.6million mansion in New Orleans which he claimed was the “most haunted home in America”, two European castles including Midford Castle in Somerset, which cost him £7.6million and a £4million townhouse in nearby Bath.
Once worth £150million, he ended up more than £4.5m in debt to the taxman and was forced to sell most of his properties. But thanks to a steady stream of film work, he’s now thought to be worth £25m.
And for his next project, he’s playing the one man in showbiz that’s maybe even wilder than him – Tiger King Joe Exotic. As Cage says: “I don’t want a perfect character, I want a character who has, as strange as it sounds, some humanity, some flaws, some needs.”
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
