Actors - Tom Cruise

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Tom Cruise

	Actors - Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise (born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962) is an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning American actor and film producer who has starred in a number of top-grossing movies and remains one of the biggest movie stars in the world. His first leading role in a blockbuster movie was in 1983's Risky Business
. He has received additional notoriety in the press for his outspoken belief in Scientology and for being notoriously litigious, especially in response to allegations or inferences of homosexuality/bisexuality (see below).

Ancestry and early life

Tom Cruise was born to Noam Rosenthal and Mary Lee Pfeiffer in Syracuse, New York. His paternal ancestry is Welsh: his great-great-grandfather Dylan Henry Mapother emigrated from Flint, in north Wales, to the United States in 1850. Cruise also has German ancestry from his paternal great-grandparents, William Reibert and Charlotta Louise Voelker. His maternal ancestry is half Irish and half German (including Alsatian French). Cruise had a transient existence as a child attending eight elementary schools and three high schools. Cruise graduated from Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey {Source: Maquis Who's Who 2006} He briefly attended a Franciscan seminary in Cincinnati and aspired to become a Catholic priest.

Cruise became interested in drama after being sidelined from his high school's wrestling team due to a knee injury. While injured, he successfully auditioned for a lead role in his high school's production of Guys and Dolls
and decided to become an actor after his success in the role.

Hollywood

While it was not his first film, Risky Business
(1983) propelled Cruise to stardom. One sequence in the film, featuring Cruise lip-syncing Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll" in his underwear, has become an iconic moment in film history. Cruise's status as an A-list actor was secured a few years later when he starred in Top Gun (1986).

He received Academy Award nominations for Born on the Fourth of July
(1989) and Jerry Maguire
(1996), both as Best Actor; and for Magnolia
(1999), as Best Supporting Actor. In 1996, he became the first actor in history to star in five consecutive films that grossed $100 million in domestic release; the films were A Few Good Men
(1992), The Firm
(1993), Interview with the Vampire
(1994), Mission: Impossible
(1996) and Jerry Maguire
(1996).

Cruise also took on more unusual roles following Interview With The Vampire and Jerry Maguire, with Eyes Wide Shut
(1999) which took two years to finish as director Stanley Kubrick's last film, alongside then spouse Nicole Kidman. Cruise also performed as a misogynistic male guru in Magnolia
(1999), which netted him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, and in very rare form, played a villain as the hitman who kidnaps unsuspecting cabbie Jamie Foxx in Michael Mann's Collateral
(2004).

Cruise teamed with producer Paula Wagner to form Cruise/Wagner Productions, which has co-produced several of Cruise's films such as Mission: Impossible
(1996), Vanilla Sky
(2001), and The Last Samurai
(2003). The company also co-produced The Others
(2001).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Tom Cruise ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Tom Cruise; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Actors - Tom Cruise

Ancestry and early life

Hollywood

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay