Thomas Cruise Mapother IV (born July 3, 1962) is an American actor and producer. He has received various accolades for his work, including three Golden Globe Awards and three nominations for Academy Awards. He is one of the highest-paid actors in the world.[1] His films have grossed over $4 billion in North America and over $10.1 billion worldwide,[2] making him one of the highest-grossing box office stars of all time.[3]

Cruise began acting in the early 1980s and made his breakthrough with leading roles in the comedy film Risky Business (1983) and action drama film Top Gun (1986). Critical acclaim came with his roles in the drama films The Color of Money (1986), Rain Man (1988), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). For his portrayal of Ron Kovic in the latter, he won a Golden Globe Award and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. As a leading Hollywood star in the 1990s, he starred in several commercially successful films, including the drama A Few Good Men (1992), the thriller The Firm (1993), the horror film Interview with the Vampire (1994), and the romance Jerry Maguire (1996). For his role in the latter, he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor and received his second Academy Award nomination.

Early life

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York,[4] to electrical engineer Thomas Cruise Mapother III (1934–1984) and special education teacher Mary Lee (née Pfeiffer; 1936–2017).[5] His parents were both from Louisville, Kentucky,[6][7] and had English, German, and Irish ancestry.[8][9] Cruise has three sisters named Lee Anne, Marian, and Cass. One of his cousins, William Mapother, is also an actor who has appeared alongside Cruise in five films.[10] Cruise grew up in near poverty and had a Catholic upbringing. He later described his father as "a merchant of chaos",[11] a "bully", and a "coward" who beat his children. He elaborated, "[My father] was the kind of person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you. It was a great lesson in my life—how he'd lull you in, make you feel safe and then, bang! For me, it was like, 'There's something wrong with this guy. Don't trust him. Be careful around him.'"[11]

Cruise spent part of his childhood in Canada. When his father took a job as a defense consultant with the Canadian Armed Forces, his family moved in late 1971 to Beacon Hill, Ottawa.[12] He attended the new Robert Hopkins Public School for his fourth and fifth grade education.[12][13] He first became involved in drama in fourth grade, under the tutelage of George Steinburg. He and six other boys put on an improvised play to music called IT at the Carleton Elementary School drama festival.[12] Drama organizer Val Wright, who was in the audience, later said that "the movement and improvisation were excellent [...] it was a classic ensemble piece".[12] In sixth grade, Cruise went to Henry Munro Middle School in Ottawa. That year, his mother left his father, taking Cruise and his sisters back to the United States.[12] In 1978, she married Jack South.[14] Cruise's father died of cancer in 1984.[15] Cruise briefly took a church scholarship and attended a Franciscan seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio; he aspired to become a priest before he became interested in acting.[16]:24–26 In total, he attended 15 schools in 14 years.[17] In his senior year of high school, he played football for the varsity team as a linebacker, but was cut from the squad after getting caught drinking beer before a game.[16]:47 He went on to star in the school's production of Guys and Dolls.[18] In 1980, he graduated from Glen Ridge High School in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.[19]

Career

Acting

At age 18,[20] with the blessing of his mother and stepfather, Cruise moved to New York City to pursue an acting career.[18] After working as a busboy in New York, he went to Los Angeles to try out for television roles. He signed with CAA and began acting in films.[20] He first appeared in a bit part in the 1981 film Endless Love, followed by a major supporting role as a crazed military academy student in Taps later that year. In 1983, Cruise was part of the ensemble cast of The Outsiders. That same year he appeared in All the Right Moves and Risky Business, which has been described as "A Generation X classic, and a career maker for Tom Cruise".[21] He also played the male lead in the Ridley Scott film Legend, released in 1985.[22] By 1986's Top Gun, his status as a superstar cemented.[23]

Cruise followed up Top Gun with The Color of Money, which came out the same year, and which paired him with Paul Newman. 1988 saw him star in Cocktail, which earned him a nomination for the Razzie Award for Worst Actor. Later that year he starred with Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, which won the Academy Award for Best Film and Cruise the Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor. Cruise portrayed real-life paralyzed Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic in 1989's Born on the Fourth of July, which earned him a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama, the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor, the People's Choice Award for Favorite Motion Picture Actor, a nomination for BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Cruise's first Best Actor Academy Award nomination.

Cruise's next films were Days of Thunder (1990) and Far and Away (1992), both of which co-starred then-wife Nicole Kidman as his love interest, followed by the legal thriller The Firm, which was a critical and commercial success. In 1994, Cruise starred along with Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas and Christian Slater in Neil Jordan's Interview with the Vampire, a gothic drama/horror film that was based on Anne Rice's best-selling novel. The film was well-received, although Rice was initially quite outspoken in her criticism of Cruise having been cast in the film, as Julian Sands was her first choice. Upon seeing the film, however, she paid $7,740 for a two-page ad in Daily Variety praising his performance and apologizing for her previous doubts about him.[24]

In 2003, he starred in Edward Zwick's period action drama The Last Samurai, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination for best actor. In 2004, Cruise received critical acclaim for his performance as Vincent in Collateral, directed by Michael Mann. In 2005, Cruise worked again with Steven Spielberg in War of the Worlds, a loose adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel of the same name, which became the fourth highest-grossing film of the year with US$591.4 million worldwide. Also in 2005, he won the People's Choice Award for Favorite Male Movie Star and the MTV Generation Award. Cruise was nominated for seven Saturn Awards between 2002 and 2009, winning once. Nine of the ten films he starred in during the decade made over $100 million at the box office.[26]

In 2006, he returned to his role as Ethan Hunt in the third installment of the Mission Impossible film series, Mission: Impossible III. The film was more positively received by critics than the previous films in the series, and grossed nearly $400 million at the box office.[28] In 2007, Cruise took a rare supporting role for the second time in Lions for Lambs, which was a commercial disappointment. This was followed by an unrecognizable appearance as "Les Grossman" in the 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder with Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. This performance earned Cruise a Golden Globe nomination. Cruise played the central role in the historical thriller Valkyrie released on December 25, 2008 to box office success.[29]