Tom Cruise

Biography: An American film actor and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and he has won three Golden Globe Awards.

Cruise first debuted in a major film in Francis Ford Coppola?s The Outsiders, released in March 1983. His first leading role was in the film Risky Business, which was released in August 1983. After playing the role of a heroic naval pilot in the popular and financially successful 1986 film Top Gun, Cruise continued in this vein, playing a secret agent in a series of Mission: Impossible action films in the 1990s and 2000s. In addition to these heroic roles, he has starred in a variety of other successful films such as Rain Man (1988), Days of Thunder (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), Jerry Maguire (1996), Magnolia (1999), Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003), Collateral (2004) and War of the Worlds (2005).

Since 2005, Cruise and Paula Wagner have been in charge of the United Artists film studio, with Cruise as producer and star and Wagner as the chief executive. Cruise is also known for his support of and adherence to the Church of Scientology.

He became involved with Scientology in 1990 through his first wife, Mimi Rogers. He has said that Scientology, specifically the L. Ron Hubbard Study Tech, helped him overcome dyslexia. In addition to promoting various programs that introduce people to Scientology, Cruise has campaigned for Scientology to be recognized as a religion in Europe. He lobbied politicians in France and Germany, where the legal systems regard Scientology as a cult and business, respectively.

Cruise married actress Mimi Rogers on May 9, 1987; they divorced in 1990. Rogers is generally believed to have introduced Cruise to Scientology. He met his second wife, Nicole Kidman, on the set of their film Days of Thunder. The couple married in 1990. He and Kidman adopted two children. They separated in February 2001 when Kidman was three months pregnant; she later miscarried.

Cruise was next romantically linked with Penélope Cruz, his co-star in Vanilla Sky. That relationship ended in 2004. In April 2005, Cruise began dating actress Katie Holmes. On April 27 that year, Cruise and Holmes, dubbed "TomKat" by the media, made their first public appearance together in Rome. A month later, Cruise declared his love for Holmes on The Oprah Winfrey Show famously jumping up and down on Winfrey?s couch during the show. In October 2005, Cruise and Holmes announced they were expecting a child, and their daughter, Suri, was born in April 2006. On November 18, 2006, Holmes and Cruise were married at the 15th-century Odescalchi Castle in Bracciano, Italy, in a Scientology ceremony attended by many Hollywood stars