Tragic Real-Life Details About Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise is known for his perky personality and general likeability, both of which have helped him sustain a successful Hollywood career for more than four decades now. His guy-next-door image is so strong that Cruise has been able to blow through some truly controversial moments, like that Oprah interview where he jumped on a couch or his rant against Brooke Shields and psychiatry, rather easily. His dominance at the box office is matched only by his star quality, and Cruise is nothing short of a screen legend. Though he often maintains a shiny veneer, there is much pain behind Cruise's iconic one-front-tooth smile. His past has included a number of tragic elements, beginning with a chaotic childhood filled with abuse and struggle.

Cruise's screen career began with 1981's "Endless Love," and it did not take him long to become a household name. His "Risky Business" dancing scene sure helped, as did his roles in huge hits like "Top Gun," "Born on the Fourth of July," and "Rain Man." Cruise continued to dazzle throughout the 1990s and 2000s, both in critically lauded movies like "Magnolia" and "Jerry Maguire," as well as action flicks like "Minority Report." Then there is the juggernaut "Mission Impossible" franchise, which is a big reason why Cruise's films have had more than $10 billion in box office earnings. Despite his continued success, Cruise's personal life has weathered many storms, and even mega-stars like Cruise face the occasional professional setback. Here are some tragic real-life details about Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise (or Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, as his birth certificate reads) was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1962. His father, Thomas, was an electrical engineer, while his mother, Mary, was a schoolteacher and aspiring actor. Like far too many Americans, Cruise's home did not provide the actor with the safe space that all kids deserve. His earliest years were spent dealing with verbal and physical abuse at the hands of his father, whom Cruise called both "a bully and a coward" and a "merchant of chaos" in a 2006 interview with Parade. "He was the kind of person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you. It was a great lesson in my life — how he'd lull you in, make you feel safe and then, bang!," he said in the interview. "For me, it was like, 'There's something wrong with this guy. Don't trust him. Be careful around him.' There's that anxiety."

Cruise has not given many specifics about his abuse, but he did confirm that things were sometimes physical in a 2013 Vanity Fair article. "As a kid, I had a lot of hidden anger about that. I'd get hit, and I didn't understand it," he said. Though Cruise was the only family member who was hit, it is not entirely clear if he was the only one who faced verbal abuse. After his mother divorced his father, Cruise remained estranged from his dad for a decade. At 22, they reconnected as the elder was dying of cancer.

Tom Cruise's early life was filled with uncertainty and chaos, and not just because of his father's abusive ways. The Mapother family was extremely poor, and they moved around all the time. Even before his parents' divorce, Cruise's father kept them moving due to his inability to keep a job and his near-constant search for work. Then, after Cruise's mother left her husband, she moved her kids to Louisville, Kentucky, in search of a better life. Both of the star's parents originally hail from Louisville, but they were living in Ottawa, Canada, when the divorce occurred. Cruise later landed in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, after his mother's 1978 remarriage when he was 16. It was there that he finished high school.

Cruise's mother worked three jobs to support her kids — Cruise and his sisters Lee Ann, Cass, and Marian — and did her best to give them a good life. "People can create their own lives, I saw how my mother created hers and so made it possible for us to survive," he told Parade. "She said, 'We're going to get through this.'" Because of all of the moving around, Cruise attended 15 schools over the course of 12 years. This included a Catholic seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Cruise spent a year at age 14 before his desire to join the priesthood waned. Shortly thereafter, a lead role in a school production of "Guys and Dolls" sparked Cruise's desire to be in the movies.

It is always hard to envision Hollywood's biggest stars as anything less than cool, but Tom Cruise has said he was ostracized and ridiculed by his peers as a youngster. There were a multitude of factors positioning him as an outsider at school, starting with the fact that he was consistently the new kid in class. Cruise also could not read, and being placed in remedial classes further isolated him. Moreover, he was too small and too eager for the other kids. "So many times the big bully comes up, pushes me," he told Parade. "Your heart's pounding, you sweat, and you feel like you're going to vomit. I'm not the biggest guy, I never liked hitting someone, but I know if I don't hit that guy hard he's going to pick on me all year."

The scars of childhood bullying often last a lifetime, and perhaps not coincidentally, there have been reports that Cruise can be somewhat of a bully himself. For instance, Leah Remini accused him of shouting at assistants in her memoir, and everyone has heard that 2020 outburst in which he was caught on an audio recording aggressively yelling at his crew over COVID-19 protocols. Furthermore, Cruise's first manager, Eileen Berlin, has claimed he has a "terrible temper" and accused him of throwing an album at her face. "There's contempt, arrogance, frustration, charm, sadness. I saw him in all those moods. What I have never seen is a real display of happiness in Tommy," she told The Daily Mail.

According to the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity, dyslexia refers to "an unexpected difficulty in reading for an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader," and it occurs due to issues with phonological processing. Given that an estimated 20% of the population has dyslexia, it is no surprise that a fair number of celebrities have been open about how the learning disorder has impacted their lives. This list includes Cher, Stephen Spielberg, Octavia Spencer, Anderson Cooper, and many others, but one of the first big-name stars to open the door to talking about dyslexia was none other than Tom Cruise. Cruise's dyslexia was a massive factor in his early life, contributing to his feelings of self-worth and isolating him from his peers.

Cruise was diagnosed with dyslexia when he was seven, but the diagnosis did not bring him much comfort. "The school took me to a psychiatrist to get tested," he told Parade. "They said, 'Oh, he's dyslexic.' I'm labeled. It instantly put me into confusion. It was an absolute affront to my dignity." Cruise said he struggled to find normalcy after the diagnosis, which is what led him to study psychiatry — which later led to his feud with Brooke Shields over anti-depressants and his infamous 2005 interview with Matt Lauer, in which he went on an anti-psychiatry stance. Cruise's stance is, of course, informed by his membership in the church of Scientology, which he has credited with helping him to overcome dyslexia through their "study technology" technique.

Tom Cruise is good at a lot of things — acting, producing, smiling — but marriage does not seem to be one of them. In fact, he appears to be downright bad at making relationships work, and because he is so famous, fans have had a front-row seat for every romantic failure. Cruise's girlfriends have included Rebecca De Mornay, Penelope Cruz, and Cher, but it is his three wives that we want to highlight. The actor first got married in May 1987, when he was 24 and his bride, Mimi Rogers, was 32. Rogers soon found herself enveloped in Cruise's fast-growing celebrity — "You cease to be an individual," she later told People — but she did not need to worry about it for long. Cruise filed for divorce in December 1989, and the marriage was officially dissolved the following February.

In a 1993 Playboy interview, Rogers claimed her marriage ended because Cruise wanted to be a monk. "At least for that period of time, it looked as though marriage wouldn't fit into his overall spiritual need. And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument," she said (via E! Online). That idea quickly fizzled, since Cruise met his next wife, Nicole Kidman, on the set of "Days of Thunder" only days after his split. He reportedly proposed as soon as the divorce was finalized, and the pair were married on Christmas Eve in 1990. Cruise filed for divorce in February 2001 and went on to have a third failed marriage with Katie Holmes, which lasted from 2006 to 2012.

It is a necessity that a celebrity of Tom Cruise's magnitude has thick skin, and Cruise has certainly been the butt of more than a few jokes over the course of his career (especially after jumping on Oprah Winfrey's couch). The actor has also faced a lot of criticism, for everything from his religion to his parenting to his exuberance. Even Cruise's appearance has at times been ripped apart, especially his smile, despite the fact that he is widely regarded as a conventionally attractive male. For instance, the Internet had a field day when Cruise was photographed at a baseball game with a mysteriously puffy face in 2021. It quickly went back to normal, but not until after the peanut gallery got their say on social media.

Though critique or ridicule from keyboard warriors is one thing, it is an entirely different ballgame when it is another celebrity doing the bashing. This is especially true if said celebrity is the author of the source material you are set to bring to life, which is what happened to Cruise when author Anne Rice got wind of his casting in the 1994 film adaptation of her novel "Interview With the Vampire." Not only did Rice denigrate Cruise's casting in a Los Angeles Times article, but she continuously complained to crowds of fans about how Cruise "butchered" her script by removing content to fit his clean-cut image. "When it first hit, it really hurt my feelings, to be candid about it," Cruise told Esquire. "Her venom hurt."

Tom Cruise married Nicole Kidman in 1990, and the two remained married for over a decade, which is an eternity in show business circles. By the time the couple announced their split in February 2001, they were one of Hollywood's most visible power couples. Very few saw the divorce coming, including Kidman herself. "I thought our life together was perfect," she told DuJour. "It took me a very long time to heal. It was a shock to my system." Even though Cruise publicly announced that Kidman was aware of why he initiated a split, the public remains in the dark about what truly happened. The media had a field day, with rumors swirling about pretty much every aspect of the couple's life, including how their film "Eyes Wide Shut" may have impacted the marriage and whether one or both spouses cheated.

One of the most salacious stories concerned an alleged miscarriage, although there were conflicting reports regarding the timeline. Kidman set the record straight after some outlets claimed she had a miscarriage at age 23. "So it's huge news, and it didn't happen," Kidman told Marie Claire. "I had a miscarriage at the end of my marriage, but I had an ectopic pregnancy at the beginning of my marriage. It was incredibly traumatic for me. Sometimes you share your grief." Though the couple did eventually welcome two children to their family through adoption, the loss of two babies no doubt left permanent holes in both Cruise and Kidman's hearts.

Tom Cruise is a rather litigious fellow, especially when it comes to false claims made about him by the tabloids. He once sued a porn star for $100 million after the man, Chad Slater, claimed to have slept with Cruise and been the catalyst for the end of his second marriage. The court awarded him a judgment of $10 million, and that is only one of the multiple lawsuits Cruise has filed regarding rumors of his gay affairs. There have been limited gay rumors in the years since, but that has not stopped shady media outlets from publishing scandalous false or exaggerated reports. Never one to lay back and take it, Cruise went to war with German conglomerate Bauer Media after they made troubling claims regarding his youngest daughter, Suri.

Suri, born in April 2006, is Cruise's daughter with his third wife, Katie Holmes. After Cruise and Holmes split up in 2012, after six years of marriage, rumors swirled for years about Cruise's involvement (or lack thereof) in his young daughter's life. The actor took things to court after Bauer magazines InTouch and Life & Style both published stories alleging that Cruise "abandoned" his daughter after the divorce. Cruise asked for $50 million in damages in the defamation suit, and things got ugly on both sides (Bauer even tried to get Suri's mental health records). The parties ultimately settled in December 2013, although all terms were kept confidential except for the fact that both Cruise and the publisher covered their own legal fees.

Even though Tom Cruise has cultivated an everyman, guy-next-door persona, it remains unclear whether his nice guy image is true to his actual attitude and behavior. It was easy to buy into Cruise's "aw, shucks" vibe when he was younger, but as the years have progressed, more and more reports have come out to suggest that Cruise might not be exactly who he seems to be when in front of the camera. One look at Cruise's long list of feuds can make even die-hard fans start to question whether the star is the root of the problem. It does not help matters that many of the celebs with whom Cruise has had beef are not themselves prone to conflict.

Stars such as Mark Wahlberg, Lisa Marie Presley, and Alec Baldwin have all publicly critiqued Cruise, but not in so serious a way so as to create a full-blown feud. Still, the list of people with whom Cruise has ongoing conflict is quite long in itself, and it includes huge celebrities like Brad Pitt, John Travolta, and the Beckhams. There is also former scientologist Leah Remini, who went to war with Cruise upon leaving the church, as well as Paramount CEO Brian Robbins. One of Cruise's bitterest feuds — the one with famed director Steven Spielberg — lasted for a full two decades before the two buried the hatchet at an Oscar lunch in 2023. The conflict reportedly began because Spielberg was angered by Cruise's couch-jumping Oprah Winfrey interview and subsequent public denigration of Brooke Shields's use of antidepressants.

Movies are meant to bring entertainment to fans, and though it is typically the stars, and a few select others, who get the credit, there are often hundreds of people involved in the construction of a feature film. Provided nothing awful happens on set, we rarely hear about people who work behind-the-scenes operating the cameras, mixing the audio, finding the props, or doing the makeup. We also rarely, if ever, hear about stunt doubles, despite the dominancy of action flicks at the box office and the widespread use of these professionals in Hollywood productions. Though Tom Cruise makes a habit of performing dangerous stunts himself, even he requires the use of stunt performers to make movie magic.

Cruise found himself embroiled in scandal after two pilots were killed and another injured while filming action scenes for the 2017 movie "American Made." The deaths occurred after a plane crashed in the Colombian Andes, where the film was shot in 2015, and multiple lawsuits were filed against producers (and others) in 2017. Cruise was not himself sued, but court documents obtained by People made it clear that the families blamed both Cruise and director Doug Liman for cutting corners to save time and money. The families suggested that both put their desire for a "high-risk, action-packed motion picture" above the well-being of the pilots and adherence to safety protocols. They also noted that Cruise himself is a skilled pilot who could have done some of the shots rather than add hours to the stunt performers' schedules each day.

For someone in a career that, by its very nature, includes a lot of rejection, Tom Cruise sure does not take it very well. Then again, it has probably been a very long time since Cruise has had to audition, and since he is such a bankable star, his professional life likely includes very little repudiation. On the personal front, however, Cruise does not always get his way — and personal rejections that happen on a world stage cause him what seem to be extreme amounts of embarrassment. When you are not used to your advances being rebuffed, even the smallest slight can seem like a big deal, which might be why Cruise was reportedly so mortified when Kate Middleton refused his help at the U.K. premiere of "Top Gun: Maverick."

While the princess initially accepted Cruise's hand to walk up the stairs, once she made it up the first flight, she switched her purse to avoid Cruise's aid for the second flight. The moment was captured on video, went viral via TikTok, and allegedly caused Cruise much distress. It is not the only public rejection that has sent Cruise into a tailspin, either. After he unsuccessfully attempted to pursue a romance with singer Shakira, news outlets reported that Cruise was extremely upset by the slight. "It was a huge dent to Tom's ego," an inside source told OK! Magazine, which also reported that Shakira had to "beg" Cruise to stop pursuing her (a quote which could not have helped his embarrassment).

There are certain actors who are identifiable primarily because of their presence in action and adventure movies. While Tom Cruise did not start out as one, he has over time shifted his career toward the genre. Cruise appeared in a few films that could loosely be classified as action, such as "Top Gun" and "Days of Thunder," but his first full foray into the genre occurred when he starred in 1996's "Mission: Impossible." Cruise is currently working on the eighth movie in the franchise that turned him into a bona fide action hero. Beyond playing Ethan Hunt, Cruise has also made two "Jack Reacher" films and many other one-off action flicks, such as "War of the Worlds," "Minority Report," and "Edge of Tomorrow."

Whether it is an apocalyptic adventure film like "Oblivion" or an action-comedy like "Knight and Day," the vast majority of Cruise's films now have some sort of action element. A known adrenaline junkie, it is clear that Cruise is especially attracted to films that allow him to do his own stunts, no matter how extreme. The star has spoken about having to convince others to let him tackle certain tasks and has at times put his life at risk in order to score the perfect shot. Among others, Cruise has torn a shoulder, cracked multiple ribs, and injured an ankle at least twice. But considering he has done things like ride a motorcycle off a cliff and hang off the side of an airplane, shattered ankles seem par for the course.

All big celebrities have been subject to rumors, but there are times when the rumor mill gets especially nasty, and death hoaxes fit squarely in the nasty pile. Though they rarely have any kernel of truth and are especially cruel, death hoaxes have become a staple of the Internet age. They can be quite elaborate as well, like the rumor that Russell Crowe fell 50 feet to his death from an Austrian mountain while filming a movie. Many others, including Cher, Jon Bon Jovi, and Johnny Knoxville, have been the subject of death hoaxes, but only a few have found themselves targeted time and time again. Tom Cruise has been falsely declared dead at least four times: in 2008, 2010, 2020, and 2023.

Unlike the 2016 hoax that suggested Cruise was moving back to his birthplace of Syracuse, New York, death rumors are not just playful gossip but problematic and mean lies that can be quite distressing. The first time Cruise was the subject of one was in 2008, when he supposedly fell off a cliff in New Zealand. Two years later, the rumor was that the star died in a plumbing accident. Cruise made light of it at the time, but probably did not think he'd be killed off by the Internet so regularly. The 2023 rumor was so undeveloped that it did not even have an attached cause of death, but the 2020 hoax claimed Cruise perished in an on-set accident, which sounds totally plausible and understandably had fans freaking out.

If you totally forgot that Tom Cruise once had a thing with Sofia Vergara, you are definitely forgiven. After all, the Columbian actor was still years away from being cast on "Modern Family" and was thus not super famous at the time. Plus, Cruise has had so many paramours that it can be hard to keep track. In addition to his longer-term relationships, the star has had brief dalliances with everyone from Melissa Gilbert to Cher. The reason Vergara is even a notable ex is because Cruise reportedly expressed an interest in rekindling the romance in August 2023, after Vergara's divorce from Joe Manganiello put her back on the market.

According to Andrew Morton's "Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography," Cruise and Vergara first dated in 2005, after the actor gave a list of potential mates to leaders at the Church of Scientology. The couple was reportedly then introduced by Will Smith, who invited Vergara to a pre-Oscars party with the intent of setting them up. It is unclear how long they were together, but there is only one instance where Vergara and Cruise were photographed in public, and they reportedly called it off because Vergara was unwilling to renounce Catholicism for Scientology. That seemingly hasn't stopped Cruise from pining after Vergara, as he reportedly began calling mutual friends as soon as she became single. ""If she bites, he's all set to pounce. He thinks she's exactly what has been missing from his life," an unnamed insider told OK! Magazine.