Paltrow and Cage: 2 paths to the top

Two actors, both born into show business clans, both winning Oscars within three years of one another.

And both starring in movies that open today. Gwyneth Paltrow stars in "Country Strong," and Nicolas Cage goes back to the Middle Ages in "Season of the Witch."

The time is ripe for a deeper look at these stars. They both won Academy Awards when they were relatively young - he was 32 and she was 26 - but they have handled their post-Oscar careers quite differently.

It says much about Paltrow's skills as an actress that in the early years of her career many of us thought she was British.

After all, this slim, pale blonde wowed audiences as the busybody heroine of Jane Austen's "Emma," played a love-challenged Londoner in "Sliding Doors" and won her Oscar as an Elizabethan in 1998's "Shakespeare in Love," all the while sporting a Brit accent.

Smoke and mirrors.

In fact, Paltrow is about as American as they come. Born in 1972, she grew up in Los Angeles and Massachusetts as the daughter of Tony-winning actress Blythe Danner (the "Fockers" franchise) and producer/director Bruce Paltrow (TV's "St. Elsewhere").

Though reared around actors, Paltrow went to college intending to major in art history. Deciding that she couldn't get acting out of her system, she went into the family business.

One of her first jobs was playing the young Wendy in "Hook," Steven Spielberg's 1991 update of "Peter Pan." For the next five years she took small roles, getting accustomed to the requirements of screen acting and finally gaining a degree of public recognition with her performance as Brad Pitt's wife in the dark 1995 thriller "Seven."

Defining Paltrow's career isn't easy because of her willingness to shift between big-budget studio projects and artistically challenging independent fare.

Thus she has appeared in studio comedies opposite Jack Black ("Shallow Hal") and Mike Myers ("Austin Powers in Goldmember"), and her character Pepper Potts has become an essential element of the "Iron Man" franchise - an element that reportedly will be sadly absent when Iron Man joins "The Avengers" in 2012.

But her resume is dotted with films clearly done for the love of acting - titles like "Proof," "Sylvia," "Bounce," "Hard Eight" - and especially "Running With Scissors" and Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums," two films in which she deftly used her cool sexuality to plumb the humor and horrors of eccentric upper-middle-class America.

No actor expects projects like these to be big moneymakers, yet these marginal titles make up half of Paltrow's credits, suggesting a longing to stretch her acting muscles that's not often satisfied by the Hollywood hit machine.

In 1996 she starred in "Emma," which paved the way for her Oscar-winning role in "Shakespeare in Love" two years later. It was in many ways a once-in-a-lifetime role that allowed her to blend sensuality with lightheartedness (she wore a fake moustache for several scenes) while portraying a proto-feminist head over heels in love.

Paltrow started dabbling in the musical genre after her Oscar. She did her own singing in "Duets," a 2000 film about a karaoke competition directed by her father (and co-starring Huey Lewis).

This fall she sang at the Country Music Association Awards and guest-starred on TV's "Glee," performing her own musical numbers (she'll reprise her role in the post-Super Bowl episode Feb. 6). And on Jan. 15, she'll host "Saturday Night Live" with musical guest Cee-Lo, whose song "Forget You" she notably covered on "Glee."

Her new movie "Country Strong" finds her singing and acting the role of an alcoholic country music star trying to get back into the big time.

Early on her personal life played out in the gossip columns, thanks to boyfriend Ben Affleck and fiance Brad Pitt, but her seven-year marriage to Coldplay front man Chris Martin (they have two children) seems like the real deal. While Paltrow has since stayed out of the tabs, she has taken to the Web in her own way, creating the lifestyle blog Goop.com.

In the meantime, Paltrow has become a solid actress as comfortable with comedic repartee as histrionics. But is she a true movie star?

Probably not. It's uncertain how many of us get excited at the prospect of "a Gwyneth Paltrow movie." Her name alone is rarely enough to put bodies in the seats.

On the other hand, beginning with "Shakespeare in Love" Paltrow has long shown an uncanny knack for picking the right ensemble projects which do not rely on her alone for their success but provide her with several juicy scenes.

She may not be an individual star, but she's a terrific team player. An actress could do worse.

Cage has greatness in him. Which is why his recent choices bug the heck out of his admirers.

Of course with that greatness comes a good dose of madness. In his salad days that weirdness was on full display in films such as "Vampire's Kiss" (for which he scarfed down a live cockroach) and David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" (he played a fugitive criminal and Elvis impersonator; Lynch called him "the jazz musician of acting").

But the post-Oscar Cage has papered over his more bizarre traits, remaking himself as the sort of bankable star the studios are comfortable with.

It's probably good for his wallet. Less so for his art.

He was born Nicolas Coppola 47 years ago today - Jan. 7, 1964, in Long Beach, Calif. (Coppola as in Francis Ford Coppola, his uncle.)

He dropped out of high school to pursue acting and changed his name so that any success that came his way would be because of his own talent rather than his famous name. He named himself after Luke Cage, a third-tier Marvel Comics superhero.

He started out playing sleepy-eyed adolescent hoodlums ("Valley Girl," "Rumblefish"), then honed that approach as a volatile one-handed baker opposite Cher in the 1987 Oscar hit "Moonstruck." That performance brought him mainstream recognition.

He tackled comedy as a desperate husband-to-be in "Honeymoon in Vegas" ('92). At the time I described him as "the most unlikely leading man in American films. He's tall, skinny, has thinning hair, a Gandy Goose nose and the hangdog expression of an abused basset hound." But he was terrifically funny.

He won his Oscar for playing an alcoholic drinking himself to death in the company of a Sin City hooker in 1995's "Leaving Las Vegas." It's Cage's single greatest performance, one in which he could draw on his actorly idiosyncrasies while keeping them in check.

If "Vegas" was a career high point, it was also a turning point. In subsequent roles Cage would move away from the dangerous edge that marked his early work. If his goal was to achieve bankability, it worked. Cage is a genuine movie star whose name can be enough to attract an audience.

Cage appears to be a man of furious passions. He so insistently wooed his first wife, actress Patricia Arquette, that she became frightened and avoided him for years before finally succumbing. His short-lived second marriage was to Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of his musical idol.

Since 2004 he's been married to Alice Kim Cage, whom he met while she was waitressing at a sushi bar. They have one child; Cage also has a grown son by a former girlfriend.

But it's also said of Cage that in choosing projects he asks to see the check before the screenplay. In recent years he's made a film every three months; perhaps facing a $6 million IRS tax lien has something to do with it.

He's found a new franchise in the "National Treasure" series, which requires little of him but generates a thus-far reliable money stream.

Still, every now and then we see flashes of the old, dangerous tightrope-walking Nicolas Cage. His costume-wearing vigilante in last year's "Kick-Ass," for example, or the self-destructive cop of "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans" (2009). And let's not forget his wonderful work as neurotic twin screenwriters in "Adaptation" (2002).

In films like these Cage seems to be not a slumming star delivering self-parody but a filmic force of nature - funny, furious and moving in unexpected ways.