Tragic Details About Tom Cruise's Life Before Fame

Tom Cruise is arguably the biggest modern movie star, and many credit him as the savior of theatrical release in the post-pandemic era. It would be genuinely hard to choose which of his many blockbusters he's best known for, and he's generally regarded as a consummate professional when it comes to his career – outside of some high-profile controversies that have popped up over the years.

However, it seems that the "Top Gun: Maverick" star has come a long way from his humble roots, back before he changed his name from Thomas Mapother to Tom Cruise. He first got into acting when he moved to New York City to pursue his performing dreams at the age of 18. By the time he was 19, he already had a remarkable performance under his belt in the 1981 drama "Taps," and had his career-sparking breakthrough in 1983's "Risky Business." He enjoyed meteoric success in the decades to come, cementing himself as a true A-lister.

But life among the Hollywood stars seemed like a far-off possibility for a young Cruise who, before fame and fortune, dealt with learning challenges, bullies, and an abusive, absentee father. Cruise had to fight his way through some difficult childhood years to forge the creative and lucrative path he's walked in his adulthood.

As a child, Tom Cruise was one of four children – including his sisters, Marian, Lee Ann, and Cass -– raised by his devoted mom, Mary Lee, and apparently terrorized by their emotionally and physically abusive father, Thomas Cruise Mapother III. Cruise described his dad as a violent and destabilizing "merchant of chaos" during a 2006 interview with Parade magazine.

"He was a bully and a coward ... He was the kind of person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you," Cruise told Parade (via CBS News), explaining that his father would "lull you in, make you feel safe and then, bang!" Still, Cruise said it taught him an important lesson at a young age about how some people operate and how trust can be a dangerous thing if misplaced.

That being said, the abuse and the confusion swirled as Cruise learned he couldn't trust his father and wasn't safe around him, which instilled a childhood anxiety that he struggled to cope with.

If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

While reading scripts and memorizing dialog is a core component of being a successful actor, Tom Cruise experienced dyslexia from a very early age, which only added to his anxiety and frustrations with learning. Cruise has spoken in the past about how he'd been diagnosed as dyslexic when he was seven and how he'd work hard to concentrate on the material he was reading but then retain very little of the information by the time he reached the end of the page.

"I would go blank, feel anxious, nervous, bored, frustrated, dumb. I would get angry. My legs would actually hurt when I was studying. My head ached. All through school and well into my career I felt like I had a secret," Cruise once explained in an interview, recounted in the Andrew Morton book "Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography." Cruise credits hard work, visualization techniques, and courses offered by the Church of Scientology (which many consider to be a cult) for helping him overcome his dyslexia.

During the first 15 years of his life, Tom Cruise attended nearly as many schools. Born in Syracuse, New York, Cruise's family moved to Canada when he was only a child and then moved around to different provinces, always forcing Cruise to relocate, make new friends, and meet new teachers, making him a perpetual new kid. Given his father's reclusive and antisocial behavior, Cruise and his family faced silent judgment and skepticism from their neighbors, and Cruise dealt with bullies both at home and at his many schools.

"So many times the big bully comes up, pushes me ... Your heart's pounding, you sweat, and you feel like you're going to vomit," Cruise recalled to Parade magazine" in 2006 (via CBS News). "I don't like bullies ... I'm not the biggest guy in the world, I never liked hitting someone, but I know if I don't hit that guy, he's going to pick on me all year."

According to the book "Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography," as well as Cruise's recollections of his childhood, the family had little money when he was a kid, and were often moving and relocating as his father took on new jobs in different cities. As such, the family found it hard to afford food or buy presents at Christmas, and Cruise found himself needing to earn money for his family when he was only eight years old.

Cruise and some of his local pals would go around the neighborhood and mow lawns for $2 a pop, while Cruise himself would make some extra money cleaning out people's yards. He spent his days when not in school doing difficult jobs so that he could earn cash for his mom to be able to afford groceries. It was not the childhood of leisure and fun in the sun you'd hope for kids to get a chance to experience. Instead, it was just more and more layers of anxiety for the young Cruise.

However, Cruise also used some of that cash to afford his greatest childhood love — watching movies. "I used to cut grass and had all kinds of odd jobs to give money to my family, but also to save money so I could go to the movies," Cruise told People in 2018. "You didn't have YouTube, and we didn't have film school. That was my film school."

In 1974, Tom Cruise's mother, Mary Lee, took him and his sisters back to the United States, leaving Thomas Cruise Mapother III in the dust. Their divorce was finalized in August 1975, and less than a month later, Cruise's mercurial father met another woman and married her days later, according to Morton's biography. Cruise and his sisters attended the unexpectedly prompt backyard wedding, and then Cruise's father essentially disappeared from their lives for nearly an entire decade without any contact whatsoever. Cruise's mother moved on three years later when she married Jack South, a supportive step-father who, along with Mary Lee, encouraged the future movie star to abandon his priesthood studies and pursue his acting career.

In 1984, Cruise was contacted by his father, who was battling colorectal cancer and was essentially in his final days. "[He] was in the hospital dying of cancer, and he would only meet me on the basis that I didn't ask him anything about the past," Cruise told Parade magazine (via CBS News). "When I saw him in pain, I thought, 'Wow, what a lonely life.' He was in his late 40s. It was sad." Cruise's father died in January 1984, when Cruise was just 21 years old.