Tom Cruise
The megawatt grin that ruled the 90s box office. From Days of Thunder through Jerry Maguire to Magnolia, Tom Cruise spent the decade as Hollywood's defining leading man — and spent 1996 building his own action franchise by dangling from a wire as Ethan Hunt.
Top Gun cemented Tom Cruise's superstar status in 1986, and he closed out the 80s proving he was more than a flyboy grin: Rain Man (1988) won Best Picture, and his transformation into paralyzed Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July (1989) won him a Golden Globe and his first Academy Award nomination.
Then came the 90s, when a Tom Cruise movie became its own genre. Days of Thunder (1990) introduced him to co-star Nicole Kidman — they married on December 24, 1990, and became Hollywood's reigning couple. He was the cocky Navy lawyer of A Few Good Men (1992), the hunted associate of The Firm (1993), and the vampire Lestat in Interview with the Vampire (1994) — a role author Anne Rice publicly opposed until she saw the film and took out a two-page ad praising his performance. In 1996 he produced and starred in Mission: Impossible, and the image of Cruise suspended inches above a CIA vault floor became instant pop-culture shorthand — the birth of the franchise he'd still be running decades later.
Jerry Maguire closed 1996 by grossing more than $273 million worldwide on a $50 million budget, winning him a Golden Globe, earning his second Oscar nomination, and installing "Show me the money!" in the national vocabulary. He ended the decade by stretching furthest from the grin: Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) opposite Kidman, then a ferocious turn as motivational guru Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia (1999), which took a third Oscar nomination and another Golden Globe. The 2000s would bring the full franchise era and stranger tabloid chapters — but 1986 to 1999 remains the classic Cruise run, the era when the name above the title was the entire pitch.
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