Tom Cruise

Profession: Actor
Place/Date of Birth: New York, USA, 03 July 2020
Associated with: Katie Holmes, Nicole Kidman

Stauffenberg’s son Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg has been quoted as saying by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung that "he should keep his fingers off my father", and adding that he feared the movie would be "terrible kitsch".

Stauffenberg and the other plotters of the July 20, 2020 assassination attempt were caught and executed after Hitler survived the explosion at his headquarters in what was then East Prussia. Valkyrie is scheduled for release in 2008.

TomKat to co-star? - July 6 2007
Tom Cruise is apparently keen to make Katie Holmes his leading lady and is lining up some plum film projects for her.

The Mission: Impossible star, who turned 45 this week, has apparently vowed to help get his wife’s career back on track by offering to produce her movies, reports the Daily Express.

"She’s not interested by many of the roles she is being offered so Tom has stepped in with some ideas of his own," a source close to the couple told the paper. "He has one project he wants both of them to star in and another he will produce with Katie in the lead."

It seems Mrs Cruise’s acting ambitions have taken a back seat since her whirlwind romance to Tom began in 2005, followed by the birth of baby Suri last year.

"Katie is a little disillusioned with acting at the moment, especially as she’s taken to being a mother so wholeheartedly," added the source.

Tom is no stranger to starring alongside an off-screen love interest. He appeared in three films with previous wife Nicole Kidman.

Anger over Cruise starring role as Hitler foe - June 27 2007
Two sensitive issues in Germany - the Nazi era and Scientology - have come together in a controversy over the production of a film in which Tom Cruise plays the country’s most famous anti-Hitler plotter.

Tom, one of Scientology’s best-known adherents, is to play Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic army officer executed after a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944, in director Bryan Singer’s new film Valkyrie.

The film’s German co-producers say they have initial permission to use the former German general staff headquarters in Berlin, where Stauffenberg worked and where he was executed by firing squad in the courtyard - and plan an historically accurate treatment.

But word that a Scientologist would play Stauffenberg has rubbed some in Germany the wrong way.

Germany’s government considers Scientology a commercial enterprise that takes advantage of vulnerable people, and critics maintain that one of its adherents should not be playing one of the Nazi-era’s few heroes.

Stauffenberg "is to be played by an actor whose sect, through dubious methods, attempts to lure people and make them pliable", Social Democratic MP Klaus Uwe Benneter said on his website.

"This is a slap in the face to all upstanding democrats, all resistance fighters during the Third Reich, and all victims of the Scientology sect."

Sabine Weber, a spokeswoman for Scientology in Berlin, said she was "shocked" that politicians would speak out against Cruise starring in the movie, saying it was a "call to discrimination" against someone because of his religious beliefs, which violates German and European human rights codes.

Film producers maintain the criticism is misguided and accuse politicians of making hay from a non-issue.

"Basically some politicians are using the popularity of Tom Cruise to become popular themselves," Babelsberg studio chief Carl Woebcken said. Babelsberg is set to co-produce the film in Germany.

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Biography

New Yorker Thomas Cruise Mapother IV (born July 3 1962) may have reached the heights of the heart throb-o-meter in the eighties but since his split with Nicole Kidman has ruined many a young woman’s fantasy with increasingly bizarre behaviour. So where did it all go wrong for the sofa leaping strange one?

Born in Syracuse Tom grew up in relative poverty following his father’s departure from the family, the actor has since claimed that he suffered abuse before the split. While Thomas III refused to pay child support, Tom’s mother Mary Lee Pfieffer moved her son from city to city, eventually settling in New Jersey where Tom, who once aspired to become a Catholic priest, then a Wrestler, took up acting. His first role was as lead in a High School production of Guys and Dolls.

1981 saw Tom take his first acting role, alongside Brooke Shields in Endless Love. He followed this up with increasingly important roles before in 1983 appearing in Risky Business, the underpanted lip syncing scene of which brought him to the attention of movie goers worldwide as well as to Director Jerry Bruckheimer who asked Tom to star in his next project. Rumour has it that the actor turned down the role of fighter pilot Maverick in Top Gun but in 1986 there he was on our screens, ready to become a cinematic icon.

As the 80s rolled on The Colour of Money, Cocktail and Rain Man ensured Tom’s place at the top of the Hollywood A list, taking him in to the nineties able to demand huge pay cheques for his work and earning him Academy Award nominations (for Born on the Fourth of July). In 1990 he met Australian actress Nicole Kidman on the set of Days of Thunder who he would soon work with again on the less successful Far and Away. Fresh from his divorce from Mimi Rogers, whom he had married just three years earlier, Tom whisked Nicole up the aisle before embarking on a roll call of more ’serious’ film work from The Firm to A Few Good Men and Interview With The Vampire.

1996 proved a successful year for Tom. He began a long relationship with the Mission:Impossible franchise and earned himself another Oscar nomination for the unforgettable Bruckheimer release Jerry Maguire. But this time seemed to mark a turning point for America’s most personable lead man. In 1999 he and Nicole took on the bizarre and controversial Kubrick movie Eyes Wide Shut which he closely followed with the Oscar nominated Magnolia which saw a further move away from his usual ’arrogant nice guy’ roles.

In 2001 the Cruise/Kidman van screeched to an unexpected halt. The couple, who had two adopted children - Isabella and Connor - were divorced just before their tenth wedding anniversary. Nicole, three months pregnant, later miscarried. Tom was soon in love again, this time with Vanilla Sky co-star Penelope Cruz with whom he was linked until 2004. He continued to create box office successes, from a second Mission Impossible movie to Collateral and Minority Report.

Following his split from Penelope Tom became ever more vocal about his beliefs as a Scientologist. The controversial religion was expected to affect his 2005 outing, War of the Worlds, however whilst the film still managed to net millions, Tom’s religious ramblings coupled with his unexpected relationship with Dawson’s Creek and Batman Begins actress Katie Holmes, sixteen years his junior, saw his own popularity wane.

Tom’s pro-Scientology and anti-psychiatry comments, a very public battle with Brooke Shields and some truly over the top, overacted protestations of love signalled the end of Tom’s relationship with Paramount pictures with whom he had worked as a Producer. Paramount weren’t the only ones to go off the actor either. The newspapers and magazines who not so long ago loved him and his movies turned against him, branding him a laughing stock and turning up the volume on the gay rumours which have plagued Cruise for so many years.

Tom and Katie carried out their fast forward relationship under the glare of the press - first bringing baby daughter Suri in to the world in April 2006 just a year after they first met, then marrying in November of the same year.
upated December 2006
February 2008