Tom Cruise Career

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Thomas Cruise Mapother IV (born July 3, 1962), better known by his screen name of Tom Cruise, is an American actor and film producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and won three Golden Globe Awards. His first leading role was the 1983 film Risky Business, which has been described as "A Generation X classic, and a career-maker" for the actor. After playing the role of a heroic naval pilot in the popular and financially successful 1986 film Top Gun, Cruise continued in this vein, playing a secret agent in a series of Mission: Impossible action films in the 1990s and 2000s. In addition to these heroic roles, he has starred in many other successful films such as Jerry Maguire (1996), Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003), Collateral (2004) and War of the Worlds (2005). Almost every film he has starred in has achieved blockbuster status, with box office revenues totaling $100-million or more in the U.S.

Family and early life

Cruise was born in Syracuse, New York, the son of Mary Lee (née Pfeiffer), a special education teacher, and Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer. Cruise's paternal great great grandfather, Welshman Dylan Henry Mapother, emigrated from Flint, north east Wales, to Louisville, Kentucky in 1850. Cruise's great grandfather, the first Thomas Cruise Mapother, was born in 1876. He also has German and English ancestry from his paternal great-grandparents, William Reibert and Charlotte Louise Voelker, and German ancestry through his mother. Tom Cruise's oldest sister, Lee Anne, was born in Louisville. His older sister Marian was born in Syracuse, as were Tom and his younger sister, Cass.

Tom Cruise's Career

1980 :

Cruise's first film role came in 1981, when he had a small role in Endless Love, a drama/romance film starring Brooke Shields. Later that same year he had a more substantial role in the military film Taps, appearing alongside George C. Scott, Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn. In 1983, he was one of many teenaged stars to appear in Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders. The cast for this film included Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, and Ralph Macchio. That same year Cruise appeared in the teen comedy Losin' It. Cruise's breakthrough came after Risky Business was released, which helped to propel Cruise to stardom.[citation needed] 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 1980s film.[citation needed] The film has been described as "A Generation-X classic, and a career-maker for Tom Cruise." A fourth film that was released in 1983 was the high-school football drama, All the Right Moves. Cruise's next film was the 1985 fantasy film Legend directed by Ridley Scott.

1990s

Cruise was welcomed with similar success the following year when he received Academy Award nominations for Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, which was based on the best selling autobiography of parapalegic veteran and anti-war activist Ron Kovic.[citation needed] In 1990, Cruise starred as hot-shot racecar driver "Cole Trickle" in Tony Scott's Days of Thunder. Cruise's next film was Ron Howard's Far and Away where he again was starring with Nicole Kidman. Afterwards' he starred in the military thriller A Few Good Men with Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore. This film was very well received and earned Cruise a Golden Globe and MTV nominations.[citation needed] The following year he starred in Sydney Pollack's The Firm along with Gene Hackman and Ed Harris. It was based on the best selling novel by John Grisham, and won Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture at the People's Choice Awards.

2000s

In 2000, Cruise returned as Ethan Hunt in the second installment of the Mission Impossible films, releasing Mission: Impossible II. The film was directed by Hong Kong director John Woo and branded with his Gun fu Style, and it continued the series' blockbuster success at the box office, taking in almost $547M in worldwide figures, like its predecessor, being the third highest grossing film of the year. Cruise received an MTV Movie Award as Best Male Performance for this film. His next five films were major critical and commercial successes. The following year Cruise starred in the remake of the Spanish film Abre Los Ojos, the romantic thriller Vanilla Sky (2001) with Cameron Diaz and Penelope Cruz. In 2002, Cruise starred in the dystopian science fiction thriller, Minority Report which was directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick.

2010s

In March 2010, Cruise completed filming the action-comedy Knight and Day, in which he re-teams with former costar Cameron Diaz, scheduled for release on June 25, 2010. On February 9, 2010, Cruise confirmed that he will star in a third Mission:Impossible sequel, slated for release on Memorial Day weekend 2011.

Producing

Cruise partnered with his former talent agent Paula Wagner to form Cruise/Wagner Productions in 1993,[5] and the company has since co-produced several of Cruise's films,[32] the first being Mission: Impossible in 1996 which was also Cruise's first project as a producer. He won a Nova Award (shared with Paula Wagner) for Most Promising Producer in Theatrical Motion Pictures at the PGA Golden Laurel Awards in 1997 for his work as a producer for the film Mission: Impossible.

His next project as a producer was the 1998 film Without Limits about famous American runner Steve Prefontaine. Cruise returned to work as a producer in 2000, continuing work on the Mission Impossible sequel. He then served as an executive producer for The Others which starred Nicole Kidman, also that year, he again worked as actor/producer in Vanilla Sky. He subsequently worked on (but did not star in) Narc, Hitting It Hard and Shattered Glass. His next project, which he also starred in, was The Last Samurai, he was jointly nominated for the Motion Picture Producer of the Year Award at the 2004 PGA Golden Laurel Awards.[citation needed] He then worked on Suspect Zero, Elizabethtown and Ask the Dust.

Popularity

In 1990, 1991 and 1997, People magazine rated him among the 50 most beautiful people in the world. In 1995, Empire magazine ranked him among the 100 sexiest stars in film history. Two years later, it ranked him among the top 5 movie stars of all time. In 2002 and 2003, he was rated by Premiere among the top 20 in its annual Power 100 list.

In 2006, Premiere ranked Cruise as Hollywood's most powerful actor, as Cruise came in at number 13 on the magazine's 2006 Power List, being the highest ranked actor.

On June 16, 2006, Forbes magazine published 'The Celebrity 100', a list of the most powerful celebrities, which Cruise topped.[citation needed] The list was generated using a combination of income (between June 2005 and June 2006), web references by Google, press clips compiled by LexisNexis, television and radio mentions (by Factiva), and the number of times a celebrity appeared on the cover of 26 major consumer magazines.

Relationships and personal life

Cruise married Mimi Rogers on May 9, 1987; they divorced on February 4, 1990. Rogers is generally believed to have introduced Cruise to Scientology.

Cruise met Nicole Kidman on the set of their film Days of Thunder. The couple married on December 24, 1990. He and Kidman adopted two children, Isabella Jane (b. December 22, 1992) and Connor Antony (b. January 17, 1995).[1] They separated in February 2001 when Kidman was three months pregnant; she later miscarried.

Cruise was next romantically linked with Penélope Cruz, the lead actress in his film Vanilla Sky. After a three-year relationship, in March 2004, Cruise announced that their relationship had ended in January.

In April 2005, Cruise began dating actress Katie Holmes. Shortly after they began their highly publicized relationship, on June 17, 2005, Cruise announced he had proposed to her at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.