- Thomas Cruise Mapother IV
- Syracuse, New York, USA
- July 3, 1962
Tom Cruise is an American actor and filmmaker. He started his career at age 19 in the 1981 film Endless Love. After portraying supporting roles in Taps (1981) and The Outsiders (1983), his first leading role was in the romantic comedy Risky Business, released in August 1983. Cruise became a full-fledged movie star after starring as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in the action drama Top Gun (1986). He has since 1996 been well known for his role as secret agent Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible film series, which has a fifth film set for release in 2015. Cruise starred in several more successful films in the 1980s, including the dramas The Color of Money (1986), Cocktail (1988), Rain Man (1988), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). In the 1990s, he starred in a number of hit films, including the romance Far and Away (1992), the drama A Few Good Men (1992), the legal thriller The Firm (1993), the romantic horror film Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), the romantic comedy-drama sports film Jerry Maguire (1996), the erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and the drama Magnolia (both 1999). In the 2000s, Cruise starred in a number of successful films, including the science fiction thrillers Vanilla Sky (2001) and Minority Report (2002), the epic war film The Last Samurai (2003), the crime film Collateral (2004), in which he portrays a hitman, the science fiction disaster thriller film War of the Worlds (2005), the war drama Lions for Lambs (2007), the historical thriller Valkyrie (2008), the action comedy Knight and Day (2010), the thriller Jack Reacher (2012), the post-apocalyptic science fiction film Oblivion (2013), and the military science fiction film Edge of Tomorrow (2014).