TomCruiseHQ.com

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962) is an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning American actor and film producer who has starred in a number of top-grossing movies and remains one of the most successful movie stars in Hollywood. His first leading role in a blockbuster movie was in 1983's Risky Business. In the last couple of years, he has received additional media coverage regarding his support of Scientology (and his related criticism of psychiatry), and his relationship with Katie Holmes.

Cruise was born to Thomas Mapother III and Mary Lee Pfeiffer in Syracuse, New York. Cruise has German ancestry from his paternal great-grandparents, William Reibert and Charlotta Louise Voelker; and Welsh ancestry from his paternal great-great-grandfather, Dylan Henry Mapother, who emigrated from Flint, Wales to Louisville, Kentucky in 1850. His maternal ancestry is half Irish and half German (including Alsatian). Cruise had a transient existence as a child with his family residing in near-poverty throughout various locations in the United States and Canada because Cruise's father refused to pay child support after his entrangement from the family when his son was eleven. Cities where he lived included Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Louisville, Kentucky, Winnetka, Illinois and Wayne, New Jersey. In all, Cruise attended eight elementary schools and three high schools. He briefly attended a Franciscan seminary in Cincinnati and aspired to become a Catholic pr