Tom Cruise

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It seems a Mission: Impossible for a young seminary student to become the world's biggest movie star, but Thomas Cruise Mapother IV made All The Right Moves.

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Tom Cruise
born: 03-07-1962
birth place: Syracuse, New York, USA

Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV to father Thomas Mapother III, an electrical engineer, and mother Mary Lee Pfeiffer.

Cruise had a close relationship with his three sisters: Marian, Lee Ann (who later became his publicist until November 2005) and Cass. He was seven when he was diagnosed with dyslexia and his parents divorced when he was twelve.

His parents moved house frequently and by the time he was fourteen, Cruise had attended fifteen different schools in the US and Canada. Finding his father “a bully and a coward, …a merchant of chaos”, Cruise dropped the name Mapother when his father refused to pay child support. He then enrolled at a Franciscan seminary to become a priest (at age 14) but dropped out after a year.

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Briefly attending St. Xavier High School in Louisville, Kentucky, he was a paperboy for the Louisville Courier-Journal and finally settled at Glen Ridge High School, New Jersey. It was here that Cruise developed an interest in acting, after injuring his knee and being unable to continue on the school’s wrestling team. He played the lead role in the school’s production of ‘Guys and Dolls’ with great success.

After graduating from Glen Ridge High School in June 1980, Cruise headed for New York to pursue an acting career. He attended the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theatre in New York City, studying drama with renowned acting coaches Phil Gushee and Sanford Meisner. He also studied at the Actors Studio, New School University, New York. Cruise made his film debut with a small part in Franco Zeffirelli’s ‘Endless Love’ (1981), starring Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt. Having gained immediate notice, he was then cast as Cadet Captain David Shawn, with George C. Scott, Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn, in the military drama ‘Taps’ (1981). The film had a mediocre response but helped Cruise gain further acting exposure and ensured a full filmmaking schedule for the next two years.

He was in two teen movies, ‘The Outsiders’ (1983) and ‘Losin’ It’ (1983). Then came ‘Risky Business’ (1983), a crime caper with Rebecca De Mornay and Cruise’s first leading role in a blockbuster. It was this role that truly began his rise to stardom. The fourth Cruise film that year was ‘All the Right Moves’ (1983), a high school football drama. His father died in 1984 and his next film, Ridley Scott’s ‘Legend’ (1985), received a lukewarm response.

These were merely ‘teething problems’ and Cruise went on to star in some of the highest grossing films of the 1980s, including: ‘Top Gun’ (1986), about macho US fighter pilots, with Kelly McGillis and Val Kilmer; Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Colour of Money’ (1986) with Paul Newman; ‘Rain Man’ (1988) co-starring Dustin Hoffman, a film that was praised by critics and won four Academy Awards; and ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ (1989), for which Cruise received Oscar nominations. Other 1980s movies were ‘Cocktail’ (1988), a light-hearted drama, which received mixed reviews and earned Cruise a Razzie award in 1989 and ‘Young Guns’ (1988). He was in an episode of ‘3rd Rock from the Sun’ (Dick and the Other Guy) in 1988.

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