If you had told fourteen-year-old Franciscan seminary student Thomas Cruise Mapother IV that one day in the not-too-distant future he would be considered one of the top hundred movie stars of all time, he would have probably grinned and told you that his ambition was to become a priest. None the less, this sensitive, deeply religious youngster who was born in July 1962 in Syracuse, New York, was destined to become Tom Cruise, one of the highest paid and most sought-after actors in screen history. Tom is the only son (among four children) of nomadic parents, Mary Lee (Pfeiffer), a special education teacher, and Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer, both originally from Louisville, Kentucky. He is of Irish, German, and English descent.
Tom spent his boyhood eternally on the move, and by the time he was fourteen, had attended fifteen different schools in the U.S. and Canada. He finally settled in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, with his mother and her new husband. While in high school, he developed an interest in acting and abandoned his plans of becoming a priest, and at age 18 headed for New York and a possible acting career. The next fifteen years of his life are the stuff of legends. He made his film debut with a small part in Un amour infini (1981) and from the outset exhibited an undeniable box office appeal to both male and female audiences. Within five years Tom Cruise was starring in some of the top grossing films of the decade including Top Gun (1986); La couleur de l'argent (1986), Rain Man (1988) and Né un quatre juillet (1989). By the 1990s and 2000s he was one of the highest paid actors in the world earning an average fifteen million dollars a picture in such blockbuster hits as Entretien avec un vampire (1994), Mission: Impossible (1996), M-I:2 Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), Mission: Impossible III (2006), Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), Le dernier samouraï (2003), Collatéral (2004), La guerre des mondes (2005), and Jerry Maguire (1996) - for which he received an Academy Award Nomination for best actor.
In 1990, he renounced his devout Catholic beliefs and embraced The Church Of Scientology, stating that Scientology teachings had cured him of the dyslexia that had plagued him all of his life. He has been married to actresses Mimi Rogers (from 1987 to 1990), Nicole Kidman (from 1990 to 2001), with whom he has two children, and Katie Holmes (from 2006 to 2012), with whom he has a daughter. A kind and thoughtful man well known for his compassion and generosity, Tom Cruise is one of the best liked members of the movie community. Thomas Cruise Mapother IV has indeed come a long way from the lonely wanderings of his youth.
