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TOM CRUISE
There's a popular Hollywood saying. Question: Who can guarantee you a box-office smash? Answers: 1) Tom Cruise 2) Tom Cruise 3) That's it. Just look at the figures. Mission: Impossible - $180 million, A Few Good Men - $141 million, Rain Man - $172 million, Top Gun - $176 million, Jerry Maguire - $158 million, The Firm - $158 million, Mission: Impossible 2 - $215 million. These are conservative estimates, the true money made worldwide from Cruise's movies is infinitely higher. But it's not just the money, there's critical respect too. Oscars and Oscar nominations have rained down on Cruise productions. Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Cuba Gooding Jr, Jack Nicholson, Cameron Crowe, Holly Hunter, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, all of them have good reason to believe Tom Cruise is some kind of Oscar talisman. Do well next to Cruise and you've a fine chance of being short-listed.
Cruise's early life was so tough it's a bona fide miracle that he's come so far. He was born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV in Syracuse, New Jersey on the 3rd of July, 1962, to nomadic parents. His mother, Mary Lee Pfeiffer from Louisiana, had married Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electronics engineer from the University of Kentucky, whose job with General Electric took them all over. Daughter Lee Anne was born in Louisville, then Marian, Tom and Cass (a third daughter) were born in Syracuse. Then they moved to Ottawa, to Missouri, back to New Jersey, and back to Louisville, before finally divorcing when Tom was 12 (his father would soon die of cancer). Mary Lee took the kids to live at Taylorsville Road, Kentucky, where life was one hell of a struggle. Young Tom was titular Man Of The Family, but they all had to work, Tom putting his newspaper delivery earnings into the general coffers. At one point there was so little money that Tom took a scholarship at the St Francis Seminary in Cincinnati where, for a year, he studied for the priesthood and, more importantly, ate properly. Eventually, Mary Lee married again; Jack South. There were more moves - indeed, by the age of 14, Tom had attended 15 different schools - but, eventually, they settled, Tom enrolling at Glen Ridge High School, New Jersey. From here, he went straight into acting.

Cruise had actually first thought of acting around the age of five. Mary Lee was a teacher with a keen interest in amateur theatrics (his cousin William Mapother was an actor) and Tom would be taken regularly to the cinema. He loved it, but the constant movement made settling into anything next to impossible. Later he would say "Nothing was quick enough in terms of life for me". Tom, a dreamy, lonely child living much of the time in his own interior world, was always the New Kid, forced to prove himself endlessly, and this was made yet more problematic by both shyness and dyslexia. It's thought the latter was brought on by teachers demanding he write with his right hand but, whatever the cause, Tom found learning demanded a terrific effort as pages turned to meaningless blocks of weird scribbles before his eyes. Constantly challenged by his parents, making him exceptionally competitive, he was desperate to fit in - more, to win. So he threw himself into sports - wrestling, raquetball, ice hockey, everything. He wasn't particularly gifted but his intensity and hyper-energy made him difficult to resist.

What eventually drew him to acting was an accident. Suffering a knee injury while wrestling, it was suggested that he try his hand at school theatre productions. Being Cruise, he threw himself in at the deep end, with the musical Guys And Dolls (he'd soon also perform in Godspell), and immediately began to pursue excellence in the field. Typically, he gave himself a 10-year deadline to achieve success. At 18, he left Glen Ridge and moved to New York, supporting himself by working as a bus-boy, a porter in an apartment block and a table-cleaner at Mortimer's restaurant. In the evenings he took drama classes, auditioning for TV ads whenever possible. He looked good, he had that winning smile, but he was never hired. Casting directors always described him as "too intense". Feeding on hot dogs and rice, he lived, he now says "like an animal in the jungle".

As yet, he had no connections, but he did have some advantages. Moving from state to state, he'd found his need to fit in had caused him to pick up the appropriate accent. He was always playing a role. Then there was his charm. As the only son in the family, he had grown up around women. Indeed, he remembers his sister Marian's friends coming round when he was just 6 or 7, sitting him up on the kitchen sink and using him for kissing practice. He says the first time he almost suffocated - but it was fun. So he was easy around women, capable of turning on the grace and charm (the very first example being his winning of Laurie Hobbs at the Sacred Heart School in Louisville), and this confidence served him well. >>>>> BIOGRAPHY

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TOM CRUISE FILMOGRAPHY

War of the Worlds ( 2005 )
Mission: Impossible 3 (2005)
Collateral (2004)
The Last Samurai (2003)
Space Station 3D (narrator) (2002)
Minority Report (2002)
Vanilla Sky (2001)
America: A Tribute To Heroes (TV) (2001)
Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures (as himself, TV) (2001)
Mission: Improbable (as himself, TV) (2000)
Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)
Magnolia (1999)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Jerry Maguire (1996)
Mission: Impossible (1996)
Interview With The Vampire (1994)
The Magic School Bus (TV, one episode) (1994)
The Firm (1993)
A Few Good Men (1992)
Far And Away (1992)
Time Out: The Truth About HIV, AIDS And You (as himself, video) (1992)
Days Of Thunder (1990)
Born On The Fourth Of July (1989)
Don't Look At Me (as himself, TV) (1989)
Cocktail (1988)
Young Guns (1988)
Rain Man (1988)
The Color Of Money (1986)
Top Gun (1986)
Legend (1985)
All The Right Moves (1983)
The Outsiders (1983)
Risky Business (1983)
Losin' It (1982)
Taps (1981)
Endless Love (1981)

Tom Cruise Producer - filmography

Untitled Sam Jones/Motocross Project (2006) (announced) (producer)
Deathrace 3000 (2006) (announced) (producer)
Mission: Impossible III (2006) (pre-production) (producer)
... aka M:I-3 (USA: promotional abbreviation)
The Eye (2006) (pre-production) (producer)
I Married a Witch (2005) (pre-production) (producer)
War Magician (2005) (pre-production) (producer)
Elizabethtown (2005) (completed) (producer)
Ask the Dust (2005) (completed) (producer)
The Last Samurai (2003) (producer)
... aka The Last Samurai: Bushidou (USA: poster title)
Shattered Glass (2003) (executive producer)
Hitting It Hard (2002) (V) (producer)
Narc (2002) (executive producer)
... aka Narco (Canada: French title)
Vanilla Sky (2001) (producer)
The Others (2001) (executive producer)
... aka Autres, Les (France)
... aka Otros, Los (Spain)
Mission: Impossible II (2000) (producer)
... aka M:I-2 (USA: DVD box title (promotional abbreviation))
... aka Mission: Impossible II (Germany)
Without Limits (1998) (producer)
Mission: Impossible (1996) (producer)
... aka Mission Impossible

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