Tom Cruise - Popular Film Star

Cruise, Tom (1962- ), American motion-picture actor, who became a celebrity in the 1980s after his performance in Risky Business (1983), a satire of suburban adolescence. In the 1990s Cruise became one of the world’s most popular film stars.

Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV in Syracuse, New York, he appeared in a succession of motion pictures in the early 1980s that focused on adolescent characters, such as The Outsiders (1983). He then moved on to roles in major productions such as Legend (1985); The Color of Money (1986), directed by Martin Scorsese; and Top Gun (1986), about United States Navy fighter pilots.

Cruise received praise for his performance in Rain Man (1988), in which he played the brother of an autistic man (see Autism). In Born on the Fourth of July (1989), he portrayed a paraplegic veteran of the Vietnam War (1959-1975) who becomes an antiwar activist. For his performance Cruise won the Golden Globe Award as best actor in a drama.

His other films of the late 1980s and early 1990s include Cocktail (1988), about a bartender; Days of Thunder (1990), which he cowrote, about a race car driver; Far and Away (1992), about Irish immigrants to the United States in the late 19th century; A Few Good Men (1992), which concerns the murder trial of two marines; and The Firm (1993), about corruption in a prestigious law firm. Although his works during this period earned a mixed reception from critics, Cruise’s popularity with motion-picture audiences grew dramatically.

In 1993 Cruise made his directing debut with “The Fabulous Frammis,” an episode of the cable-television miniseries Fallen Angels. In 1994 he appeared in Interview with the Vampire, and in 1996 he starred as agent Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible, which he also produced. In 1997 Cruise won the Golden Globe Award for best actor in a drama for his starring role in Jerry Maguire (1996), which concerns the conflicts a sports agent feels between his personal and professional life.

In 1999 Cruise and his then-wife, Nicole Kidman, costarred in the psychological thriller Eyes Wide Shut. In 2000 Cruise won the Golden Globe Award as best supporting actor for his role in Magnolia (1999), which tells the interlocking stories of several characters in the San Fernando Valley in southern California. In Mission Impossible 2 (2000), Cruise reprised his role as Ethan Hunt.