Otherwise ageless movie star Tom Cruise is celebrating his 60th birthday and here’s a guide to the man behind the myth.
Tom Cruise, he of the ageless face, body and energy level, is celebrating a birthday July 3.
Contrary to what’s visible to the naked eye, the actor is turning 60.
He has the appropriate amount of work under what must be a utility belt to back that up, including his first-ever billion-dollar box office haul with Top Gun: Maverick. But it’s Cruise’s sheer zest for entertaining audiences that continues to awe and delight.
And his viral lecture in December 2020, when COVID-19 pandemic protocol wasn’t taken as seriously as he demanded on the set of Mission: Impossible 7, proved that the world’s biggest movie star isn’t afraid to throw his hard-earned Hollywood weight around, either.
“I said what I said,” he told Empire in an interview published in May 2021. “There was a lot at stake at that point.”
Alas, production was suspended anyway in June 2021 after a positive COVID test, but after all sorts of pandemic-induced delays, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One is finally slated for July 14, 2023, with Part Two to follow on June 28, 2024.
“I have an aggressive side, absolutely,” Cruise told Cameron Crowe 36 years ago for Interview magazine. “I need a creative outlet. Now I work out every day. I get up and work out 45 to 60 minutes. And that’s how I start my day. Discipline is very important to me.”
When Brad Pitt, who’s only 58, told GQ Australia a few years ago that he thinks making movies (or at least being in them) is “a younger man’s game,” you could practically hear Cruise’s inimitable laugh.
Warner Bros; Paramount Pictures; Getty Images; Melissa Herwitt/E! Illustration
So, with our need for speed recently fulfilled, in honor of his milestone birthday here are 60 things to know about Tom Cruise:
WENN
1. Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, N.Y., to Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer, and Mary Lee Pfeiffer, both of Louisville, Ky. (His grandfather and great-grandfather were both Thomas Cruise Mapother, as well.)
2. He has two older sisters, Lee Anne and Marian, and one younger sister, Catherine, nicknamed Cass.
3. Cruise wanted to act from around the time he was 4 and started doing impressions of everyone from Donald Duck to Humphrey Bogart and Elvis Presley.
4. In 1974, when the family was living in Ottawa, Mary Lee packed up and took the kids back to Louisville. She officially divorced Tom III in August 1975 and, six weeks later, he remarried, briefly. Joan Lebendiger, recently widowed, had four kids, one of whom later told biographer Andrew Morton that they never saw their stepbrother Tom again after the wedding.
“As a kid, I had a lot of hidden anger about that. I’d get hit, and I didn’t understand it,” Cruise recalled to Vanity Fair in 1994.
“He was the kind of guy who really got picked on a lot at school himself when he was growing up,” he said of his father. “He had also been small, though he ended up being six foot two. People had been quite brutal to him. Inside, I believe he was a really sensitive individual.” Tom III could also “actually be quite loving.”
But in 2006 he told Parade that his dad was “a bully and a coward—the 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!”
Cruise visited his father in the hospital before he died of cancer in 1984 and Tom III said he’d get better and they would “‘talk about the whole thing,'” the actor told VF, but that never came to pass.
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
5. Tom was very close to his mother, whom he described to James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio as “a very warm, charismatic woman, very kind, very generous.” She worked four jobs at any given time to take care of them, and Tom had a paper route to pitch in. “Every night I’d come home, bathe my feet and sit in the family room, and Tom would massage my feet for a half-hour,” Mary Lee recalled to Rolling Stone. (She died at 80 in 2017.)
6. He was also protective of his sisters and, as the man of the house, took on the role of scrutinizing their boyfriends when they’d come by to meet the family.
7. Cruise was raised Catholic and he spent his freshman year of high school at St. Francis Seminary in Cincinnati, after a priest named Father Ric Schneider gave a talk at his (also Catholic) school in Louisville. “He was a typical teenager, trying to find his way in life,” Schneider told the New York Daily News in 2013. “We would give them an IQ test, and he just about made the cut. The cutoff is 110, and he scored exactly 110.”
It’s been rumored that Cruise considered entering the priesthood, but he doesn’t it remember it that way. “We didn’t have the money back then, and I went for the education for a year, and it was free,” Cruise has explained.
8. Mary Lee got remarried to Jack South in 1978 and the whole family moved to New Jersey when Tom was 16.
“In the beginning, I felt threatened by my stepfather,” Cruise told Rolling Stone. “There’s a part of you that’s in love with your mother. But he is such a wise, smart man. He loved my mother so much that he took us all in, four young people. We’d bet on football games, and he was a terrible bettor, so I’d make lots of money.”
As for his dad, Tom III, who had recently passed away, “I think that he felt remorse for a lot that had happened. He was a person who did not have a huge influence on me in my teens; the values and motivation really came from my stepfather. But he was important. Really important. It’s all sort of complex. There wasn’t one thing I felt.”
MEGA
9. He was always a daredevil, jumping off things, riding his bike too fast, sometimes into walls and, here and there, breaking bones. In high school he joined the glee club and did plays. He was also an athlete, over the years dabbling in soccer, baseball, basketball, football and ice hockey, and he wrestled. Sports and acting were where he really stood out and, shocker, the ladies have loved him since grammar school.
“I was a wild kid,” Cruise admitted. “I’d cut school. Everything had to do with my wanting always to push the envelope to see: where do I stand with myself? How far can I go?”
10. Cruise has been open about his battle with dyslexia, calling himself “a functional illiterate” in school, though he “loved learning. I wanted to learn, but I knew I had failed in the system.”
“My energy was always all over the place. Reading was not at the top of my list, because it took me so long,” he told Cameron Crowe for Interview in 1986. “When I wrote a paper, my mother would help me with it. I would take a test and get very nervous. I would skip questions and skip lines. I’ve gotten better. I’ve learned to control my eyes. I used to have to use my finger all the time. I just wasn’t relaxed about it.”
11. Senior year of high school he got kicked off the football team after he was caught drinking, according to Morton, but that left him time to audition for the school musical, Guys and Dolls. He played Nathan Detroit, and a commercial director who happened to catch a performance told him he should pursue acting professionally. So, he started going to New York on weekends to audition for musicals—and he missed his graduation ceremony while performing in an amateur production of Godspell.
20th Century Fox
12. Cruise made his movie debut in the 1981 drama Taps, in a role that was bigger than the one he was originally cast in “because you could see right away that he had a giant talent,” former Paramount head Sherry Lansing said in Stephen Galloway‘s 2017 biography Leading Lady. “He was always extremely focused and exceptionally polite.”
13. On the set of Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Outsiders, featuring a veritable who’s-who of ’80s-era heartthrobs, prankster Cruise scrawled “Helter Skelter” on co-star Diane Lane‘s mirror and put honey on her toilet seat.
Geffen Pictures
14. The only direction Cruise received for his iconic Risky Business dance to “Old Time Rock and Roll” was one line in the script: “Joel dances in underwear through the house.” He ad-libbed the rest, grabbing the candlestick, “using it as a guitar, jumping on the table. I waxed half the floor and kept the other half dirty, so I could slide in on my socks. As we went along, I threw more stuff in,” he shared with Crowe in 1986.
15. Cruise dated his Risky Business co-star Rebecca De Mornay, who called him a “pure person.” She told Rolling Stone in 1986, “There’s something earnest and virtuous about him that’s quite rare.” According to Taps co-star Sean Penn, they were out at a club in New York one night and after realizing that a girl he was talking to was trying to pick him up, Cruise “screamed at her, ‘I have a girlfriend I’m in love with!'” (Perhaps at the time readers thought Penn might be exaggerating.) He and De Mornay started dating in the summer of 1983 and maintained a long-distance relationship while he shot Ridley Scott‘s Legend in London, but broke up when he returned to the U.S. to start making Top Gun.
