Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise, born in 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 Frightening 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 a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for a best actor Oscar for his starring role in Jerry Maguire (1996) as a sports agent who finds himself at a moral crossroads. In 1999 Cruise and his then-wife, Nicole Kidman, costarred in the much-heralded psychological thriller Eyes Wide Shut, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Cruise and Kidman divorced in 2001 after 11 years of marriage. 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 II (2000) and Mission: Impossible III (2006), Cruise reprised his role as Ethan Hunt. He also starred in Vanilla Sky (2001) and the futuristic thriller Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg, as well as in The Last Samurai (2003), the Michael Mann thriller Collateral (2004), and Spielberg's 2005 remake of The War of the Worlds. The usually discreet Cruise repeatedly made headlines in 2005, talking openly about his belief in Scientology, criticizing the psychiatry profession, and on Oprah Winfrey's television talk show effusively declaring his love for actress Katie Holmes, whom he later wed in 2006. This perceived erratic behavior, coupled with the relatively disappointing box-office performance of the film Mission: Impossible III, was cited by Paramount Pictures in 2006 as the reason for the studio's decision to end its working relationship with Cruise after 14 years. Later that year, the actor announced that he had struck a deal with MGM to revive the studio United Artists. The first fruit of this new relationship was the political drama Lions for Lambs (2007), in which Cruise played an ambitious Republican senator pursuing a risky new military strategy in Afghanistan. Contributed By: Richard T. Jameson Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.