He was a very handsome young man, brilliant at school, full of promise and ideas, very attractive to women, and always generous to his sickly, rather nerdy-looking kid brother Which is not how things turned out. Francis is the kid brother who rose to greatness, wealth, Oscars and horizon-wide opportunities for self-destruction Whereas Augie faltered and became overshadowed. He is the unknown Coppola now, a furious romantic, a wanderer, someone who has failed to find his place. There are profound feelings left from this reversal - remember how in the The Godfather Part II the kid brother, Michael, has his older brother, Fredo, executed for several kinds of family failure."I remember once," says Cage, "my father took me to see Godfather II I was 10.

And thereby hangs a tale that helps explain the tragic look in Cage's eyes.As the Coppola kids grew up - there was Augie, Francis and their sister, the actress Talia Shire - Augie was the genius. Wow, if I could do something like that."Nicholas Coppola was born in Long Beach, California, in January 1964, the son of August, or Augie, Coppola, the older brother of the man who was about to become a movie director. Leaving Las Vegas would never have gone over in the Eighties. When I was starting to get into the idea of being a film actor, I was impressed by pictures like Midnight Cowboy.

Why do you want to do a drunk role? This will not be considered by the critics, by the Academy, because it's too dark for their liking.' But there's a day coming, I think, with a feeling for the old noir movies. It seems certain that he will get at least an Oscar nomination.And yet? "Honestly, as I talk to you today," says Cage from his house, north of Hollywood Boulevard, late in December, "I haven't had an offer yet on the strength of Leaving Las Vegas Even now, there's some anxiety about it And there was a lot before making the movie People told me, 'This is not a good idea. He has a Nixonian beard that could need shaving between takes. His eyes are more sunken than ever; his lower lip droops, and as it sags so his hairline begins to recede. But he is very hard-working, and just as he's done offbeat, cult movies - Red Rock West, Raising Arizona, Wild at Heart - where he's gone as far out as any young actor, so he's made commercial films in which he specialises in being a sweet, rather dumb or mournful guy trying to do his best for others: Moonstruck, Honeymoon in Vegas, It Could Happen to You.He is also at this moment the holder of the award for best actor in 1995 from the American National Society of Film Critics, the New York Critics Circle, and the same groups from Los Angeles and Boston - all for Leaving Las Vegas He has had a Golden Globe nomination. If you think of the boys he was teamed up with on, say, Rumble Fish - Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Vincent Spano, Chris Penn - you'd never have picked Cage as the one likely to become a real actor.That he managed it can be put down to several things: his genes, his determination, for sure, but also a kind of lyrical recklessness unique to him, and a rare mix of comedy, dignity and melancholy Cage has a deep romantic streak, yet little ordinary grace. When he runs on screen, it's desperate, splay-limbed, but passionate.

I put the cockroach close to me and every muscle in my body said, 'Don't do it!' But I did it and I couldn't sleep for three nights. It was soft, not crunchy - just a nightmare!"The cockroach isn't even the spookiest thing in Vampire's Kiss. For that you'd have to go to the way Cage stares, howls, reacts and moves. What lifts the picture clear of its forlorn script are the ways in which, physically and psychically, Cage conveys the threat of being possessed He is not a handsome man - he never was a good-looking kid. And everyone went, 'You've got to be crazy.' And I said, 'Yes, I know what you mean.' And they wrangled up these New York cockroaches. And the day arrived when I had to do it and I saw the bug when I walked on the set, and its legs were kicking and it looked huge! I was going to say, 'Guys, I can't do it.' But I thought that would be a cop-out because I'd set it up.

I wanted to tie in the Renfield thing - the assistant to Dracula who eats bugs. It was a slow progression for my character: first he's eating pistachio nuts, then he's eating a cockroach, then he eats the dove, and ultimately bites a girl's neck and drinks her blood So I said I wanted to try to eat a cockroach. Hence the cockroach."Definitely the real thing," groans Cage, still haunted by what he did "Originally they wanted me to eat raw eggs That didn't do anything for me. Indeed, he is the madness in whatever is left of the Method these days." The character in Vampire's Kiss is a repulsive literary agent who believes he has slept with, and been bitten by, a vampire. He has a head-start in such things, but he starts to disintegrate.