The Hollywood icon who despised the “vulgar” Tom Cruise: “His behaviour is shocking”
Apart from the whole Scientology thing, Tom Cruise is a pretty popular guy in Hollywood. Of course, nobody in the entertainment industry can truly be called universally beloved unless their name is Dolly Parton or Keanu Reeves, so there are a few folks in Tinseltown who don’t care for the action star.
He fell out with Brooke Shields to such an extent that she found herself forcibly removed from the annual list of recipients who get a coconut cake every year from the A-list, which must have been a kick in the teeth, especially when he apologised for his unprompted rant about the dangers of psychiatry.
Mickey Rourke hates him, but he hates a lot of people, so that probably didn’t register on Cruise’s radar. King of Queens alum Leah Remini loathes every fibre of his being for obvious reasons, while the ever-verbose Richard Harris called him a “midget” and mocked him for bringing “eight bodyguards” with him wherever he went, also saying: “He’s got nice teeth, but has he ever read a book?”
Steven Spielberg credited him for single-handedly saving cinema with Top Gun: Maverick, Glen Powell worships the ground that he walks on, and Paul Thomas Anderson carries a deep-lying love for the Mission: Impossible figurehead that borders on obsession, since he once compared him to Jesus Christ.
None of that means he doesn’t have enemies, and he made a pretty legendary one in the formidable shape of Lauren Bacall. The ‘Golden Age’ icon, Academy Award nominee, and Golden Globe and Tony winner, who starred in a string of classic pictures from the 1940s to the 1990s, was no fan of the midlife crisis that saw Cruise leaping around on Oprah Winfrey’s couch like a man possessed.
“His whole behaviour is so shocking,” she told Time, actively cringing at the actor professing his love for then-wife Katie Holmes in one of the most awkward and uncomfortable segments ever broadcast on television. “It’s inappropriate, and vulgar, and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially. I think it’s a kind of sickness.”
Bacall wasn’t best pleased that Spielberg’s War of the Worlds was being peddled at the same time Cruise was playing a game of ‘the floor is lava’ with Winfrey’s furniture, and she wasn’t the only one, since he was swiftly dropped by his long-time home studio, Paramount, with the company’s president claiming he turned off the entire planet’s population of women in one fell swoop.
Did she at least think he was good at his job? In a word, no. “When you talk about a great actor, you’re not talking about Tom Cruise,” she said. When asked if she was confirming that she didn’t rate him in the slightest as a thespian, she confirmed it with a curt, “No, I don’t.”
One-half of one of cinema’s most indelible onscreen duos wasn’t one for mincing her words, and she also deeply hated Natalie Portman, so it wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary to unload both barrels on another actor, even if they were the biggest star in the world.
