Date of Birth:3 July 1962, Syracuse, New York, USA more
Mini Biography:In 1976, if you had told 14 year old Franciscan
seminary student Thomas...
Trivia:Once lived in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada & attended the same high
school...
Awards:Nominated for 3 Oscars. Another 32 wins & 39 nominations
Height: 5'' 7
There''s a popular Hollywood saying. Question: Who can guarantee you a box-office smash? Answers: 1) Tom Cruise 2) Tom Cruise 3) That''s it. Just look at the figures. Mission: Impossible - $180 million, A Few Good Men - $141 million, Rain Man - $172 million, Top Gun - $176 million, Jerry Maguire - $158 million, The Firm - $158 million, Mission: Impossible 2 - $215 million. These are conservative estimates, the true money made worldwide from Cruise''s movies is infinitely higher. But it''s not just the money, there''s critical respect too. Oscars and Oscar nominations have rained down on Cruise productions. Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Cuba Gooding Jr, Jack Nicholson, Cameron Crowe, Holly Hunter, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, all of them have good reason to believe Tom Cruise is some kind of Oscar talisman. Do well next to Cruise and you''ve a fine chance of being short-listed.
Cruise''s early life was so tough it''s a bona fide miracle that he''s come so far. He was born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV in Syracuse, New Jersey on the 3rd of July, 1962, to nomadic parents. His mother, Mary Lee Pfeiffer from Louisiana, had married Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electronics engineer from the University of Kentucky, whose job with General Electric took them all over. Daughter Lee Anne was born in Louisville, then Marian, Tom and Cass (a third daughter) were born in Syracuse. Then they moved to Ottawa, to Missouri, back to New Jersey, and back to Louisville, before finally divorcing when Tom was 11.
Cruise would later have little good to say about his father. "He was a bully and a coward," he''d recall in an interview with Parade magazine. "He was the kind of person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you. He was an antisocial personality, inconsistent, unpredictable. It was a great lesson in my life - how he''d lull you in, make you feel safe and then BANG!" Cruise would not see his father for 10 years, when the older man was dying of cancer. Even then there would be no apology, no forgiveness, no closure, his father only seeing Tom at all if he swore not to mention the past.
Mary Lee took the kids to live at Taylorsville Road, Kentucky, where life was one hell of a struggle, Tom living with an aunt for a year while his mum got house and home together. When he rejoined the family, young Tom was titular Man Of The House, but they all had to work, Tom putting his newspaper delivery earnings into the general coffers. The family received food stamps but not full Welfare as Mary Lee was always working. "My mother finally had the courage to stand up to my father and say ''No more, I''m not taking it, so long''," Cruise would say in that same Parade interview. "People can create their own lives. I saw how my mother created hers and made it possible for us to survive". At one point there was so little money that Tom took a scholarship at the St Francis Seminary in Cincinnati where, for a year, he studied for the priesthood and, more importantly, ate properly. Eventually, Mary Lee married again; to plastics salesman Jack South. There were more moves - indeed, by the age of 14, Tom had attended 15 different schools, being bullied at nearly all of them - but, eventually, they settled, Tom enrolling at Glen Ridge High School, New Jersey. From here, he went straight into acting.
Cruise had actually first thought of acting around the age of five. Mary Lee was a teacher with a keen interest in amateur theatrics (his cousin William Mapother was an actor) and Tom would be taken regularly to the cinema. He loved it, but the constant movement made settling into anythingwould say "Nothing was quick enough in terms of life for me". Tom, a dreamy, lonely child living much of the time in his own interior world, was always the New Kid, forced to prove himself endlessly, and this was made yet more problematic by both shyness and dyslexia. It''s thought the latter was brought on by teachers demanding he write with his right hand but, whatever the cause, Tom found learning demanded a terrific effort as pages turned to meaningless blocks of weird scribbles before his eyes. Constantly challenged by his parents, making him exceptionally competitive, he was desperate to fit in - more, to win. So he threw himself into sports - wrestling, raquetball, ice hockey, everything. He wasn''t particularly gifted but his intensity and hyper-energy made him difficult to resist.
What eventually drew him to acting was an accident. Suffering a knee injury while wrestling, it was suggested that he try his hand at school theatre productions. Being Cruise, he threw himself in at the deep end, with the musical Guys And Dolls (he''d soon also perform in Godspell), and immediately began to pursue excellence in the field. Typically, he gave himself a 10-year deadline to achieve success. At 18, he left Glen Ridge and moved to New York, supporting himself by working as a bus-boy, a porter in an apartment block and a table-cleaner at Mortimer''s restaurant. In the evenings he took drama classes, auditioning for TV ads whenever possible. He looked good, he had that winning smile, but he was never hired. Casting directors always described him as “too intenseâ€. Other descriptions from those who knew him at the time included "long-haired", "angry", "muscular" and "obsessed with success". Feeding on hot dogs and rice, he lived, he now says “like an animal in the jungleâ€.
As yet, he had no connections, but he did have some advantages. Moving from state to state, he''d found his need to fit in had caused him to pick up the appropriate accent. He was always playing a role. Then there was his charm. As the only son in the family, he had grown up around women. Indeed, he remembers his sister Marian''s friends coming round when he was just 6 or 7, sitting him up on the kitchen sink and using him for kissing practice. He says the first time he almost suffocated - but it was fun. So he was easy around women, capable of turning on the grace and charm (the very first example being his winning of Laurie Hobbs at the Sacred Heart School in Louisville), and this confidence served him well.
While in New York, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV shortened his name to the far snappier Tom Cruise. He went to Los Angeles to audition for TV roles (there''s a famous clip of him trying out with a very young Heather Locklear - neither got the part), but got none. He did though sign with the Creative Artists Agency and got film work. First was Endless Love, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, renowned for Jesus Of Nazareth. Brooke Shields starred but Cruise, way down the bill (with James Spader, also making his debut), had a foot on the ladder. Or not, considering the film was so dismal. Returning to New Jersey, he was surprised to hear he had another audition, for a one-line part in Taps, the tale of military academy students so loyal the fight to prevent its closure. Where before Cruise''s intensity had been a drawback, now it made him. Director Harold Becker (who''d earlier made The Onion Field, and would later helm Sea Of Love and Malice) was so impressed by his test he lifted Cruise to third on the bill, as belligerent cadet Dick Shawn.
Holding his own alongside Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn and even George C. Scott, Cruise was now headline material. Next came Losin'' It, about four kids trying to lose their virginity in Tijuana (smooth Cruise gets an older, married woman), then the big one, Risky Business. Here Cruise played a smart teenager who, his parents out of town, gets tied up with a high-class prostitute and a bunch of shady fig