Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise: The Last Movie Star Standing

At the closing ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, a 62-year-old man dropped from the roof of the Stade de France, took the flag from the mayor of Los Angeles and rode it out of the stadium. It was not a stunt double. For four decades Cruise has organised his professional life around a single unfashionable proposition: that if the audience is asked to believe something extraordinary, someone had better actually do it, on camera, in one piece.

Fifteen Schools and a Seminary

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born in Syracuse, New York, on 3 July 1962, the son of an electrical engineer and a special-education teacher. The family was Catholic and close to poor, and it moved constantly — fifteen schools in fourteen years, including a stint in Ottawa where his father consulted for the Canadian Armed Forces. Of that father, who died of cancer in 1984, Cruise has been unsparing: "a merchant of chaos," a "bully" and a "coward" who beat his children.

He is dyslexic. He spent a year at St Francis Seminary in Cincinnati intending to become a Franciscan priest before leaving. Cut from the varsity football team in his senior year, he took the lead in *Guys and Dolls* instead, graduated from Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey in 1980, and moved to New York at eighteen with his parents' blessing to work as a busboy and audition.

Taps to Top Gun

The break came fast. Cast in a background part in *Taps* (1981), he impressed Harold Becker enough that the role was expanded — and Becker let him watch the rushes, teaching him to assess his own work "as the audience watching this," a discipline Cruise says has governed him ever since. He shaved his head without asking permission during rehearsals, an early sign of a temperament that reads either as total commitment or total control, depending on who is describing it.

*The Outsiders* and *Risky Business* followed in 1983, *Legend* under Ridley Scott in 1985, and then *Top Gun* in 1986, which made him a global star and a sex symbol at twenty-four.

The Serious Decade

Rather than bank the persona, he spent fifteen years buying access to the best directors alive. Scorsese put him opposite Paul Newman in *The Color of Money*; Cruise rehearsed for a month and learned to run a pool table well enough that Scorsese thought he could have made the film's final shot himself. *Rain Man* (1988) won Best Picture. *Born on the Fourth of July* (1989) brought his first Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe; Roger Ebert wrote that "his performance is so good that the movie lives through it."

*Jerry Maguire* (1996) delivered a second nomination and a second Globe. Kubrick, introduced by Sydney Pollack, cast him and Nicole Kidman in *Eyes Wide Shut*, a shoot originally estimated at three or four months that ran vastly longer. And Paul Thomas Anderson's *Magnolia* (1999) produced the strangest and possibly best performance of his life; Peter Travers called him "a revelation... he's devastating." A third Oscar nomination, a third Golden Globe.

Ethan Hunt

*Mission: Impossible* (1996) gave him a franchise and, more importantly, a producer credit — his first. He had researched Brian De Palma's entire filmography inside twenty-four hours before committing. Over thirty years the series became a laboratory for practical, in-camera spectacle: helicopters, buildings, and eventually wing-walking on vintage biplanes in homage to Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. He has held a pilot's licence since 1994, is an aerobatic flyer, owns a P-51 Mustang and was inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation in 2010.

The Man Who Would Not Let Cinema Die

*Top Gun: Maverick* (2022) premiered at Cannes, where he was given an Honorary Palme d'Or, passed $1 billion, and earned him a reported $100 million. It arrived at the moment the theatrical business looked terminal, and Cruise had spent years lobbying exhibitors and distributors to hold the line on big-screen release. He worries publicly that intellectual property and CGI have crowded out original screenplays and location spectacle. Between 2012 and 2025 he set a Guinness record with eleven consecutive films grossing over $100 million; his work has taken more than $13.3 billion worldwide.

Scientology and the Public Collapse

He was brought into Scientology by his first wife, Mimi Rogers, in 1986, and credits its Study Technology with helping him beat dyslexia. He has been close to the church's leader David Miscavige since the 1980s; Miscavige was best man at his 2006 wedding to Katie Holmes.

The mid-2000s nearly cost him everything. He jumped on Oprah Winfrey's couch. He said psychiatry "should be outlawed," attacked Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants for postpartum depression, and was rebuked by *The Lancet* for adding "to the burden of those with a mental illness, who often fear seeking or continuing treatment because of the stigma." He apologised to Shields in person in 2006. That August, Paramount ended a fourteen-year relationship, with Sumner Redstone citing the economic damage of his conduct. Three marriages — to Rogers, to Kidman, to Holmes — have all ended in divorce.

Why Tom Is Called a Genius

The honours have arrived in a rush: an Honorary Palme d'Or in 2022, a British Film Institute Fellowship — the BFI's highest award — in March 2025, and an Honorary Academy Award at the Governors Awards in November 2025 for a forty-five-year career. Note what those are. They are not acting prizes. Cruise has four competitive Oscar nominations and no win.

That is the honest frame. The claim for Cruise rests principally on craft and physical discipline rather than intellect, and the craft is real and unusually specific. It consists of: an autodidact's command of film technique acquired entirely on set, department by department; the ability to learn a demanding physical skill — pool, flying, combat, freefall, wing-walking — to a professional standard in service of a shot; and a producer's understanding of budget, distribution and exhibition that lets him protect the result. In his *Sight and Sound* interview he discusses lens choices across sixty years of cinema, from *The Graduate* to Michael Mann's digital experiments on *Collateral*, with the fluency of a cinematographer. He insists charisma is not mystical but learnable: "Great actors make it look easy."

The counter-case is equally clear. Ebert identified the "Tom Cruise Picture" as a formula with nine repeating ingredients — the mentor, the superior woman, the craft to be honed, the arena — and Cruise has spent much of his career playing skilful variations on a single self. His range, next to a Day-Lewis or a Blanchett, is narrow, and *Magnolia* stands out precisely because it is an exception. And whatever the intelligence is, it is bounded by its domain: the same man who can pre-visualise a helicopter sequence to the frame told a national television audience that a branch of medicine should be banned.

Legacy

Cruise is the last star whose name alone still opens a film worldwide, and he has used that leverage almost entirely to defend an idea of cinema — theatrical, practical, physically real — that the industry around him has been abandoning. He announced *The Final Reckoning* in 2025 as his last outing as Ethan Hunt. Whatever else the record shows, no one has worked harder to make the impossible look like it actually happened.

Achievements

• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama — 1990
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy — 1997
• Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture — 2000
• Honorary Palme d'Or — 2022
• Worked as film actor, film producer and film director