Who Is Tom Cruise?

1. A rootless childhood and an unlikely start

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on 3 July 1962 in Syracuse, New York, the third of four children of Mary Lee, a special-education teacher, and Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer. His childhood was unsettled: the family moved frequently as his father sought work, and Cruise attended many schools, including a Franciscan seminary in Cincinnati for a year, where he briefly considered the priesthood. He has described a childhood marked by his father's temper and by dyslexia, which made school difficult, and he found his footing not in the classroom but in sports and in the theatre. At Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey he played American football until an injury ended that ambition, and a school production of Guys and Dolls gave him his first taste of acting.

He moved to New York at eighteen to pursue acting, working as a waiter while he auditioned, and his early breaks came quickly. A small role in Endless Love in 1981 was followed by a part in the military drama Taps, in which his intensity stood out among a young cast, and by a supporting role in Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders in 1983. The film that made him a star arrived later that year: Risky Business, in which he played a Chicago teenager who turns his parents' house into a brothel while they are away. The film's famous scene of Cruise sliding across the floor in a shirt and socks to the sound of Bob Seger's Old Time Rock and Roll became an image of the 1980s, and it established the qualities that would define his career: confidence, charm, and a physical energy that filled the screen.

The success of Risky Business gave Cruise a choice that many young actors never get: he could pick his projects rather than take whatever was offered. He chose carefully, working with established directors and mixing commercial films with serious dramas, a pattern he has maintained throughout his career. In the three years after Risky Business he made All the Right Moves, Legend and The Color of Money, in which he played a young pool hustler opposite Paul Newman, who had himself been a young star in the 1960s. The Newman pairing was symbolic: Cruise was being positioned as the heir to an older tradition of American movie stardom, and he was learning from the best.

2. Top Gun and the making of a global star

Top Gun, released in 1986 and directed by Tony Scott, changed Cruise's life and changed Hollywood. He played Pete Mitchell, known as Maverick, a naval aviator whose recklessness and grief over the death of his friend Goose drive the story, and the film became the highest-grossing film of its year in the United States. It was more than a hit: it was a cultural event, with its soundtrack, its aviator sunglasses and its poster of Cruise in a flight jacket becoming fixtures of the decade, and it increased applications to join the United States Navy so noticeably that the Navy set up recruitment tables outside cinemas. Cruise had become, at twenty-four, a global star, and the film's success gave him a power in the industry that few actors of his generation would match.

The years that followed showed that he was not content to repeat Top Gun. In 1988 he played the self-centred brother of Dustin Hoffman's autistic savant in Rain Man, a film that won the Academy Award for best picture, and in 1989 he played the paraplegic Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic in Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, a performance that earned him his first Academy Award nomination for best actor. The contrast between the two roles was deliberate: one was a commercial film in which he supported a more famous actor, the other a serious drama in which he carried the film himself. Both showed that he could act, and not merely charm, and the Kovic performance in particular, in which he played a man moving from patriotic enthusiasm to disillusionment and activism, remains one of his most respected pieces of work.

The 1990s consolidated his position. He starred in A Few Good Men in 1992, in which his courtroom confrontation with Jack Nicholson produced one of the most quoted scenes in modern cinema, and in Interview with the Vampire in 1994, a casting choice that was widely questioned at the time and that he carried off. In 1996 he made two films that defined the second half of his career: Jerry Maguire, in which he played a sports agent who loses everything and rebuilds his life, earning a second Academy Award nomination, and Mission: Impossible, in which he played the agent Ethan Hunt. The two films together showed the two sides of his stardom: the actor who could carry a romantic drama and the action star who could carry a franchise. Both would matter for the next thirty years.

3. Mission: Impossible and the art of the real stunt

The Mission: Impossible series, which began in 1996 and is based on the television series of the 1960s, has become the centre of Cruise's career and the clearest expression of his philosophy of filmmaking. As both star and producer, he has shaped each film around a simple idea: the action should be real. Where other action films rely on computer-generated imagery, Cruise insists on performing his own stunts, and the series has become famous for the feats he has undertaken: hanging from a cliff in Utah, climbing the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, hanging from the side of a military transport aircraft as it takes off, holding his breath underwater for several minutes, and riding a motorcycle off a cliff and opening a parachute. Each film has tried to outdo the last, and each has been marketed around the stunt, with behind-the-scenes footage showing Cruise training and rehearsing.

The commitment to real stunts is not only a matter of spectacle. Cruise has argued, in interviews and in his public advocacy for cinema, that audiences can tell the difference between a real feat and a digital one, and that the knowledge that the actor is genuinely at risk changes how a scene feels. Film critics have largely agreed: the Mission: Impossible films, particularly Fallout in 2018 and the two-part Dead Reckoning films, have been praised as among the best action films of their era, with the quality of the set pieces carrying films whose plots are often deliberately convoluted. The series has also been commercially durable in a way that few franchises are, with each new entry finding an audience across generations, and it has made Ethan Hunt, a character who barely changes across eight films, into one of the most recognisable figures in popular cinema.

The physical cost of this approach has been real. Cruise has broken bones, torn ligaments and suffered injuries on set, and he has spoken about the long training periods, sometimes lasting months, that each stunt requires. He has also used his position as producer to insist on safety standards and on the employment of experienced stunt teams, and he has been credited by colleagues with raising the standard of action filmmaking. The contrast with the computer-generated spectacle of much modern blockbuster cinema is deliberate: Cruise's films are an argument, made in images, that the human body, filmed honestly, is still the most exciting special effect available.

4. The dramatic actor: Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut and beyond

Cruise's reputation as an action star has sometimes obscured his work as a dramatic actor, and the late 1990s were the period in which he made his most ambitious choices. In 1999 he appeared in two films that showed opposite sides of his talent: Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick's final film, in which he played a doctor whose marriage is tested by a night of temptation, and Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson's ensemble drama, in which he played Frank Mackey, a motivational speaker who teaches men to seduce women and who is revealed to be a damaged, frightened son. The Magnolia performance, in which he played a character who is at once repulsive and pitiable, earned him his third Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor, and a Golden Globe Award, and it remains the performance that critics cite when they argue that Cruise is a far better actor than his action roles suggest.

The choices he made after 2000 were uneven, and he has been candid about the films that did not work. He took risks with films such as Vanilla Sky, a remake of a Spanish film that divided audiences, and The Last Samurai, in which he played an American soldier who joins a samurai rebellion, a film that was praised for its craft and criticised for its premise. He also made commercial successes such as War of the Worlds with Steven Spielberg and the first of the modern Mission: Impossible sequels. The pattern of his career in this period was that of a star who could open a film on his name alone, and who therefore had the freedom to choose projects that interested him, even when they did not succeed.

The 2010s brought a period of professional difficulty, partly because of the intense public attention paid to his personal life and his membership of the Church of Scientology, and partly because several films underperformed. He responded in the way he always has: by working harder, returning to the Mission: Impossible series with a new energy, and making films such as Edge of Tomorrow in 2014, a science-fiction action film that became a critical success, and Jack Reacher, in which he played a drifter who solves crimes. The comeback was completed by Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, which became one of the highest-grossing films of his career and one of the most successful films of the year worldwide, proving that a sequel made thirty-six years after the original could work if it was made with care and released in cinemas.

5. Top Gun: Maverick and the defence of the cinema

Top Gun: Maverick was not only a commercial success but a statement. Released in 2022, after delays caused by the pandemic, it brought back Pete Mitchell as an older pilot who must train a new generation, including the son of his late friend Goose. The film's aerial sequences were filmed with real aircraft and real pilots, with cameras mounted inside the cockpits, and the result was a film that could only be fully appreciated on a large screen with a powerful sound system. Cruise insisted that the film be released in cinemas rather than on a streaming service, at a time when many studios were moving their biggest films to streaming, and he argued publicly that the cinema experience mattered and that audiences would return to theatres for a film made for them. The film's success, and the fact that it drew audiences who had not been to a cinema in years, was widely cited as evidence that he was right.

The film also earned Cruise an Academy Award nomination as a producer for best picture, his first nomination in that category, and it won the Academy Award for best sound. More importantly, it changed the conversation about his career: the actor who had once been the young star of the 1980s was now the older mentor, and the film's emotional core, the relationship between Maverick and Goose's son, was a story about age, loss and responsibility that resonated with audiences who had grown up with the original. It was a rare example of a legacy sequel that justified its existence, and it showed that Cruise's stardom, rather than fading, had deepened with age.

The success of Top Gun: Maverick also made Cruise the most prominent advocate for theatrical exhibition in Hollywood. He has spoken repeatedly about the importance of cinemas, about the communal experience of watching a film with strangers, and about the craft of filmmaking as a discipline that deserves the largest screen. In an industry that has shifted towards streaming and towards films made for small screens, his position is deliberately old-fashioned, and it has made him a figure of some controversy among those who argue that the future of film is digital. But his box-office record gives his argument weight: audiences have repeatedly shown that they will come to cinemas for films that are made for cinemas, and Cruise has made that argument with his own career.

6. Scientology, privacy and the public image

No account of Cruise's life can ignore the public attention paid to his membership of the Church of Scientology, which he joined in the 1980s and has spoken about publicly. His advocacy for the church, and his criticism of psychiatry, drew intense media coverage in the 2000s, and his personal life, including his marriages to Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes, and his divorces from Kidman and Holmes, became the subject of constant tabloid attention. The coverage reached a peak in 2005, when his appearance on a television talk show, in which he jumped on a sofa while discussing his relationship with Holmes, became a widely mocked moment, and when a leaked video of him speaking about Scientology circulated online. The episode damaged his public image for a time, and several films released in the years that followed performed below expectations.

Cruise has rarely discussed these matters in detail, and his public appearances in recent years have focused on his work rather than his private life. The approach has been effective: by the time of Top Gun: Maverick, the conversation about Cruise was once again about his films rather than his beliefs, and his reputation as a professional, a hard worker and a generous colleague had reasserted itself. Colleagues who have worked with him, from directors such as Christopher McQuarrie to co-stars across the Mission: Impossible series, have spoken about his preparation, his courtesy on set and his willingness to share credit with the crew. The contrast between the tabloid image and the professional image is a reminder that a public figure's reputation is made of several different stories, and that the story that endures is often the one told by the work itself.

The question of how to write about a figure whose beliefs are controversial is one that biographers face with many public figures, and the fairest approach is to report what is known, to attribute claims to those who make them, and to separate the work from the belief. Cruise's films are public objects that can be judged on their own terms, and his advocacy for Scientology is a matter of public record that he has discussed himself. Readers who want to understand his career need both facts, and neither fact cancels the other. The enduring interest of his story is that a man whose private life was once the subject of mockery has, through sustained work, made his professional reputation the dominant story again.

7. Legacy: the last movie star

Cruise is often described as the last movie star, and the phrase captures something real about how Hollywood has changed. In the studio era, stars were the industry's central product, and audiences went to films because of the actor's name. In the modern era, franchises, intellectual property and streaming algorithms have taken that role, and few actors can open a film on their name alone. Cruise is one of the few who still can, and he has used that power to make films that are, in their scale and craft, a defence of the old model. His career is therefore not only a personal success but a test of whether the star system itself can survive, and his continued box-office success suggests that it can, at least for one actor who is willing to work as hard as he does.

His influence on action cinema is already visible in the films that have followed his example. Directors and studios have noted the audience response to real stunts, and several recent action films have emphasised practical effects and physical performance in a way that echoes the Mission: Impossible series. His influence on the business of film is visible too: his insistence on theatrical release, his willingness to delay films until they could be seen in cinemas, and his public advocacy for the cinema experience have given exhibitors a powerful ally at a time when they needed one. Whether the industry follows his example or not, his career has shown that there is still an audience for films made with ambition and craft, and that the audience will reward them.

For readers who want to understand modern Hollywood, Cruise is a useful figure because his career contains the whole history of the modern blockbuster: the rise of the young star in the 1980s, the franchise era of the 1990s, the celebrity culture of the 2000s, and the streaming-era defence of the cinema in the 2020s. He has been present at every stage, and he has adapted at every stage without abandoning the core of his appeal: energy, discipline and a willingness to take physical risks that other actors will not. That is why, four decades after Risky Business, he remains a working star, and why the question of who will succeed him as the last movie star is still unanswered.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Tom Cruise
• Wikipedia — Tom Cruise
• IMDb — Tom Cruise
• Golden Globes — Tom Cruise

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• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.