Tom Cruise

Clinging to a plane during take off, scaling the Burj Khalifa or riding a motorbike off a cliff: few images define modern cinema better than Tom Cruise risking his life without a stunt double. Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on 3 July 1962 in Syracuse, New York, he is for many the last true movie star, an actor and producer who has been filling cinemas around the world for forty years.

From seminary boy to teen phenomenon

His childhood was anything but easy. The son of an engineer he described as "a merchant of chaos" for his abuse, he passed through 15 schools in 14 years and struggled with dyslexia. At 14 he even entered a Franciscan seminary with the idea of becoming a priest, but acting got in the way. After debuting alongside other future stars in The Outsiders (1983), he broke through as a leading man that same year with Risky Business.

The phenomenon arrived in 1986: Top Gun made him the idol of an entire generation. Rather than coasting, he sought out the best: he learned from Paul Newman in The Color of Money (1986), partnered Dustin Hoffman in the Oscar winning Rain Man (1988) and transformed into Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), which brought him his first Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe.

The nineties: from heartthrob to complete actor

The following decade proved there was far more than a smile. He faced off against Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men (1992), triumphed with The Firm (1993), surprised as the vampire Lestat in Interview with the Vampire (1994) and charmed as the sports agent of Jerry Maguire (1996), his second Oscar nomination.

In 1999 he closed the decade with two radical gambles: the unsettling guru of Magnolia, which earned him a third nomination, and Eyes Wide Shut, the final film of Stanley Kubrick, shot with his then wife Nicole Kidman. Hits kept coming with Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg, The Last Samurai (2003), his memorable villain in Collateral (2004), War of the Worlds (2005) and his hilarious cameo in Tropic Thunder (2008).

Mission: Impossible, the last action hero

In 1996 he launched, as star and producer, Mission: Impossible, the beginning of the saga that would define his career. Eight instalments across almost thirty years, the later ones with his trusted director Christopher McQuarrie, with Cruise personally performing ever more outrageous feats, from Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) to Ethan Hunt's farewell in Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025).

Along the way he made science fiction gems like Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and starred in the biggest hit of his career: Top Gun: Maverick (2022), which sailed past a billion dollars and brought audiences back to cinemas after the pandemic, to the point that Spielberg told him he had saved Hollywood. In November 2025 the Academy finally handed him an honorary Oscar for his career, four years after he returned his three Golden Globes in protest at the organisation behind them. His next challenge: Digger, under the direction of Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Three wives and a church

His private life has generated as much ink as his films. He married the actress Mimi Rogers in 1987, who introduced him to Scientology, the controversial church whose most famous face he would become. On the set of Days of Thunder (1990) he met Nicole Kidman, to whom he was married for eleven years and with whom he adopted two children, Isabella and Connor.

After a three year romance with Penélope Cruz, whom he met filming Vanilla Sky (2001), in 2006 he married Katie Holmes, mother of his daughter Suri, whom he divorced in 2012. In 2025 he had a brief, much discussed romance with Ana de Armas. Now past sixty, he keeps doing what he does best: running on screen as if the whole of cinema depended on it. And perhaps, in a way, it does.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Tom Cruise is Endless Love (1981); in all, 61 films over 45 years. They have worked as actor in 56, producer in 20 and writer in 1. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), with 100 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 17 titles. The person they have worked with most is Christopher McQuarrie, on 10 films, among them Edge of Tomorrow and Valkyrie.