Before Top Gun, Tom Cruise nearly trained to become a Franciscan priest
Tom Cruise went to fifteen schools in fourteen years, spent a year at a Cincinnati seminary hoping to become a Franciscan, and was cut from his high school football team for drinking beer. Within six years of graduating he was a superstar, and his films have since earned more than 13.3 billion dollars.
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born in Syracuse, New York, on July 3, 1962, the son of an electrical engineer and a special education teacher from Louisville, Kentucky. The family moved constantly. In late 1971 his father took a defence consulting job with the Canadian Armed Forces, and the family settled in Ottawa, where a fourth-grade drama teacher gave Cruise his first taste of acting through an improvised ensemble piece. His parents split when he was in sixth grade, and his mother took the children back to the United States.
A Catholic church scholarship took him to St. Francis Seminary in Cincinnati. Accounts of why he left after a year differ: priests said his family moved again, while a classmate claimed the two boys were asked to go after being caught with liquor. He graduated from Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey in 1980, starring in Guys and Dolls, and at 18 headed to New York, bussing tables before trying Los Angeles.
Film came fast. A bit part in Endless Love in 1981 led to Taps, where director Harold Becker expanded what was meant to be a background role. Francis Ford Coppola cast him in The Outsiders, and Risky Business followed in 1983. Top Gun in 1986 sealed his stardom, and the same year he held his own opposite Paul Newman in Scorsese's The Color of Money. Playing the paralysed veteran Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July in 1989 brought a Golden Globe and his first Best Actor Oscar nomination.
In 1996 he produced and starred in Mission: Impossible as Ethan Hunt, a role he kept until 2025, often doing his own dangerous stunts. Anne Rice, who had objected to his casting in Interview with the Vampire, later paid for a two-page trade advertisement apologising. Guinness credits him with eleven consecutive films grossing 100 million dollars or more between 2012 and 2025. He has held a pilot certificate since 1994, and his public advocacy for Scientology has drawn controversy.
Source: Tom Cruise
