1. Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, N.Y., to Thomas Cruise Mapother III, {an electrical} engineer, and Mary Lee Pfeiffer, each of Louisville, Ky. (His grandfather and great-grandfather have been each Thomas Cruise Mapother, as properly.)
2. He has two older sisters, Lee Anne and Marian, and one youthful sister, Catherine, nicknamed Cass.
3. Cruise needed to behave from across the time he was 4 and began doing impressions of everybody from Donald Duck to Humphrey Bogart and Elvis Presley.
4. In 1974, when the household was residing in Ottawa, Mary Lee packed up and took the children again to Louisville. She formally divorced Tom III in August 1975 and, six weeks later, he remarried, briefly. Joan Lebendiger, just lately widowed, had 4 youngsters, considered one of whom later instructed biographer Andrew Morton that they by no means noticed their stepbrother Tom once more after the marriage.
“As a child, I had a number of hidden anger about that. I might get hit, and I did not perceive it,” Cruise recalled to Vainness Truthful in 1994.
“He was the form of man who actually obtained picked on rather a lot in school himself when he was rising up,” he mentioned of his father. “He had additionally been small, although he ended up being six foot two. Individuals had been fairly brutal to him. Inside, I imagine he was a very delicate particular person.” Tom III may additionally “truly be fairly loving.”
However in 2006 he instructed Parade that his dad was “a bully and a coward—the particular person the place, if one thing goes mistaken, they kick you. It was an excellent lesson in my life, how he’d lull you in, make you are feeling secure after which, bang!”
Cruise visited his father within the hospital earlier than he died of most cancers in 1984 and Tom III mentioned he’d get higher and they’d “‘discuss the entire thing,'” the actor instructed VF, however that by no means got here to go.