Tom Cruise was the last movie star in the old sense: a name that alone could fill a cinema, and a performer who treated every film as if the whole of Hollywood depended on it.
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, and grew up moving between schools as his family relocated. After an early interest in acting, he left school and moved to New York, where small film roles led to a breakthrough in Risky Business (1983), in which his confident, comic turn as Joel Goodsen made him a young star.
The eighties made him a leading man. In Top Gun (1986) he played naval aviator Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, a role that became a cultural landmark, and in Rain Man (1988) he held his own opposite Dustin Hoffman as Charlie Babbitt. Then, in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), he played paralysed Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic with a seriousness that brought him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and a Golden Globe win.
The nineties and beyond kept him at the top. He was the lawyer at the centre of A Few Good Men (1992), the sports agent of Jerry Maguire (1996), which brought a second Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe win, and the television producer of Magnolia (1999), which brought a third Academy Award nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, and another Golden Globe win. He has received Academy Award nominations, and Golden Globe wins, but no competitive Academy Award win, a fact that makes his longevity, rather than a single trophy, the story of his career.
As Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible series, which began in 1996, Cruise built a franchise around daring action and a reputation for performing many of his own stunts. Later films such as Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022), in which he returned as Maverick, showed a star still willing to push himself in front of a camera. Through four decades, Cruise has remained what the title says: the last movie star, a performer whose name, smile and determination still mean a night at the cinema.