Tom Cruise, the man who many people call one of the last movie stars left in Hollywood, has earned that reputation by starring in one classic film after another, as well as starring in some of the most entertaining films in history. Say what you will about the man’s personal life (something I could write a whole other blog about) but no one loves movies more, and no one is more dedicated to providing the best possible entertainment to audiences than this guy.

Tom Cruise was born in Syracuse, New York in 1962. Raised Catholic and frequently moving from school to school, he first became involved in drama in the fourth grade, receiving a positive reception not only for his acting skills but for his ability to improvise. After starring in his high school’s production of Guys and Dolls, Cruise moved to New York City to pursue an acting career as soon as he turned 18. But his career didn’t take off until later when he moved to Los Angeles. He originally pursued a career in television but he lucked out and got a bit part in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1981 romantic drama Endless Love.

Cruise’s first major supporting role was as military academy student Captain David Shawn in Taps (1981), based on Devery Freeman’s 1979 novel Father Sky about a group of military school students who try to save their school from closing. The film starred George C. Scott and Timothy Hutton and featured Sean Penn in his film debut. After that Cruise worked with director Francis Ford Coppola in the crime drama The Outsiders (1983) alongside other young stars like Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe (in his feature film debut). But it was Cruise’s role as Joel Goodson in Paul Brickman’s sex comedy Risky Business (1983) that turned him into a breakout star.

Although if Risky Business made Tom Cruise a star, Tony Scott’s 1986 naval action drama Top Gun made him a super star. Despite a story that left many film critics unimpressed, audiences in the eighties really dug it, as well as Tom Cruise’s cocky pilot character Maverick (“I feel the need…the need for speed!”) and it ended up being the highest-grossing film in America that year.

That decade Cruise also starred in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986) as young pool hustler Vincent Lauria opposite Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie, a role Newman originally played in the 1961 film The Hustler, making this film an early example of a legacy sequel. Cruise again achieved box office success with the negatively reviewed but commercially popular Cocktail (1988), but he pulled a one-eighty that same year in a film that won the Oscar for Best Picture called Rain Man (1988), in which Cruise starred opposite Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant Raymond. Proving Cruise had more sophisticated taste in film than critics may have thought.

Not only that but Cruise would earn his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor the following year in Oliver Stone’s biopic Born on the Fourth of July (1989) in which Cruise received praise for playing real-life paralyzed Vietnam war vet Ron Kovic.

Cruise reunited with Top Gun director Tony Scott as well as Top Gun producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer playing Cole Trickle in the NASCAR-themed sports action drama Days of Thunder (1990), which he co-wrote the story for. Plus he starred opposite Nicole Kidman in Ron Howard’s Western drama Far and Away (1992), and starred as Lt. Daniel Kaffee in Rob Reiner’s legal drama A Few Good Men (1992), an early hit for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin that also starred Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore and Kevin Bacon.

Next Cruise stretched his muscles with Sydney Pollack’s legal thriller The Firm (1993) and the gothic horror film Interview with the Vampire (1994), playing Lestat de Lioncourt opposite that other Hollywood heartthrob Brad Pitt, but Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996), based on the 1966 espionage television series of the same name, really changed the course of Cruise’s career. Not only would this be Cruise’s first time as a producer, but his role as the agent Ethan Hunt would be a part he would go back to in a number of highly successful sequels that almost get bigger and better the more of them they make, including Mission: Impossible II (2000, John Woo), Mission: Impossible III (2006, J.J. Abrams), Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011, Brad Bird), Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015, Christopher McQuarrie), Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018, Christopher McQuarrie) and McQuarrie’s two-part finale Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) and Part Two (aiming for a release date in 2024). The hugely popular and death-defyingly action-packed series of films has featured such actors as Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Michelle Monaghan, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Alec Baldwin and Vanessa Kirby among its cast, and Cruise has earned a reputation as a daredevil for his insistence on doing his own stunts, which makes these films even more jaw-dropping.

Cruise once again received an Oscar nomination for the title role of sports agent Jerry Maguire in Cameron Crowe’s 1996 film co-starring Renee Zellweger and Cuba Gooding Jr., worked with director Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his memorable performance as the seething Frank T.J. Mackey in Paul Thomas Anderson’s psychological drama Magnolia (1999), reunited with Cameron Crowe for the sci-fi thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), did some Steven Spielberg sci-fi in the Philip K. Dick-based Minority Report (2002) and played American soldier-turned-samurai Captain Nathan Algren in the epic period drama The Last Samurai (2003).

Cruise played the villainous Vincent in Michael Mann’s neo-noir thriller Collateral (2004), he returned to the world of sci-fi with Spielberg in War of the Worlds (2005), became unrecognizable as Les Grossman in Ben Stiller’s satire Tropic Thunder (2008), worked under director Christopher McQuarrie for the first time in the action thriller Jack Reacher (2012) and starred opposite Emily Blunt in Doug Liman’s sci-fi film Edge of Tomorrow (2014), based on the Japanese light novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka.

Cruise reunited with Doug Liman for the action comedy American Made (2017) playing a pilot who gets involved with the CIA, and he reunited with his Top Gun castmates in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), directed by Joseph Kosinski who Cruise previously worked with on the 2013 sci-fi film Oblivion. Top Gun: Maverick became the highest-grossing film of Tom Cruise’s career with many people saying it has surpassed the quality of the original. The Academy agreed because they nominated it for Best Picture.

Like the Mission: Impossible films, Top Gun: Maverick earned marks for the authenticity of its action scenes, which in this case involved a lot of flying jets. Ever pushing the envelope like the daredevil he is, Cruise has reportedly signed on to work with Doug Liman to shoot a movie in outer space. How that will work, I have no idea. But you have to appreciate the ambition and the showmanship of Tom Cruise. It is almost as if he treats every movie he makes like it could be his last, and so he always feels the need to top himself every time. It’s amazing that he’s in his fifties because he doesn’t act like it. Some people say the man must be crazy. My opinion? At least he’s doing something worthwhile with his passion. He was clearly made for Hollywood.