Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography pdfdrive com

Moulin Rouge while Tom, also in Australia, worked on Mission: Impossible II.
Clearly she enjoyed Junod’s company, taking him around to local bars, showing
him the Sydney Harbor bridge, which her grandfather had helped build, and
ending up in his hotel bed with Junod, fully clothed, next to her. Just then the
phone rang; it was Tom seeking the whereabouts of his wife, as he and the
children were waiting for her in a Chinese restaurant. When Junod told him
where she was, Tom responded by saying, “In your dreams, buddy,” only for
Nicole to interject with, “I’m afraid so, darling. I’m afraid I’m right in his bed at
this very moment.”
While Junod insisted he had only been enjoying a “flirtation,” it was perhaps a
sign of his security that Tom, who had seen his wife make love onstage with a
man he didn’t particularly like and have sex with a complete stranger for six
days straight, seemed to take the unusual news in his stride. In fact, he singled
out Nicole for special praise when he accepted his Best Supporting Actor award
for Magnolia at the Golden Globe awards ceremony in Hollywood. “Her
generosity, her support, her sacrifices, her talent—she inspires me,” he told the
audience.
Nicole’s sister, Antonia, was by his side when he walked the red carpet, as
Nicole was busy filming Moulin Rouge. During the lengthy shoot, rumors

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inevitably circulated that Nicole was having an affair with her new leading man,
another Scotsman, Ewan McGregor. The fact that she got on equally famously
with his wife, Eve, and that Tom was on set as much as his schedule allowed, to
see his wife and children, was lost in the shuffle. Indeed, Connor and Bella
became used to seeing their mother, dressed in high heels, fishnet stockings, and
a tight corset, making them supper in their trailer in between rehearsing her song
and dance routines. Notably, even though Tom insisted on filming Mission:
Impossible II in Australia so that he could be close to his wife, no one recalled
her ever visiting him on set. Nicole remained his elusive object of desire, playing
a role on film, and perhaps in life, where, as director Baz Luhrmann said of her
character, “She was a woman at her absolute sexual prime.”
There was a price to pay. The long and intense rehearsals took their toll,
Nicole twice cracking a rib during a dance sequence and then, in April 2000,
badly tearing some knee cartilage. She flew to Los Angeles, where noted
surgeon Neal ElAttrache, the handsome brother-in-law of Sylvester Stallone,
operated. Nicole saw him frequently afterward for consultations about her injury
and the two became friendly.
At that time the whole family seemed accident-prone. After filming for
Mission: Impossible II wrapped, Tom took the children on an ill-fated fishing
trip on a forty-foot boat. During the voyage, they hit a reef, the motor conked
out, and a Jet Ski hit the boat’s side. When flames from the onboard barbecue
flared too high, Tom threw it overboard—becoming, as one wag noted, the first
actor in Australian history to throw a barbie on the shrimp. In some ways it was
refreshing to see that the all-action hero who races sports cars and motorbikes,
scuba dives, skydives, flies acrobatic planes, and dreams of climbing Everest is
flawed like mere mortals. He exudes such a mountainous air of competence,
security, and invincibility that when he was returning from a wilderness rafting
trip, the party had a choice of three helicopters to pick them up. One rafter, who
was terrified of choppers, traveled with Tom. “God isn’t going to kill him,” he
reasoned.
Director John Woo exploited that image of the superhero, the guy who always
dodges the bullet, in full for Mission: Impossible II. Even Woo, who made his
name from choreographed violence, was nervous as he watched Tom film the
famous opening stunt where he held on to a rock face thousands of feet above
the Utah desert with one hand. Woo’s mood was not helped by the fact that
Tom’s mother was standing next to him watching anxiously as a hovering
helicopter filmed her son clinging to a rock. “I was more panicked than her,”
recalled Woo. “I grabbed her hand, turned to her, and said, ‘Mom, he’s going to

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be fine,’ and actually I was the one worried.” It took the cameraman seven takes
to get the right shot. When Woo wanted Tom to be a “rock star,” he didn’t mean
him to take it so literally.
Tom told director Cameron Crowe afterward that during the dazzling
sequence he was simply admiring the view. That moment symbolized a man at
the top of his game, king of his movie world. At thirty-six he was still limber
enough to perform his own breathtaking stunts, an actor whose determined
nonchalance in the face of danger was his trademark, and a successful producer
in firm control of a big-budget movie that took in $70 million on its opening
weekend in America alone.
Tom was never content to rest on his laurels as an actor and a producer,
always searching for fresh talent, scripts, and challenges. At this time he was
intrigued by the work of the young Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar. After
a meeting in New York, he signed his latest script, a ghost story called The
Others.
While Nicole and Tom seemed to be growing apart as a couple, professionally
they were more entwined. Nicole signed up for six future projects, including a
Paul Verhoeven movie where she was slated to play a suffragette, linked to the
Cruise/Wagner production stable. First out of the blocks, though, was The
Others. As executive producer, Tom cast his wife as the lead in his latest project,
even though Nicole, still on crutches after Moulin Rouge, protested about
playing a religiously neurotic mother of two children who are so sensitive to
light that they have to be kept indoors with all the curtains and blinds drawn.
Within that enclosed dark world, the icy, high-strung mother is joined by a group
of strange servants and the ghost of her dead soldier husband.
It is a creepy, disturbing film, and Nicole, still enjoying the afterglow of
Moulin Rouge, rebelled. Her husband insisted that she set her doubts aside. It
was a shrewd decision, Nicole giving one of her best, and possibly most
revealing, screen performances as an obsessive and overwrought mother. As her
biographer James Dickerson perceptively noted, “How odd it was that Tom
would choose this story for Nicole, for, in its own way, it seemed to mirror their
marriage, down to the smallest detail.” It was a sentiment Tom agreed with.
When he watched her performance as a cold, neurotic, frigid mother who is
suffocating yet unkind to her children, he remarked to his circle that she was
perfect for the part. It was not said with affection.

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