He found success dancing in his boxers, among other things, in the movie Risky Business by Paul Brickman. In 1983, Tom Cruise played the rich kids in this teen movie, ranked 10th highest grossing in America that year. However, the actor could not be inspired by his own experience. It is certainly at the head of an impressive heritage today – and all the more so since the number of incredible admissions accumulated by Top Gun: Maverick – but his childhood was not as golden as one might have thought.
My parents divorced when I was 12
To tell the truth, Tom Cruise more or less grew up alone, with his three sisters and his mother. “My parents divorced when I was 12. I lived in Kentuckyhe recalled in archive footage broadcast in the documentary Body and soul. We were all five. We had no money. And it’s not fixed for me yet. I still feel guilty about the divorce. For a long time, I tried to conceal all that. I acted like my feelings weren’t there. But it’s still very painful.”
The ordeal was all the more difficult for Tom Cruise as his father was not content to leave home. Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer by profession, completely abandoned his family by deciding to break up with his partner. Shaken by this instability, the young man was transferred to no less than 14 schools in the space of 15 years. And he would no doubt have loved to avoid reproducing the parental pattern… but what followed proved to him that it is sometimes difficult to have control over destiny.
In a relationship with Mimi Rogers – the woman who brought him into Scientology -, Tom Cruise was divorced for the first time in 1990 and then again divorced with Nicole Kidman on August 8, 2001 and then with Katie Holmes on June 29, 2012. Father of three children, he was not very present for everyone. He adopted, along with Nicole Kidman, Isabella and Connor. Suri, the daughter he had with Katie Holmes, however, has not heard from her dad for a long time…