When Tom Cruise rescued an entire family from a burning yacht
The movie industry prides itself on smoke and mirrors. Controlled explosions, stuntmen and cutting-edge special effects are used almost ubiquitously to give stories an enhanced sense of reality. As action heroes take on impossible stunts to save the world from imminent destruction, most of the risk is usually placed on the shoulders of stuntmen or curtailed by CGI nerds; however, Tom Cruise likes to make things as authentic as possible.
Throughout his dense oeuvre, Cruise boasts a fine selection of action movies that have seen him – the real him – dangling out of helicopters, scaling skyscrapers and steering powerful vehicles. During a past interview with the BBC’s Graham Norton, the actor revealed that he was an avid stunt performer before his acting days.
When asked why he would dare to put his life at risk for a movie, Cruise revealed that in his childhood, he performed “flips off the house into the snow” and raced bicycles over ditches. Then, as he grew older, the actor fell in love with “fast cars, motorcycles, hiking and climbing,” anything adventurous or adrenaline-inducing.
At age 61, Cruise still prefers to take on as many stunts as he can for his action roles. Most recently, he showed his fearlessness in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. “I feel that [when acting] you’re bringing everything, you know, physically and emotionally, to a character in a story,” he added while speaking to Norton. “I’ve trained for 30 years doing [stunts], and it allows us to put cameras where you are normally not able to.”
As a restless adventurer and fearless actor, Cruise rarely switches off, even while taking a holiday with his family. In 1996, the Top Gun actor heeded his name to take his then-wife Nicole Kidman and their children for a cruise on the 263-foot superyacht Talitha.
While cutting languid lines in the deep blue, Cruise noticed an adjacent yacht that had caught fire and was slipping into the water. Initiating full Ethan Hunt mode, the actor deployed Talitha’s skiff when he saw the survivors emerging from the wreckage in a rubber lifeboat.
Welcoming the rescuees aboard his yacht, Cruise discovered he had saved French newspaper magnates Jacques and Bernadette Lejeune, their seven-year-old daughter, and two additional crew members. The fire later revealed that the fire was caused by a short in the boat’s electrical circuitry.
After 30 minutes of refuge on Cruise’s luxury yacht, the family and their crew were taken back to the island of Capri by a patrol boat. Pat Kingsley, Crise’s publicist, explained in a press statement at the time that Cruise “did what any decent person would do,” adding, “If I ever get in trouble, I hope Tom Cruise is nearby.”
The Talitha was built in 1929. As well as having several famous captains and owners over the years, it was used as a gunboat in World War II. The video below expands upon the boat’s extraordinary history.
