Once Hollywood's "sure thing" at the box office, Tom Cruise is working through the most difficult rough spot in his career. While he might still be the most recognizable celebrity in the world, he's not the most loved. Like John Travolta, he's a movie star whose fame has been accompanied by many rumors and stories about his personal life, with much of the fuss related to his association with Scientology. For years, this didn't affect his popularity, but Tom Cruise's recent career stumbles -- starting with crazy TomKat couch jumping and evolving since then -- have often left the rest of us wondering if Tom's dude qualities of old have been unfortunately replaced with douche horns instead.
With this summer's Knight and Day and the upcoming Mission: Impossible IV, is there still time for Hollywood's once-unstoppable movie star to make a comeback… and do we want him to?
Tom Cruise -- in his best work -- perfectly fits the mold of what it means to be a movie star. A three-time Oscar nominee, he has "it" -- the looks, the style and the attitude to get and keep the attention of anyone watching. Logic dictates that when this translates into a string of successful movies, it can equal money and power. From Top Gun to the Mission: Impossible series, Tom Cruise has earned a great deal of both as an actor and producer and he's the only celebrity to ever twice top the Forbes Celebrity 100 Power List. As we all know, with great power comes great responsibility, and the ways that Cruise has used his power to further his own causes haven't made him a pop culture hero. Instead, they've backfired, leaving his popularity hurting, and making it hard to people to differentiate between the Tom Cruise they see in movies and the Tom Cruise in unpleasant interviews or leaked Scientology videos.
When we do judge Tom Cruise solely on his body of work, he has taken many risks as an actor that are worthy of respect. He's put his movie brand on the line by playing characters on either side of the moral fence, willing to go from hero (Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible) to villain (Vincent in Collateral) to comedic jerk (Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder) without hesitation. Besides doing most of his own stunts, he's also gone out of his way to work with actors and directors whom he admires -- the biggest example being the one and a half years he gave up to film Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut in London. Whether they like him or not, no one can accuse Tom Cruise of not putting a complete effort into any film project that he's involved in.
In true rags-to-riches fashion, Tom Cruise's stunning climb to the top of the Hollywood food chain began in the most humbling of circumstances. Moving often and facing a double whammy of dyslexia and a difficult relationship with his strict father, Tom Cruise (then known as Thomas Cruise Mapother) came to find outlets for his struggles in athletics and drama. During a stint at Henry Munro Middle School in Ottawa, Ontario, he became a seasoned floor hockey player and performed in stage plays like IT, which was picked up for filming by a local TV network. In the wake of his parents' separation, Cruise returned to the U.S. where he was enrolled in three high schools -- and briefly considered a future as a Catholic priest -- before finding a second home in the drama department of a New Jersey high school and realizing that acting was his calling.
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