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 had 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 wished 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 youngsters again to Louisville. She formally divorced Tom III in August 1975 and, six weeks later, he remarried, briefly. Joan Lebendiger, not too long ago widowed, had 4 youngsters, certainly 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 would get hit, and I did not perceive it,” Cruise recalled to Vanity Fair in 1994.
“He was the sort of man who actually bought picked on lots at college himself when he was rising up,” he stated 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 consider 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 individual the place, if one thing goes incorrect, they kick you. It was an awesome 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 stated he’d get higher and they’d “‘speak about the entire thing,'” the actor instructed VF, however that by no means got here to move.