TOM CRUISE

WHO: Tom Cruise aka Thomas Cruise Mapother IV WHEN: 3 July, 1962 WHERE: Syracuse, New York, USA WHAT: Actor, religious lunatic HEIGHT: 3 ft 2 in KNOWN FOR: Being short, a very good actor, smarmy, a scientologist and of questionable sexuality

Thirty years and more have we had to put up with the rodent featured Tom Cruise troubling our screens. Over that time he’s been at the centre of many an allegation, usually about his insane devotion to pseudo-religion Scientology or his sexuality. Most notably however, Cruise, a dwarf with too many teeth, has been quick to stamp on any story about him that deviates from the one he and his ‘people’ want the public to hear.

Curiously, after getting his break in the weepy ‘Endless Love,’ it was ‘Top Gun’, the most homoerotic mainstream feature film ever, that really made him that most venal of things, a Hollywood player. ‘Risky Business’, however, released three years earlier in 1983, was Cruise’s first leading role, and the scene that got the most publicity involved him dancing around in just a pair of Y-fronts, like a screaming mary at a Jockey Shorts party.

Using his PR clout, Cruise has effectively become the spokesman for Scientology, a fake religion invented by L Ron Hubbard, a third rate science fiction author, in the 50s. It was Cruise’s first wife, Mimi Rogers, who introduced the big-toothed midget to the crackpot cult.

Since his divorce from Rogers, Cruise has been married to palid ginger stick insect Nicole Kidman, linked to Penélope Cruz and, most recently, married for a third time to the noticeably taller than him Katie Holmes. Even with this frenzy of connections to trophy women, the vertically challenged fool has been persistently dogged by rumours that he prefers Arthur to Martha.
In recent years Cruise’s behaviour has become increasingly erratic, and not only in his aggressive support of Scientology. Starting with an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s show, in which he leapt up and down on a sofa like three-year-old high on too much orange squash, declaring how infatuated he was with Katie Holmes, Cruise then got into a public row with Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressants, and told a magazine that psychiatry was “a Nazi science”.

Given this bizarre behaviour, which also included him threatening to eat the placenta of his and Holmes’ daughter, Suri, it’s not entirely surprising that his contract with studio Paramount Pictures was terminated in late 2006.

All in all, it leaves one asking whether Cruise, the man that the Church Of Scientology has described as its own Christ, is a nothing more than a very lucky, very wealthy tool or a deeply troubled, unbalanced shortarse who lives in a permanent state of denial. You decide.