Tom Cruise wasn’t quite born on the Fourth of July, but he is celebrating his birthday the only way he knows how—by releasing another action epic that he risked life and limb to make.

So, Tom Cruise is 61 now—and he continues to be doing something right.

The reassuringly youthful actor is, once again, celebrating his birthday while on a press tour for a long-awaited action epic that entailed performing his own death-defying stunts and leaving his co-stars marveling over his work ethic, graciousness and charm, his set-commanding skills still second to none.

“There is no one else like him,” Simon Pegg told E! News while talking up their latest outing, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, in theaters July 12. “He is the last movie star—of the old kind, you know.”

No offense to the Chalamets of the world, but…we know.

Making it no secret that he does it all for you—for us, the audience!—Cruise approached the release of Top Gun: Maverick last year as if the fate of movies themselves was hanging in the balance. Which, coming out of the pandemic, it kinda was.

And right on schedule (minus the years lost to COVID-related delays) Cruise is back at it with the first half of Dead Reckoning, the seventh of what will be at least eight movies in the Mission: Impossible franchise, which kicked off in 1996 back when the star being lowered into a room on a wire was considered a mind-blowing action sequence.

Now, he calls riding a motorcycle off a cliff (at the beginning of the shoot, just in case, um… the end result necessitated a rewrite) his “happy place.”

“It’s full-on,” he told E! News’ Keltie Knight at the Rome premiere of Dead Reckoning Part One. “My life’s an adventure, I’ve always wanted that since I was a little kid.” And, though he looks extremely-rested, he quipped that he tries not to sleep.

Because that would be a break in the action, now wouldn’t it? 

Read on for more tirelessly fascinating facts about birthday boy 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.

Paramount Pictures

16. Top Gun producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson envisioned no one other than Cruise playing Maverick after they saw a magazine story about the elite flying school at San Diego’s Miramar Naval Air Station and went down to see the hot shots in person. “From the first time we went down to Miramar—even before the script was written—we said, ‘These guys are Tom Cruises,'” Bruckheimer told Rolling Stone.

17. Although Cruise also told Rolling Stone in 1986 that he wasn’t sure he would be able to get married in his “present state of mind,” he tied the knot with Mimi Rogers on May 9, 1987, two years after meeting her at a dinner party. Emilio Estevez was Cruise’s best man.

18. Paul Newman, his co-star in 1987’s The Color of Money, turned him on to race car driving and Cruise has been feeling the need for speed on land and in the air (and sometimes on the water) ever since. Years later the student became the teacher when, in 2010, Cruise taught Zac Efron about motorcycles. “I don’t know,” Efron told Details when asked why Cruise offered to do that. “I don’t even want to know. It’s just so cool that he gave a s–t, the fact that he cared at all.”

Jim Smeal/WireImage

19. Mimi and her first husband, Jim Rogers, were both members of the Church of Scientology (Jim was a high-level auditor) and she’s said to have introduced Cruise to the organization, giving him L. Ron Hubbard‘s Dianetics and other literature. His immersion in Scientology coincided with the release of Top Gun and the actor becoming one of the biggest stars in the world, and to this day Cruise remains the most famous member of the church.

20. Despite being critically panned, 1988’s Cocktail, starring Cruise as a playboy bartender, gave Disney its biggest opening weekend ever at the time: $11.8 million.

21. According to Morton’s 2008 biography Tom Cruise, director Oliver Stone wanted Tom to be injected with a chemical that would have rendered him temporarily paralyzed so he could better identify with the role of real-life Vietnam War veteran and activist Ron Kovic in 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July. The insurance company understandably shut that idea down. The film still won two Oscars, best editing and best director for Stone, so it worked out.

22. People named Cruise its “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1990. Soon after, he and Rogers divorced. When Vanity Fair asked about his first marriage in 1994, Cruise replied tersely, “It was a long time ago. I really don’t think about it.”

23. Cruise met Nicole Kidman during casting for the racing drama Days of Thunder and they tied the knot on Dec. 24, 1990. They adopted two children, Isabella and Connor, and starred in two more movies together, Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut.

After Isabella arrived, Cruise told Vanity Fair in 1994, “We talked about children from time to time, but there was always the work. But then we went, When is it ever going to be the right time? That’s how the conversation started. You’re lying in bed at night and you’re trying to sleep, so you roll over and you go, What would happen if we had this in our life?

“One of the things that Nic and I talk about is that now suddenly we’re a family. We’re at that point where we’re trying to define where we are. Can we still party? Are we really boring? Oh, my God . . . we’re old!”

24. Disney had Cruise in mind when they created the look of the title character in 1992’s Aladdin. “There’s a confidence with all of his attitudes and his poses,” lead animator Glen Keane said in a DVD extras feature.

Matt Turner/Liaison

25. An old tabloid go-to back in the 1980s and ’90s was to claim that this or that star was gay, and Cruise was aware that the rumor was out there.

“First of all, I don’t think it’s an indictment,” Cruise told Vanity Fair in 1994. “But I hadn’t heard those rumors till about three months ago myself… I don’t know why they say it. I’ve heard everything from I’ve cheated on my wife to my wife was there on the set of The Firm because she was pissed off about my love scene on the beach. It’s not true, but people are going to say what they want to say.”

26. Cruise wanted Brian De Palma to direct Mission: Impossible, which would mark his debut as a producer with his agent turned partner Paula Wagner, even though De Palma was in movie jail following several flops. Cruise even deferred his $20 million salary (not including his back-end deal) so they could raise the movie’s budget. Mission accomplished: M:I made almost $500 million worldwide and spawned a franchise. De Palma, however, didn’t attend the film’s premiere in May 1996, reportedly because he and Cruise didn’t always see eye to eye during production.

Paramount Pictures

27. Shooting M:I, Cruise insisted they use a fan big enough to create the 120 mile-per-hour wind he’d be facing if he was really clinging to a bullet train while a helicopter exploded behind him. A crew member told Galloway, “He said, ‘I want the wind blowing in my face and I want my jaws to be blowing.’ That’s Tom. He’s a guy’s guy.”

28. The intense Eyes Wide Shut shoot was scheduled to last four months but ended up keeping Tom and Nicole in London for 18 months. Also during their time in England, as fate would have it, they attended Princess Diana‘s funeral in September 1997, as did with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, who were in town making Saving Private Ryan.

29. “All I can say is that I hope we are together when we are 80,” Nicole Kidman told Talk in 2000. “I can’t say we will be, but I will be so devastated if we are not.” Alas, they announced their separation on Feb. 5, 2001. “She knows why, and I know why,” Cruise cryptically told Vanity Fair later that year. “She’s the mother of my children, and I wish her well. And I think that you just move on. And I don’t say that lightly. I don’t say that with anything.”

Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com

30. Penélope Cruz successfully sued an Australian tabloid in June 2003, winning damages and a retraction over a story claiming she and then-boyfriend Cruise had postponed their impending marriage because she had cheated on him. They broke up in January 2004 after more than two years of dating, a source telling People the relationship “just ran its course.”