During the Parade magazine interview, Tom Cruise stated he agreed to have a face-to-face conversation with Thomas Cruise Mapother III in his early 20s after he discovered he had been hospitalized for terminal cancer. The “Top Gun” star shared he found the situation upsetting despite his decade-long estrangement from his father. “When I saw him in pain, I thought, ‘Wow, what a lonely life.’ He was in his late 40s. It was sad,” shared the actor.
In a 2004 “Inside the Actors Studio” interview, Cruise revealed he gifted his dad a figure in the likeness of Mark Twain’s beloved character Tom Sawyer. “It had the music from ‘The Sting’ on it … because he and I, we loved that movie. We saw that movie together. I gave him that as a gift, and he laughed,” shared Cruise.
While speaking to Barbara Walters in 1992, Cruise stated that his father asserted that he wanted to get to know him better after his hospital visit. “He said, ‘Look, when I get out of here, we’ll go out and we’ll have a beer. And we’ll talk about everything.’ And then he died,” he related.
While the exact reason for the actor’s choice of Hollywood name is unclear, it’s difficult to deny that the name Tom Cruise makes a big impact when the credits are rolling.
