Tom Cruise has been a movie star for decades, but the three-time divorcé keeps his family world as dad to son Connor and daughters Isabella and Suri extremely private.
Tom Cruise is known for a lot of things, but gabbing about his kids isn’t one of them.
Naturally that has something to do with the fact that son Connor Cruise and daughter Isabella Cruise with ex-wife Nicole Kidman, as well as daughter Suri Cruise with ex-wife Katie Holmes, are leading relatively private lives outside of show business—though they can’t help being famous-by-association thanks to their movie star parents.
But you can’t deny Tom’s enigmatic ways, the Mission: Impossible star being so impressively out there—jumping off cliffs, riding motorcycles, sending his friends coconut cake every year—and yet increasingly private.
Though he rhapsodized about fatherhood when all of his children were little, his inclination to share exponentially decreased as the spotlight grew ever brighter (and he notched his third divorce in 2012).
So, any rare sighting of him spending time in public with his now grown children tends to be an event.
Such was the case when Tom was snapped in a group pic that included Isabella, 31, and Connor, 29, at a Florida Panthers vs. Tampa Bay Lightning hockey game last December, though it took until recently for the Internet to notice the photo on NFL Hall of Famer Derrick Brooks’ Instagram.
“Wow, look who stopped by my office before our @tblightning game tonight! @tomcruise,” the former Tampa Bay Buccaneers linebacker captioned the Dec. 27 post. “I was a little star struck but played it cool and He said he was too!”
Little did Derrick know he was doing the social media equivalent of lighting a long fuse, classic M:I-style.
It was the first time the 61-year-old actor had been seen with Connor and Isabella at a public event since a 2009 Los Angeles Galaxy game (the three were informally snapped by paparazzi with Suri in Central Park in 2010), though public outings with his son have been a bit more frequent.
As for his youngest child, how much time Tom spends with now-18-year-old Suri has been a subject of speculation ever since he and Katie divorced in 2012 after less than six years of marriage.
“My whole life I always wanted to be a father,” Tom told Vanity Fair for the October 2006 cover story that introduced Suri to the world at 3 months old. “I always said to myself that my children would be able to depend on me and I would always be there for them and love them—that I’d never make a promise to my kids that I couldn’t keep. I’m not one of those people who believe you can spoil a child with too much love. You can never give a child too much love. There’s just no way.”
While they were together, he and Katie were frequently spotted out with their daughter, and there are countless pap pics of them trying to get from a car into a building and back again to prove it.
But they didn’t let the ever-present photographers stop them from living their life: The family went to amusement parks, attended Galaxy games (they were Beverly Hills neighbors with David and Victoria Beckham when the English football star crossed the pond to give soccer a shot in the arm in 2007) and were at the 2010 Super Bowl in Miami Gardens along with then-15-year-old Connor.
But Suri was 6 when Tom and Katie split up. She’s lived with her mom in New York for years, while her dad is based in Florida these days when not globetrotting for work—which he so often is.
In the ensuing years, Tom has never gone the route of giving a big interview about fatherhood, or made some other flagrantly public gesture to counter the narrative that they didn’t have a relationship.
In a Playboy interview published in June 2012, a month before he and Katie announced they were divorcing, Tom said that, while he preferred not to waste time dealing with the stranger rumors and other swipes at his character that shadowed his wildly successful career, he had his limits.
“You start with a letter saying, ‘OK, you know it’s not true. Apologize,'” he said. “There is a point with a lot of things when you just go, ‘You know what? I don’t want to waste my time with this. I’m busy. I’d rather spend this time with my kids and my wife, at home or on our movies, creating a life together. If you have kids, it is the most important thing to create good times.”
But, he added, “with certain ones you have to go, ‘OK, you crossed a line, and now you have the attention of my lawyers.’ When it involves your kids, with these guys you have to go, ‘Here’s the line, and anytime you cross it…’ But there are lots of times when you just have to say, ‘Please don’t cross that line. Be decent. Let’s not do this.'”
And he did push back against what he viewed to be an egregious take, filing a $50 million defamation lawsuit against Bauer Media’s In Touch and Life & Style for reporting in 2012 that he had “abandoned” Suri.
Sitting down for a deposition in the case on Sept. 9, 2013, Tom acknowledged not seeing his child for at least 100 days while filming the action thriller Edge of Tomorrow in London, but denied ever being out of touch.
“You have to work at it,” he said, sharing that he called her every day, per court documents obtained by E! News. “I’ve gotten very good at it. I tell wonderful stories. I also find that, you know, Suri is a very happy child, and confident, and has a good sense of herself.”
Tom continued, “Things change and there’s different agreements, like in any divorce, where you work out a schedule. It’s just a different set of circumstances. It certainly does not mean that I’ve abandoned my daughter.”
The lawsuit was settled that December and dismissed with prejudice, meaning it couldn’t be refiled. A spokeswoman for both publications said it was never their intent “to communicate that Tom Cruise had cut off all ties and abandoned his daughter, Suri, and regret if anyone drew that inference from anything they published.”
And so began the next era of Tom Cruise, silent movie star (so to speak). In work-centric interviews and on the red carpet, he’s as charming as ever, but his kids fall into the no-ask zone.
Yet as any person with or without social media knows: Just because it isn’t in a photo for the world to see, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Keep reading for all the details on Tom’s family:
