CELEBRITY INTERVIEW
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50 PLUS MAGAZINE
TOM CRUISE GLOBAL MEGASTAR IF there’s one thing that global megastar Tom Cruise is good at it’s winning new friends. And he certainly did that across the UK during 2021. Cruise, unbelievably now 59 but with enviable youthful looks and the energy of a 25 year-old, was here making the seventh film in the Mission: Impossible franchise. As a result, he popped up filming in various unlikely places including Birmingham, Yorkshire and Derbyshire and was spotted bringing his stardust to Wimbledon, Silverstone Grand Prix and Wembley Stadium for the Euro 2020 final. All of which proved a delight for his many UK fans and showed yet again that Cruise is one of the film world’s most popular – and accessible – actors. Acting certainly wasn’t the first choice for the young Thomas Cruise Mapother IV growing up in Syracuse, New York. At 14, he was a student in a Franciscan seminary with an ambition to join the priesthood. 10
He was the only son of four children of nomadic parents. As a result, the youngster spent his boyhood always on the move and by the age of 14 he had attended 15 different schools in the US and Canada. He finally settled in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, with his mother and her new husband and pretty soon abandoned plans to become a priest, dropped out of school and at 18 was headed for New York and a possible acting career. The catalyst, he later recalled was “when I saw Akira Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai. “After about 30 seconds, I realized that this was not just a cultural thing, it was universal. “Years later, I read Bushido. It talked about many things that I strive for in my own life:
loyalty, compassion, the idea of looking back on your life and taking responsibility for everything you’ve ever done. “I’m fascinated by the Samurai and the Samurai code – it’s one of the main reasons I wanted to make The Last Samurai (2003).” Tom Cruise, as he then became, made his film debut in Endless Love (1981) and, from early on, that star quality was plainly evident to both female and male audiences. Within five years, the young man with the billion dollar smile was starring in some of the most successful films of the 1980s including Top Gun, The Color of Money, Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July. Unsurprisingly, by the 1990s, he was one of the highest paid actors in the world, earning an average 15 million dollars a picture.
