Tom Cruise’s Early Life and Passion for Acting:
American actor Tom Cruise was born in Syracuse, New York, on July 3, 1962. He became one of Hollywood's most well-liked leading men in the 1980s. Since then, he has continued to be one of the most consistently successful and varied actors in the film industry. He is equally adept in big-budget action blockbusters as author-driven comedy and tragedies. Cruise's most well-known character is that of secret agent Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible series, for which he is renowned for carrying out the majority of his risky feats.
Tom Cruise started his acting career in high school and debuted in the movie Endless Love (1981). Before winning his breakthrough part in Risky Business (1983), where he played a high school senior who converts his parents’ home into a brothel, he had cameos in movies including Taps (1981) and The Outsiders (1983). The movie was a huge success and made Cruise well-known. His role as a U.S. Navy jet pilot in Top Gun (1986), the highest-grossing movie of that year, solidified his superstar status.
He costarred with Paul Newman in Martin Scorsese’s film The Color of Money that same year. Two years later, he played the egotistical brother of a guy with autism in the film Rain guy. He was nominated for his first Academy Award in Born on the Fourth of July (1989) for his role as activist and Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic.
Tom Cruise portrayed a variety of characters during the 1990s, such as a vampire in Interview with the Vampire (1994) and a Navy lawyer in A Few Good Men (1992). In Brian De Palma’s 1996 film Mission: Impossible, he debuted as secret agent Ethan Hunt. The movie, which is based on the 1966–1973 television series of the same name, centers on Hunt’s efforts to find a traitor in his group, the Impossible Missions Force. With its exhilarating action scenes, global plot, and star-studded cast, the wildly successful film set a new benchmark that was carried over by sequels that were released in 2000, 2006, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2023, and 2025.
Tom Cruise’s role as a sports agent in Jerry Maguire (1996) earned him his second Oscar nomination. He co-starred with his then-wife Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick’s eagerly anticipated last picture, Eyes Wide Shut, which explored marital integrity and was met with mixed reviews in 1999. In the same year, Cruise was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of a chauvinist self-help guru in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
Tom Cruise starred in a number of high-profile action movies in the 2000s, such as Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction thriller Minority Report (2002), the gritty Los Angeles-set Collateral (2004), and The Last Samurai (2003), in which he played a disillusioned American soldier who joins a samurai community.
For the visually arresting version of H. G. Wells’s novel, War of the Worlds (2005), he and Spielberg got back together. In 2008, Tom Cruise shocked viewers by taking on a humorous role as a strict film executive in Tropic Thunder. In Valkyrie, he played the historical figure Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer who planned an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler.
Tom Cruise later starred in the action thrillers Jack Reacher (2012) and Knight and Day (2010), returning to the role of a former U.S. Army investigator in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016). He was chosen to play a post-apocalyptic survivor in the science-fiction adventure Oblivion (2013), following his role as a 1980s rock idol in the musical Rock of Ages (2012).
Then, in the 2014 alien invasion movie Edge of Tomorrow, he portrayed a chatty military public relations officer who continually dies and resurrects. Tom Cruise starred in the crime thriller American Made and the action-horror movie The Mummy in 2017. He played the same character from the 1986 movie in Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Due to the advent of streaming services and movie theater closures during the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020 and 2021, attendance had declined. However, the sequel was a huge box office hit and was credited with helping bring people back to cinemas.
Tom Cruise reprised his role as Ethan Hunt in the 2025 film Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, which included a stunt in which he was seen dangling from a flying biplane.
Tom Cruise’s private life has frequently garnered just as much attention as his acting career. His marriage to Nicole Kidman and their 2001 divorce were extensively covered by the Hollywood media.
His vocal support for Scientology became problematic in the years that followed, particularly after he made public remarks in 2005 denouncing psychiatry as an illegitimate science—a view held by Scientologists. Cruise’s highly publicized romance with actress Katie Holmes, to whom he was married from 2006 to 2012, has contributed to his continuous presence in tabloids and entertainment media.