Thomas Cruise (born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV; July 3, 1962) is an American actor and film producer. He has received several accolades for his work, including three Golden Globe Awards and nominations for three Academy Awards. Cruise is one of the best-paid actors in the world, and his films have grossed over $4 billion in North America and over $10.1 billion worldwide, making him one of the highest-grossing box-office stars of all time.

Cruise began acting in the early 1980s and made his breakthrough with leading roles in the comedy Risky Business (1983) and the action drama Top Gun (1986). Critical acclaim came with his roles in the dramas The Color of Money (1986), Rain Man (1988), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). For portraying Ron Kovic in the latter, he won a Golden Globe Award and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. As a leading Hollywood star in the 1990s, Cruise starred in several commercially successful films, including the drama A Few Good Men (1992), the thriller The Firm (1993), the horror film Interview with the Vampire (1994), and the romance Jerry Maguire (1996), for which he won another Golden Globe and received his second Oscar nomination. His performance as a motivational speaker in the 1999 drama Magnolia earned him a third Golden Globe and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. As an action star, Cruise has played Ethan Hunt in six films of the Mission: Impossible film series from 1996 to 2018. He also continued to feature in several science fiction and action films, including Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003), Collateral (2004), War of the Worlds (2005), Knight and Day (2010), Jack Reacher (2012), Oblivion (2013), and Edge of Tomorrow (2014).

Cruise was born in Syracuse, New York, the son of Mary Lee (née Pfeiffer) (1936–2017), a special education teacher, and Thomas Cruise Mapother III (1934–1984), an electrical engineer, both originally from Louisville, Kentucky. He has three sisters: Lee Anne, Marian, and Cass. They are of English, German, and Irish ancestry. One of Cruise's ancestors, Patrick Russell Cruise, was born in north County Dublin in 1799; he married Teresa Johnson in County Meath, in 1825. They left Ireland for the United States that same year and settled in New York. They had a daughter, Mary Paulina Russell Cruise, whose son Thomas Cruise Mapother was Cruise's great-grandfather. A cousin, William Mapother, is also an actor; he and Cruise have appeared in five films together.

Cruise grew up in near poverty and had a Catholic upbringing. Cruise described his father as "a merchant of chaos", a "bully", and a "coward" who inflicted beatings upon him. Regarding his father, Cruise once said, "He was the kind of person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you. It was a great lesson in my life—how he'd lull you in, make you feel safe and then, bang! For me, it was like, 'There's something wrong with this guy. Don't trust him. Be careful around him.'"

Cruise spent part of his childhood in Canada. His family moved to Beacon Hill, Ottawa in late 1971 so that Cruise's father could take a position as a defense consultant with the Canadian Armed Forces. There, Cruise attended the newly opened Robert Hopkins Public School for much of grade four and grade five. In grade four, Cruise first became involved in drama, under the tutelage of George Steinburg. Cruise and six other boys put on an improvised play to music called IT at the Carleton Elementary School drama festival. Drama organizer Val Wright, who was in the audience that night, reflected, "The movement and improvisation were excellent. It was a classic ensemble piece."

In sixth grade, Cruise went to Henry Munro Middle School in Ottawa. In the spring of that year, Cruise's mother left his father, taking Cruise and his sisters back to the United States; in 1978, she married Jack South. Cruise's father died of cancer in 1984. Cruise briefly attended a Franciscan seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio on a church scholarship and aspired to become a Catholic priest before he became interested in acting.:24–26 In total, Cruise attended 15 schools in 14 years. In his senior year of high school, he played football for the varsity team as a linebacker, but was cut from the squad after getting caught drinking beer before a game.:47 Also in his senior year, Cruise starred in his high school's production of Guys and Dolls. He graduated from Glen Ridge High School in Glen Ridge, New Jersey in 1980.