Cocky, darkly good-looking, Tom Cruise is the all-American handsome hero; 'Maverick' he may be nicknamed, but it is a pretty mainstream role he plays as the young flyer in Top Gun (1986). Cruise was stretched a little more in Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986), where he had Paul Newman to contend with. In Rain Man (1988) he held his own opposite Dustin Hoffman, and in Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July (1989) he was impressive as a paraplegic war hero. But his career in the 1990s, though successful at the box office, has been mostly confined to safe projects like A Few Good Men (1992) and Mission: Impossible (1996). Jerry Maguire (1996), in which he played an agent with a conscience, was a rare attempt to make a movie with a message. Spending two years working with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut (1999) looks like Cruise's break-out, but one suspects the least conventional thing about him is his devotion to the cult of Scientology.

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