Nicolas Cage once spent $150,000 on a dinosaur skull and many other bizarre things, but he also lived the good life for a long time.
Hollywood gives people many opportunities to be successful but it also has pitfalls for those who are not careful. When someone becomes a star, they are likely to earn in millions but when people are not careful with their finances, they end up losing it all. There are many cautionary tales from Hollywood that shows us why it's important to be pennywise. There are many stars who went broke by keeping their lavish lifestyle up for years.
Once upon a time, Nicolas Cage was a hitmaker and raking in millions of dollars every year. Unfortunately, he was also spending as many millions every year. He used to be worth $150 million but he squandered it with expensive purchases. There was a time when he owned 15 residences across the world, including homes in California, Las Vegas, and a deserted island in the Bahamas, according to CNBC.
He also bought some strange items like a nine-foot-tall burial tomb, an octopus, shrunken pygmy heads, a $150,000 Superman comic, and a 70-million-year-old dinosaur skull. He had to return the skull to the Mongolian government. But, it wasn't the purchase of bizarre items that made him broke.
The 56-year-old star's problem arose from his many properties. His poor management forced him to foreclose on many of the homes and he landed in debt soon. The actor owed the Internal Revenue Service $6.3 million in property taxes in 2009. As the Face-Off actor was not judicious while spending his money in his 30s, by the time he hit his 40s, he was broke.
He blamed his money manager on sending him "down a path toward financial ruin", according to Mirror UK. The Con Air star has regained control in recent years but not before he did real damage to his bank account.
The Honeymoon in Vegas actor was once in a period when he was "meditating three times a day and reading books on philosophy." Then he sought the places he read about and wanted to buy those properties. "I started following mythology, and I was finding properties that aligned with that," he said, according to CNBC.
This "holy grail quest," as Cage calls it, "put me on a search around different areas, mostly in England, but also some places in the States." Just like his film National Treasure he was on a hunt and during it he bought real estate, including two European castles, for $10 million and $2.3 million, respectively, and a $15.7 million countryside estate in Newport, Rhode Island.
The real estate purchases were like building a library for the Mandy actor. "You read a book, and in it there’s a reference to another book, and then you buy that book, and then you attach the references. For me, it was all about where was the grail? Was it here? Was it there?" he said. In the end, he realized, "What is the grail but Earth itself?"
With so many millions squandered, he still saw some of those purchases with no regret. "You have good investments and bad investments. The good investments came from personal interest and my honest enjoyment of the history," he said.
There was another reason that Nicolas Cage, born Nicolas Coppola, wanted to own many homes. It had nothing to do with his quests but more to do with the Moonstruck actor's modest childhood. He grew up outside of Beverly Hills with his professor father. "I would take the bus to school, and some of the older boys were going to school in Maseratis and Ferraris,” he told the New York Times.
When he was young, he wished for more and with a famous relative who had the life he wished for, it became a lot more ingrained. "My uncle [Francis Ford Coppola] was very generous. I would visit him for summers, and those summers — I wanted to be him," he explained. "I wanted to have the mansions. That was driving me," he said.
He also used to own multiple yachts, a private jet, a pyramid tomb, 50 rare cars, and 30 motorbikes, as per Mirror UK. After blowing up most of his money, when he showed up at a film premiere in September 2019, the actor was dressed in a dirty denim jacket and with a full beard, as per Mirror UK. He looked unkempt at the premiere of Running with the Devil. The film, which also starred Laurence Fishburne, has only a 5.4/10 rating on IMDB.
References:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/how-nicolas-cage-blew-150m-22479827
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/07/magazine/nicolas-cage-interview.html
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/nicolas-cage-looks-unrecognisable-new-20087553
