Tom Cruise

Risky Business opened in 1983 and gave Tom Cruise, then twenty-one, the sort of exposure most actors spend a decade failing to get. What he did with it was more interesting than the film itself. Within three years he had Top Gun, the highest-grossing release of 1986 worldwide, and in the same year The Color of Money, opposite Paul Newman under Martin Scorsese. The pattern was set early: one film to hold the audience, one to keep the industry paying attention.

Rain Man arrived in 1988 and won Best Picture, with Cruise doing the unshowy half of it opposite Dustin Hoffman. A year later Oliver Stone cast him as Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, which brought a Golden Globe and his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He was twenty-seven. The films that followed - A Few Good Men in 1992, The Firm in 1993 - confirmed that the commercial instinct and the critical one were running at the same time.

Then 1996, which reorganised his career and arguably the business around him. Mission: Impossible put him in the producer's chair on a franchise he still controls three decades later. Jerry Maguire, released the same December, won him a second Golden Globe and a second Oscar nomination. Magnolia in 1999 brought a third of each, for a performance deliberately unpleasant enough to take the persona apart. Whatever else is true of him, he tended to choose directors rather than parts.

The comparison across decades is unusual in that the job description barely changed. He is still the lead, still doing the stunt himself, still opening films in cinemas at an age when most of his contemporaries moved to producing or television. In November 2025 the Academy gave him an Honorary Award at the Governors Awards - his first Oscar, after four nominations and no wins. The photographs from 1986 and the photographs from now show a man doing the same job, which is rather the point.