Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise, born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, became one of Hollywood’s leading stars through major roles and producing control. His mother, Mary Lee, was a special-education teacher; his father, Thomas Mapother III, worked as an electrical engineer. After moving in childhood, Cruise attended high school in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where he participated in wrestling and drama. He moved to New York at 18 to pursue acting. His screen appearance in Endless Love (1981) preceded roles in Taps (1981), The Outsiders (1983), and Risky Business (1983), the latter making him a star.

Risky Business established Cruise before Top Gun (1986), directed by Tony Scott, turned naval aviator Pete “Maverick” Mitchell into a cultural icon. He followed it with Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986), playing pool prodigy Vincent Lauria opposite Paul Newman, and Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988), as Charlie Babbitt, the estranged brother of an autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman. Cruise earned his Academy Award nomination for Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), portraying Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic. In 1992’s A Few Good Men, he played Navy lawyer Daniel Kaffee and confronted Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup in court.

His work in the 1990s ranged from drama to auteur projects. In The Firm (1993), adapted from John Grisham’s novel, he played young attorney Mitch McDeere. Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996) introduced IMF agent Ethan Hunt and began Cruise’s franchise. That year’s Jerry Maguire brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor as sports agent Jerry Maguire; Cuba Gooding Jr., playing Rod Tidwell, won an Oscar for supporting actor. Cruise received a supporting-actor nomination for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), in which he played motivational speaker Frank T. J. Mackey. He also portrayed Lestat de Lioncourt in Interview with the Vampire (1994).

Beyond acting, Cruise co-founded Cruise/Wagner Productions with Paula Wagner in 1993 and served as producer on Mission: Impossible films. The series expanded with John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), J. J. Abrams’s Mission: Impossible III (2006), Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol (2011), and Christopher McQuarrie’s later installments. In Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Cruise returned as Maverick more than three decades after the original; the film became a box-office success. He performed practical stunts for Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), including a motorcycle jump from a Norwegian mountain, followed by a BASE jump. Cruise has been publicly associated with the Church of Scientology.