Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962 in Syracuse, New York, actor Tom Cruise led a peripatetic existence as a child, moving from town to town with his rootless family. A high-school wrestler, Cruise went into acting after being sidelined by a knee injury. This new activity served a dual purpose: performing satiated Cruise's need for attention, while the memorization aspect of acting helped him come to grips with his dyslexia.

Moving to New York in 1980, Cruise held down odd jobs until getting his first movie break in Endless Love (1981). His first big hit was Risky Business (1982), in which he entered movie-trivia heaven with the scene wherein he celebrates his parents' absence by dancing around the living room in his underwear. The Hollywood press corps began touting Cruise as one of the "Brat Pack," a group of twenty-something young actors who seemed on the verge of taking over the movie industry in the early 1980s. But Cruise chose not to play the sort of teen-angst roles that the other Bratpackers specialized in--a wise decision, in that he has sustained his stardom while many of his contemporaries have fallen by the wayside or retreated into direct-to-video cheapies.

Top Gun (1985) established Cruise as an "action" star, but again he refused to be pigeonholed, and followed up Top Gun with a solid characterization of a fledgling pool shark in The Color of Money (1986), the film that earned co-star Paul Newman an Academy Award. In 1988, Cruise took on one of his most challenging assignments as the brother of autistic savant Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. "Old" Hollywood chose to give all the credit for that film's success to Hoffman, but a closer look at Rain Man reveals that Cruise is the true central character in the film, the one who "grows" in humanity and maturity while Hoffman's character, though brilliantly portrayed, remains the same. In 1989 Cruise was finally given an opportunity to carry a major dramatic film without an older established star in tow. As paraplegic Vietnam vet Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Cruise delivered perhaps his most outstanding performance. Cruise's bankability faltered a bit with the expensive disappointment Far and Away (1990) (though it did give him a chance to co-star with his wife Nicole Kidman), but with A Few Good Men (1992), Cruise was back in form. In 1994 Cruise appeared as the vampire Lestat in the long-delayed film adaptation of the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire. Although she was violently opposed to Cruise's casting, Rice reversed her decision upon seeing the actor's performance.

In 1996, Cruise scored financial success with the big-budget actioner Mission Impossible, but it was with his multilayered, Oscar-nominated performance in Jerry Maguire (also 1996) that Cruise proved once again why he is considered a major Hollywood player. 1999 saw Cruise reunited onscreen with Kidman in a project of a very different sort, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. The film, which was the director's last, had been the subject of controversy, rumor, and speculation since it began filming. It opened to curious critics and audiences alike across the nation, and was met with a violently mixed response. However, it allowed Cruise to once again take part in film history, further solidifying his position as one of Hollywood's most well-placed movers and shakers.