Word: tomming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cruise, 27, is the movies' biggest star, with nothing but promise on the horizon. Just ask two masters he has apprenticed with: Dustin Hoffman, the decade's most lauded actor, and Paul Newman, the last golden exemplar of Hollywood star quality. "There's no sense of a crest in Tom," says Hoffman, who won an Oscar as Cruise's brother in Rain Man. "His talent is young, his body is young, his spirit is young. He's a Christmas tree -- he's lit from head to toe." Newman, who played Cruise's mentor in The Color of Money, considers...
What does he have that separates him from the Brat Pack? He's not as lovely as Rob Lowe. He doesn't explode, on- or off-camera, as ripely as Sean Penn. "Tom is at a disadvantage," says Barry Levinson, his Rain Man director. "He's got a pretty face, so his abilities are underestimated. And he's not working a rebel image, which is associated with being a good actor." But he does have the image, in the films that made him famous, of an intense young man with a mission: the total workhorse, the ultimate party animal...
...Back home he became bitter, questioning his old values of family and patriotism, before convincing himself he could best serve his country as a squad leader in the war against the war. This morality play could be a turnoff if it weren't for Cruise's presence. Says Tom Pollock, head of Universal Pictures, the film's patron: "Tom Cruise is all America's all-American boy. The film's journey is more powerful when it is made by the maverick from Top Gun. It's not only Ron who goes through this wrenching story, it is Tom Cruise...
Stone, who planned the movie for more than a decade, was ready to do battle too. "Tom has the classical facial structure of an athlete, a baseball player," he says. "He's a kid off a Wheaties box. I wanted to yank the kid off that box and mess with his image -- take him to the dark side." So the kid goes off to war and sees a slaughtered Vietnamese family. In the chaos of a skirmish, he kills one of his own men. Paralyzed from the chest down, he finds his sex life over before it begins. In horrifying...
...treats him gently, Cruise's tearful face expresses wonderfully conflicting feelings of joy and fear, peace and release. He makes sense of the story even when the movie doesn't. No wonder that at the end of the filming, Kovic gave | Cruise his Bronze Star. "He gave it to Tom for bravery," Stone says, "for having gone through this experience in hell as much as any person can without actually having been there." The presentation was made for the actor's 27th birthday...