I must say, this interview is one of the most candid pieces I've read.  Nic speaks of his past roles in a very telling and genuine way.  I love it!

OSCAR-WINNER Nicolas Cage is back on screen in thriller The Frozen Ground playing a cop chasing a serial killer.

The actor, 49, has also starred in hit movies The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off and Leaving Las Vegas.

He is married to third wife, Alice Kim, 29, and they have a seven-year-old son Kal-El. He also has a son, Weston, 22, from a previous relationship.

Here he tells GARTH PEARCE what he wished he had known at 18.

I WISH I had not been so angry at 18. I was a pretty wild guy with a lot of energy. I was into punk rock and didn’t know where I was fitting in.

I wanted that energy to go somewhere. I wanted it to be constructive rather than destructive — but I just did not have a clue in which direction to take it.

Finding a career in which I could express those feelings was lucky. It could have gone either way. I could have ended up in jail.

I have learned to calm down. I have developed into a person who is generally happy. People say I look sad — the way my eyes are — but I want to be happy. The way I was? It was a complicated time. You are trying to find some reason for being — trying to come to terms with who you are and what you want to do with your life. I was lucky because I managed to get away with it.

Even when I was 21, when I was filming in Peggy Sue Got Married with Kathleen Turner, there was something going on in my head. Kathleen did not like me very much and you cannot blame her.

My character in the script was supposed to be suave, romantic and young. Yet I turned him into this nutty professor. It really freaked her out. That was an example of thoughts which had to get out.

I would have been fired from the movie had the director Francis Ford Coppola (Nic’s uncle) not stuck by me.

Kathleen was basically saying: “Horrible, terrible.” She really gave me the ice treatment. If I was her at that time, I’d have done the same.

But that is where luck comes in. Cher saw the film and understood. She said she wanted to work with me in the romantic comedy Moonstruck.

So there I was on that movie, kissing Cher, who was such an easy-going, very youthful person with a hell of a lot of spirit. I remember my lack of shaving irritated her skin after a while!

Advice? Richard Gere on the 1984 film The Cotton Club said to me: “If you keep on behaving as you are, you will only have about three film roles left in you.”

I was so gung-ho. I was ripping up my trailer, trashing my hotel room, walking on set and insulting everyone.

It was part of the way I was for getting into a part. I thought that was the best way to behave, as the lost youth who went the wrong way.

So another thing I wish I knew at 18 is that manners are very important and being polite costs nothing. Being angry is a waste of valuable energy.

My father (August Coppola, brother of director Francis Ford Coppola) was an outstanding teacher. He did not have any time for the fame and fortune of acting but he loved films and taking me to them.

I grew up watching Sean Connery play James Bond. I have always thought my father looked like Sean Connery. I first realised that when he took me to a drive-in cinema to see Dr No. What I saw up there on the screen was basically my father as this incredible super-spy.

So when I worked with Sean on The Rock in 1996 it was hard not to judge him as a father figure. He’s much more, of course — he was able to play action heroes, intense dramas or light comedy.

Did I properly appreciate my father or my mother, Joy, in my teens? Of course not! Who does? My parents had divorced by the time I was in my teens in any case.

But it never put me off marriage. I never wanted to be a bachelor for ever. Even when I was young and wild and my circumstances were not pro-marriage.

I was in Los Angeles and single. I was with a girl who I had just met and asked her: “Can we kiss?” We did. Then I said: “Can you show me your underwear?” She did. That’s all the dialogue we had.

That’s a story from young Hollywood. But even when young I was thinking that sort of thing could not carry on for the rest of my life. I married for love. (His ex wives are actress Patricia Arquette and Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis). You do not marry expecting divorce.

There are things I wish I’d done differently at any age. I invested a lot of money in property and was caught out by the bubble which burst.

So I have had to sell a lot and now just own a small country cottage near Glastonbury in Somerset and a place in Las Vegas.

But my life is good. I am happy to say that. I also know that life is full of surprises. I suspect that things are always going to change. I am always going to have something to worry about, believe me.

The worries about life were there at 18 and are still here today.