cage

Academy Award-winning actor Nicolas Cage has bought the sprawling Gray Craig estate in Middletown for $15.7 million, a purchase price that ranks among the highest ever for a home in Rhode Island.

The 24,000-square foot, brick-and-stone country manor, on 26 secluded acres, has 12 bedrooms, 10 full bathrooms and sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean from its perch bordering the Norman Bird Sanctuary.

The sale was registered in Middletown Town Hall on Tuesday. Cage’s Hancock Park Real Estate Trust purchased the mansion from Mark J. and Becky Ruhmann Levin, of Boston, who’ve owned the property since 2000 as a vacation home.

Melanie Delman, of Lila Delman Real Estate, which listed the property, refused to confirm whether Cage is the buyer. Cage’s publicist, Annette Wolf, would not comment on the purchase.

The sale ranks in the state’s most expensive residential purchases, Delman said, eclipsed by the $17.15 million sale last December of the Miramar mansion on Bellevue Avenue in Newport.

When Levin, CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., and his wife purchased the estate for $10.85 million in 2000, it set a record for the highest price paid for a single-family home in Rhode Island. “What’s really nice here is we have a guy that has his choice of everywhere in the world to live,” Middletown Town Administrator Gerald S. Kempen said, joking that he wanted to apply to be Cage’s groundskeeper. “He chose Middletown. It says a lot about this town.”

Rumor has it Cage and his wife, Alice Kim, and toddler son, Kal-El, will use Gray Craig as a primary residence, Kempen said.

Earlier this year, the Rhode Island Airport Corp. approved a private helicopter landing pad for the lawn of the estate.

Cage has homes in five countries, including an island in the Bahamas, a mansion in Germany and multiple homes in the U.S. The British newspaper The Independent this week reported the Cage purchased an 18th-century castle in Bath, England, for about $10 million.