Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

partying hard as he tried to come to terms with his split from actress Elizabeth
McGovern. Leaving Joe in Rome, Sean flew to visit Tom on the Legend set for
just one day. It was not a success. Tom was focused and working, Sean
brokenhearted and drinking. Sean enigmatically describes their meeting as a
“kind of disastrous interaction.” He left the following day to go to Belfast in
Northern Ireland. “I thought, ‘Take me somewhere violent,’ ” he later recalled,
indicating his mind-set at the time.
If being a stranger in a strange land was unsettling enough, the shoot was
dogged by accidents. Tom strained his back when a stunt went awry, and was
mauled by a live fox he was supposed to cradle during one scene. Four weeks
before the end of shooting, Tom and other members of the cast and crew
watched helplessly as the giant stage burned down, destroying the carefully
constructed polystyrene forest that was the film’s setting. While only four days’
shooting was lost, the accident served as a metaphor for the film, which was
enough of a box-office flop to make director Ridley Scott believe his Hollywood
career was over and seek work producing pop videos.
As one film reviewer noted: “Performances tend to get lost in productions like
this. I particularly noticed how easily Cruise got buried in the role of Jack. Here
is the talented young actor from Risky Business, where he came across as a
genuine individual, and this time he’s so overwhelmed by sets and special
effects that his character could be played by anybody.” Even Tom admitted that
he was “just another color in a Ridley Scott painting” and these days treats the
movie as a bit of a joke.

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Things were not much better when he returned to New York. His relationship
with his girlfriend Rebecca De Mornay soon reached the final reel. They had
been apart for the best part of a year, and while he had briefly seen her on the set
of her movie The Slugger’s Wife, and she had flown to London a couple of
times, the strain of maintaining a long-distance relationship in the days before
cell phones and e-mails had taken its toll. It was a liaison built on mutual
ambition, shared careers, and similar backgrounds of broken homes and constant
moving.
If anything, Rebecca’s early life was much more exotic and sophisticated, as
she enjoyed a peripatetic upbringing with a bohemian mother and lived in a
number of European countries. “I was desperate to fit in. . . . I’ve worked hard to
be accepted,” she once explained. While Tom learned to speak with a Canadian
or Kentucky twang, when Rebecca lived in Austria she spoke German with a
perfect regional accent. They were two souls striving for acclaim and adulation.
“There’s definitely something different about kids who come from broken
homes,” observed Rebecca. “They have this sort of searching quality, because
you’re searching for love and affection if you’ve been robbed of a substantial
amount of time with your parents. I think that is true of Tom.”
Lurking in the background was the old green-eyed monster of jealousy and
envy. Both Tom’s and Rebecca’s careers took off after the success of Risky
Business. At the time it seemed that Rebecca, who was a much less experienced
actor than her boyfriend, had made much smarter choices. During the year or so
they were together, she was ostensibly the more successful partner. In 1984,
while Tom spent months playing a woodland creature in London, Rebecca
notched up three movies that went on to earn critical acclaim.
It is not hard to imagine how Tom, competitive and controlling, would have
responded as he watched his girlfriend outstripping him in both the quality and
quantity of her film work. Even the $500,000 fee for Legend and the magical
word “starring” might not have provided enough compensation. For a young
man who had grown up bolstered by the uncritical acclaim of an adoring mother
and cheerleading sisters, it would probably have been difficult to come to terms
with a live-in companion who seemed to be outstripping him in his chosen
career, the spotlight shining more brightly on Rebecca, who was then more
worldly, polished, and stylish.
In her movie The Trip to Bountiful, she was praised for her performance as a
young woman who befriends an old lady, played by film veteran Geraldine Page,
who won an Oscar. In Rebecca’s second film that year, the gritty drama