Tom Cruise

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV (Syracuse, New York, July 3, 1962), better known as Tom Cruise, is an American actor and film producer who has won an three Golden Globe Awards, a Saturn Award and an honorary Palme d'Or. Throughout his more than four-decade career, he has starred in commercially successful films that have also been critically acclaimed. He has among his repertoire the action films Top Gun (1986), Days of Thunder (1990) and the saga Mission Impossible (1996-present); the dramatic films The Color of Money (1986), Rain Man (1988), Born on July 4th (1989) and Magnolia (1999); the gothic horror film Interview with the Vampire (1994); the romantic comedy Jerry Maguire (1996); as well as the science fiction films Minority Report (2002), The War of the Worlds (2005) and Oblivion (2013). He has also starred in the thrillers The Firm (1993), Collateral (2004), Valkyrie (2008) and Jack Reacher (2012).

Cruise is considered one of the highest paid and most influential actors in Hollywood. In 2020, with a net worth of $570 million, he was ranked the second richest actor in the world by Forbes magazine. His films have collectively grossed more than $4 billion in the United States and more than $11 billion worldwide, making Cruise one of the highest-grossing actors in the film industry of all time.

He has also earned three Oscar nominations for Best Actor: in 1990 for Born on the 4th of July, in 1997 for Jerry Maguire and in 2000 for Magnolia, and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Considered one of the sex symbols of cinema and a superstar of Hollywood, his sentimental life has been exposed in the media.

He has married three well-known actresses: Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman, and Katie Holmes. His relationship with Penelope Cruz also raised eyebrows, as did his affiliation and propaganda with the Church of Scientology, which Cruise credits with providing him with greater spiritual awareness and other benefits, such as his dyslexia cure.

The bad reputation of the organization, caused by complaints of fraud, coercion and others, have affected its public image and professional progress in recent years^{[citation required]} .

His longtime company, Paramount Pictures, decided to part with him in 2006 (although the two parties have been working together again since 2011). To further his career, Cruise reactivated a long-standing firm in 2007, United Artists, with which he has produced several of his films since then. In 1990 he was named the world's sexiest man alive. by People magazine. In 1990 and 1994 he was voted Favorite Movie Actor of the Year by public vote at the People's Choice Awards. In 2006, Forbes magazine named Cruise the most influential celebrity in the world. Vanity Fair published the list of the Top 40 Hollywood Celebrities With the Most Earnings of 2010. Cruise was ranked 35th on the list, earning an estimated $14.5 million for his films.

Biography

He was born in Syracuse, New York, on July 3, 1962, the son of electronics engineer Thomas Cruise Mapother III (1934-1984) and his wife, Mary Lee Pfeiffer (1936-2017), a theater-loving teacher; and brother of Lee Anne, Marian and Cass. Tom Cruise is of English, German, and Irish descent. The family lived in many cities due to his father's job instability, but eventually settled in Ottawa, Canada. write). Tom attended 14 different schools in just 15 years.

Following his parents' divorce, Cruise leaves Canada and settles with his mother and sisters in Kentucky. For a while he considered entering a Franciscan monastery, but ultimately decided to become an actor. Cruise grew up in near poverty and had a Catholic upbringing. The family was dominated by his abusive father, whom the actor has described as "a merchant of chaos." Cruise has said that he was beaten by his father, whom he called "a bully and a coward." He has stated that 'My father was the type of person who, if something goes wrong, kicks you. It was a great lesson for my life, how it would make you numb and make you feel safe and then, boom! To me it was like, "There's something wrong with this guy. Be careful around him.»"

Artistic career

Career beginnings (1981-1990)

Tom Cruise at the Oscar Awards, 1989. Behind, the one who was still his first wife, Mimi Rogers.

After graduating high school, Tom moved to New York where he went to a few castings while working as a waiter. At the age of 19 he decided to go to Los Angeles to try his luck in Hollywood . In 1981, after a brief role in the film Endless Love , he would be chosen to act in the film Taps along with another young promise: Sean Penn. In his early years, Tom participated mostly in movies for adolescent audiences: comedies like Losin & # 39; It (1983) and Risky Business (1983).

But from very early on he added prestigious titles to his track record, such as The Outsiders (1983) by Francis Ford Coppola, along with other future stars such as Patrick Swayze and Matt Dillon, and The Color of Money (1986) by Martin Scorsese, with the illustrious Paul Newman, who with this film won the Oscar for Best Actor that had been so long resisted. Since Endless Love, the figure of Tom Cruise began to be known, but in 1985 with Legend by Ridley Scott and in 1986 with the blockbuster Top Gun by Tony Scott forges his fame as an actor of romantic and action stories, which his female fans and male audiences like equally.

In 1987 Cruise gave his fans a little displeasure by marrying an older actress, Mimi Rogers. She was the one who introduced Tom to Scientology. The blockbuster film Cocktail (1988) in which he starred alongside Elisabeth Shue, despite its discreet quality, establishes him as the star of American cinema of the moment.

In 1988, Cruise took a qualitative leap in his career with Rain Man, a Barry Levinson film that swept the Oscars awards, winning four statuettes, including for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman). Cruise was not awarded for it, but the following year he was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor for Oliver Stone's Born on the 4th of July, where he played a veteran of the Vietnam War in a wheelchair, a role with which he was very excited and won his first Golden Globe.

From Days of Thunder to Eyes Wide Shut (1990-2000)

Although Cruise manages to obtain critical acclaim with his dramatic films, he does not neglect commercial cinema, shooting Days of Thunder (1990), about the world of racing cars. His partner in the film is Nicole Kidman, with whom he begins a relationship after the failure of his marriage to Mimi Rogers. Divorced from Rogers, Cruise married Kidman in a very low-key ceremony on Christmas Eve 1990.

In the early 1990s, hits like Far and Away (1992), A Few Good Men (1992) and The Firm (1993) underpin his position as the leader of American cinema, at least in its highest-grossing channel. A Few Good Men was nominated for four Oscars: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Sound, and Best Editing. The film is part of AFI's 10 Top 10 in the category of "Court Films".

In 1994, the actor starred, along with Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, Antonio Banderas and Christian Slater, in the horror film Interview with the Vampire, based on the novel by Anne Rice. Later it was learned that during the filming of this movie Cruise and Pitt had several run-ins that ended up deteriorating their friendship and they have never worked together again.

In 1996, Jerry Maguire, a romantic comedy directed by Cameron Crowe, led to another nomination for the Oscar for Best Actor and win his second Globe of Gold. Cruise, once again, is not awarded by the academy but his co-star, Cuba Gooding Jr., wins the Oscar for best supporting actor for this film. Mission: Impossible (1996) by Brian De Palma, a film adaptation of a famous television series from the 60s and the first film produced by the actor, definitively confirms him as an action film idol. The collection success is such that Cruise will shoot five sequels in later years (2000, 2006, 2011, 2015 and 2018 respectively).

In 1999, the actor surprised with a rare role in Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson's critically acclaimed ensemble film for which Cruise won a Golden Globe and his third Oscar nomination.

That same year, Tom Cruise and his wife Nicole Kidman embarked on Stanley Kubrick's latest project, Eyes Wide Shut, whose filming suffered multiple incidents. It was rumored that the couple's relationship was affected by this film and that this led to a commented marital crisis and subsequent divorce in 2001. The film is based on the novel Dream Story, by Arthur Schnitzler, and its script was written by Kubrick himself and Frederic Raphael.

From Mission: Impossible 2 to Knight & Day (2000-2010)

The start of the new decade is productive for Cruise; a new installment of the saga Mission: Impossible (2000), the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001) and the futuristic film Minority Report (2002) by Steven Spielberg, reaffirm Cruise's position in commercial cinema.

A position that is supported by other hits such as Collateral (2004), where he plays a hired killer; The War of the Worlds (2005), a science fiction film based on the novel of the same name by H. G. Wells and Mission Impossible 3 (2006). The War of the Worlds grosses $591 million worldwide at the box office and earns three Oscar nominations for Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Sound Editing. French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma ranked the film eighth on its list of the best films of the 2000s. Still, Cruise indulges in bolder projects such as The Last Samurai (2003), a film that was feared as a great commercial failure due to its setting in ancient Japan and the unusual appearance (with a beard) of its protagonist. The Hollywood studios got it wrong, and the movie was another box office hit with $456 million worldwide.

Tom Cruise in 2006

Tom Cruise's professional position seemed set in stone, but the situation was complicated by his publicized relationship with Katie Holmes, 16 years his junior. After a three-year courtship with Penélope Cruz that many critics described as montage, Tom Cruise surprised by choosing Katie Holmes as his new partner, a relationship that on November 18, 2006 culminated in a luxurious wedding in a castle in Bracciano (Italy).

Cruise's close relationship with Scientology, a controversial sect banned in countries like Germany, and his shocking television appearance in 2006 harshly criticizing pharmaceutical companies and the increased use of antidepressants in the United States, criticizing in particular actress Brooke Shields, who had revealed that she used antidepressants after giving birth, sparked a barrage of criticism against the actor. The company of his greatest hits, Paramount Pictures , considered that Cruise was harming his public image (and therefore his commercial future in the cinema), and opted to terminate (or not renew) his contract.

Faced with this situation, Cruise and his agent, Paula Wagner, tried to recover positions by signing an agreement in 2007 with the company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to reactivate the famous United Artists, legendary company with which Cruise would launch his next films. Said business venture debuted with Lions for Lambs (2007) by Robert Redford, where Cruise starred alongside Meryl Streep and Redford himself. To reposition himself in his profession and tackle certain prejudices about him, Tom Cruise played a parody role in Ben Stiller's comedy Tropic Thunder (2008), for which he was nominated for the Golden Globe for best supporting actor. He later starred in the blockbuster Valkyrie (2008), based on the attempt to kill Adolf Hitler. It received mixed reviews and did not achieve the expected commercial success.

Cruise repeated the genre of comedy and action shooting Knight and Day (2010) with Cameron Diaz, with locations in various tourist locations around the world such as Boston, Salzburg, Cadiz and Seville. In 2009, the actor was the first candidate to play the leading role in Salt, a film that finally starred Angelina Jolie.

2010-present

In the 2010s, Cruise shot 3 installments of the Mission Impossible saga; Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015) and Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018). Mission: Impossible - Fallout has been considered by many to be the best installment in the franchise to date, and was the most commercially successful, grossing $791 million worldwide. In 2012 Cruise starred opposite Rosamund Pike in Jack Reacher, a film adaptation of the novel One Shot by British author Lee Child. The film was very well received at the box office and led the actor to star in the sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016). In 2013 Cruise shot with the Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko and Morgan Freeman the science fiction film Oblivion by Joseph Kosinski which was another success in terms of commercial cinema. He then acted with Emily Blunt in another science film fiction, At the Edge of Tomorrow (2014).

Tom Cruise at the premiere in Japan by Jack Reacher: Never Back in 2016

In 2017 Tom surprised audiences by starring in The Mummy, a film produced by Universal Pictures in which Oscar-winning Russell Crowe also starred. Not bad at the box office, the film has received negative reviews and has been considered one of Cruise's worst films of his career. Also in 2017, the actor played Barry Seal, a drug dealer and former CIA agent in the 1980s, in American Made, a film directed by Doug Liman.

Christopher McQuarrie, Vice Admiral Kenneth R. Whitesell, Tom Cruise, Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer at Top Gun premiere: Maverick on May 4, 2022 in San Diego (California)

On Sunday, August 13, 2017, Cruise suffered a spectacular accident (in which he broke an ankle) while filming one of his action scenes for the sixth installment of his saga Mission Impossible and filming had to be suspended for two months.

On May 5, 2020, it was confirmed that Tom Cruise, along with Elon Musk, NASA and the International Space Station, would perform the 1.er film shot in space in the history of cinema. On September 22, 2020, filming was made official within NASA plans for October 2021 and it was confirmed that the director of the film will be Doug Liman.

On May 10, 2021, Cruise returned his three Golden Globe Awards to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association due to its many controversies and irregularities in the association's operation.

On May 27, 2022, after several delays due to the Covid19 pandemic, Top Gun: Maverick was released, directed by Joseph Kosinski. It is the sequel to the film Top Gun that brought Cruise to world stardom in 1986. Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Ed Harris, Thomasin McKenzie, Miles Teller, Glen Powell and Val Kilmer, who also appears in the first film, accompany the actor in this installment. The critically acclaimed film became the actor's highest-grossing film of 2022, grossing more than $1.4 billion worldwide. Cruise told the media at his presentation at the Cannes Film Festival that he will never make movies for streaming platforms.

Private life

In the 1980s, Cruise had several partners, including actress Rebecca De Mornay and singer Cher. He was married twice before his last marriage to Katie Holmes. The first time in 1987 with the actress Mimi Rogers, from whom he separated in 1990, and then with the actress Nicole Kidman, whom he met while filming Days of Thunder, and with whom he also became They divorced in a very publicized way at the end of 2001. With Kidman their marriage lasted almost eleven years and they were one of the most popular couples in Hollywood. They had no biological children but adopted two: Isabella Jane (born 1992) and Anthony Connor (born 1995).

After starring together in Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman parted ways irreconcilably. In the June 2006 issue of Ladies' Home Journal , Kidman said she still loved Cruise: “He was huge; he still is. To me, he was just Tom, but to everyone else, he's huge. He was always charming to me and I loved him. I still love him". In addition, the actress has expressed how shocked she was by the divorce from her.

After two stable relationships, Cruise had an affair with the Spanish actress Penélope Cruz, with whom he starred in the film Vanilla Sky. This film is a version of a Spanish title called Open your Eyes, directed by Alejandro Amenábar. He met Katie Holmes while searching for a co-star for his movie Mission Impossible 3. His first public appearance was on April 29, 2005, in Rome, at the David di Donatello Awards, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars.

A few months later they got engaged. Cruise declared that he had fallen madly in love with the actress in the talk show of the presenter Oprah Winfrey The Oprah Winfrey Show , when he starred in an excessive scene getting on a sofa and proclaiming his love for her during the broadcast of the show on television.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes in 2009

Shortly thereafter, Cruise proposed to Holmes on the morning of July 17, 2005, atop the Eiffel Tower in Paris; she accepted. At the press conference, attended by Holmes's mother, Cruise announced to the news: Today is a magnificent day for me. I am engaged to a magnificent woman. The couple announced that Holmes was pregnant. On April 18, 2006, Cruise's first biological daughter was born, whom they named Suri. On November 18 of that year, he married Katie Holmes, generating great excitement in Italy, the place chosen for the ceremony.

The ceremony, attended by many Hollywood stars, was celebrated by the rite of the Church of Scientology, at the Odescalchi castle in Bracciano, 35 kilometers from Rome. In June 2012, Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Cruise citing irreconcilable differences and custody of Suri. According to the TMZ medium, the main reason that led the actress to take the step was the excessive obsession that her husband showed for Scientology.

In order to separate from Tom Cruise, Holmes carried out the entire process in absolute secrecy, thanks to the help she received from Nicole Kidman, Cruise's ex-wife, who advised and supported her throughout the tough lawsuit.

Between late 2020 and mid-2022, the actor was romantically involved with British actress Hayley Atwell, co-star of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. The couple separated at the end of 2021 but reconciled a few months later. In June 2022 it was confirmed that Cruise broke up with her again.

Filmography

Awards and nominations

Oscars

Razzie Awards

Golden Globe Awards

BAFTA Awards

Screen Actors Guild Awards

People's Choice Awards