Tom Cruise (born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962) is an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning American actor and film producer who has starred in a number of top-grossing movies and remains one of the most successful movie stars in Hollywood. His first leading role in a blockbuster movie was in 1983's Risky Business. In the last couple of years, he has received additional media coverage regarding his support of Scientology (and his related criticism of psychiatry), rumors that he is a homosexual, and his relationship with Katie Holmes.

Cruise was born to Thomas Mapother III and Mary Lee Pfeiffer in Syracuse, New York. Cruise has German ancestry from his paternal great-grandparents, William Reibert and Charlotta Louise Voelker; and Welsh ancestry from his all-paternal great-great-grandfather, Dylan Henry Mapother, who emigrated from Flint, Wales to Louisville, Kentucky in 1850. His maternal ancestry is half Irish and half German (including Alsatian). Cruise had a transient existence as a child with his family residing throughout various locations in the United States and Canada. Cities where he lived included Ottawa, Canada, Louisville, Glen Ridge, New Jersey (where he graduated from Glen Ridge High School) and Wayne, New Jersey. In all, Cruise attended eight elementary schools and three high schools. He briefly attended a Franciscan seminary in Cincinnati and aspired to become a Catholic priest. It was recently brought forth that Cruise had suffered from child abuse when he was younger. He stated that when something went wrong, his father came down hard on him. He told Parade Magazine that his father was "a bully and a coward" and "a merchant of chaos". Cruise said he learned early on that his father was not to be trusted. Cruise became interested in acting after being sidelined from his high school's wrestling team due to a knee injury. While injured, he successfully auditioned for a lead role in his high school's production of Guys and Dolls and decided to become an actor after his success in the role.

Hollywood

Acting career

Cruise's first acting role came in 1981, where he had a small role in Endless Love, a drama/romance film starring Brooke Shields. He had a much larger role in a substantially bigger film, Taps, starring alongside George C. Scott, Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn. The film about miltary cadets was moderately successful. In 1983, he was one of many young teenage stars to appear in Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders. The cast for this film included Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, and Ralph Macchio. That same year Cruise appeared in the teen comedy Losin' It with Shelley Long. Also on 1983, Risky Business was released, Risky Business is thought to be the film that propelled Cruise to stardom. One sequence in the film, featuring Cruise lip-syncing Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll" in his underwear, has become an iconic moment in film history. The film has been descried as "A Generation-X classic, and a career-maker for Tom Cruise". A fourth film that was released in 1983 was the high-school football drama, All the Right Moves. Cruise as Maverick in the 1986 blockbuster, Top Gun.

Cruise was welcomed with similar success the following year when he received Academy Award nominations for Born on the Fourth of July. In 1990, Cruise starred as hot-shot Cole Trickle as a racing car driver in Days of Thunder. Days of Thunder is where Cruise first met Australian actress Nicole Kidman, who was his co-star. Cruises' next film was Far and Away where he again was starring with Nicole Kidman. Cruise starred in A Few Good Men with Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore, the well received military thriller earned Cruise Golden Globe and MTV nominations. The following year he starred in The Firm which won Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture at the People's Choice Awards.

In 1994, Cruise starred in Interview with the Vampire, a drama/horror film that was also very well received. In 1996, Cruise starred in (as well as produced) Mission: Impossible. The film grossed $456,494,803 worldwide, and was the third highest grossing film that year. In 1996 he starred in Jerry Maguire. The film earned him an Academy Award Best Actor nomination as well as winning co-star Cuba Gooding Jr. an Academy Award, the film was in total, nominated for five Academy Awards. The film also saw the line "Show me the Money!" become part of popular culture. Jerry Maguire saw Tom Cruise become the first actor in history to star in five consecutive films that grossed at least $100 million in domestic release. Eyes Wide Shut (1999) which took two years to finish as director Stanley Kubrick's last film, alongside then spouse Nicole Kidman. Cruise also performed as a misogynistic male guru in Magnolia (1999), which netted him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

In 2000, Cruise returned as Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible films, releasing Mission: Impossible II, the film continued the series' blockbuster success at the box office, taking in $545,902,562 in worldwide figures, like its predecessor, being the third highest grossing film of the year. The following year Cruise starred in the erotic thriller remake of 1997's Abre Los Ojos, Vanilla Sky. In 2002, Cruise starred in the dystopian thriller, Minority Report as well as The Last Samurai, which saw Cruise perform some of his own stunts, as he did in M:I-2.

In the 2004 action thriller film Collateral, Cruise combatted a good-guy stereotype which had been attributed to him. A number of Cruise's more well-known and popular movies have cast him in a similar role, one which has been half-jokingly referred to by movie fans (and some critics) as the "Generic Tom Cruise Character." In this role, Cruise portrays a character who, as the film begins, is seen as a cocky, stuck-up, self-centered egotist who cares for little other than himself. As the events of the movie unfold, his character learns to become more open-minded and altruistic, until by the time the climax has been reached, he has undergone a radical change and been transformed into a better human being. Collateral saw a surprising turn as a sociopathic gray-haired hitman with a killer smile, Vincent, who hijacks the cab to be transported to five hits on one night. His trademark smile and handling guns took a 180-degree turn for an unlikable character who is very organized and thoroughly nasty, as opposed to his popular good-guy characters.

Cruise in War of the Worlds

In 2005, Cruise starred in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds. The events leading up to the release of the film, notably, Cruises' very public advocation of Scientology and anti-psychiatry statements, coupled with the criticism of his relationship with actress Katie Holmes, many expected the film to be a bomb at the boxoffice. In an ironic twist of events, the film earned $234,280,354 at the United States box office, becoming his most successful film in domestic figures (not taking inflation into account), and ultimately earning $591,416,316 in worldwide figures. He was however, the winner of three Razzie nominations at the end of the year.

Producing career

Cruise teamed with producer Paula Wagner to form Cruise/Wagner Productions, which has co-produced several of Cruise's films, the first being Mission: Impossible in 1996, Cruises' first work as a producer. He won a Nova Award (shared with Paula Wagner, Cruise's producing partner at Cruise/Wagner Productions) for Most Promising Producer in Theatrical Motion Pictures at the PGA Golden Laurel Awards in 1997 for his work as a producer on Mission Impossible.

His next project as a producer was the 1998 film, Without Limits, a film about famous runner Steve Prefontaine. Cruise returned to work as a produced in 2000, continuing work on the Mission Impossible sequel. He then served as an executive producer for The Others which starred Nicole Kidman, also that year, he again worked as actor/producer in Vanilla Sky. He subsequently worked on (but did not star in) Narc, Hitting It Hard and Shattered Glass, with Shattered Glass being particularly successful. His next project, which he also starred in, was The Last Samurai, he was jointly nominated for the Motion Picture Producer of the Year Award at the 2004 PGA Golden Laurel Awards. He then worked on Suspect Zero, Elizabethtown and Ask the Dusk. he reprised his role as actor/producer in the third 'Mission Impossible film.

Tom Cruise is noted as having negotiated some of the most lucrative movie deals in Hollywood, and was described in 2005 by Hollywood economist Edward Jay Epstein as "one of the most powerful - and richest - forces in Hollywood". Epstein argues that Cruise is one of the few producers (the others being George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Jerry Bruckheimer) who are regarded as able to guarantee the success of a billion-dollar movie franchise. Epstein also contends that the public obsession with Cruise's tabloid controversies obscures full appreciation of Cruise's exceptional commercial prowess in the industry.

Other work

Tom Cruise co-hosted the annual Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway with Oprah Winfrey in 2004.

Filmography

• Mission: Impossible III (3-May-2006)
• War of the Worlds (27-Jun-2005)
• Collateral (06-Aug-2004)
• The Last Samurai (22-Nov-2003)
• Austin Powers in Goldmember (22-Jul-2002)
• Minority Report (17-Jun-2002)
• Vanilla Sky (10-Dec-2001)
• America: A Tribute to Heroes (21-Sep-2001) Himself
• Mission Impossible II (24-May-2000)
• Magnolia (8-Dec-1999)
• Eyes Wide Shut (13-Jul-1999)
• Jerry Maguire (13-Dec-1996)
• Mission Impossible (22-May-1996)
• Interview with the Vampire (11-Nov-1994)
• The Firm (30-Jun-1993)
• A Few Good Men (11-Dec-1992)
• Far and Away (22-May-1992)
• Days of Thunder (27-Jun-1990)
• Born on the Fourth of July (20-Dec-1989)
• Rain Man (12-Dec-1988)
• Cocktail (29-Jul-1988)
• The Color of Money (17-Oct-1986)
• Top Gun (16-May-1986)
• Legend (28-Aug-1985)
• All the Right Moves (21-Oct-1983)
• Risky Business (5-Aug-1983)
• Losin' It (8-Apr-1983)
• The Outsiders (25-Mar-1983)
• Taps (11-Dec-1981)
• Endless Love (17-Jul-1981)

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