Mimi Rogers introduced Tom to Scientology and then got
upstaged by his co-star. Tom Cruise's first marriage never had a chance.
Tom Cruise and Mimi Rogers first got together in either 1985 or 1986. While we don't know exactly
when they first hooked up, the young "Top Gun" actor confirmed they were an item in a Rolling
Stone interview published in June 1986. A whirlwind romance ensued and they married
within a year, but while they agree they loved each other, they couldn't get on the
same page about their meet-cute. According to Cruise, they met at a dinner party in 1985 and,
as he told the mag, she wasn't immediately available because she had a boyfriend.
However, that's not how Rogers remembered it, though. Speaking with an Us Weekly reporter
in 1987, she echoed the fact that they met at a dinner party, but told the outlet she was single
and that mutual friends pushed them together. As the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported, she said:
"I wasn't seeing anybody, he wasn't seeing anybody, and they thought,
'These people should be going out with somebody. Let's see if they
want to go out with each other. And we said, 'Aw, what the heck. Okay.'"
According to Rogers, it just felt right and they were soon talking of marriage,
despite their age difference — she was 31 and he was 24 when they tied the knot. Rogers also
understood that fame would soon be a part of their lives. As she shared:
"When I saw 'Top Gun' the first time, I knew what we were in for."
"I feel the need, the need for speed. Ow!"
Was Cruise head over heels about the marriage,
or suffering from cold feet? The actor spoke with Rolling Stone less than a year
before saying "I do," and confessed he wasn't sure he'd ever walk down the aisle, saying:
"I don't know if I could get married. Right now, in my present state of mind,
I don't believe so. I need a lot of space for myself and my work."
Rogers clearly made him change his mind, but he again spoke of his uncertainty about
marriage with Rolling Stone in 1990. Recalling his parents' divorce when he was 12, the actor shared,
"My worries were 'Jesus, am I going to be faithful? Does marriage work
as a concept?' I really never thought it could."
"You're probably going to want to divorce me in three weeks."
Following their wedding, Rogers and Cruise appeared to be going strong. As she told
the Chicago Tribune in 1988, they were living in lower Manhattan while focusing
on their careers and each other, doing their best to live normal lives. She explained:
"We go to the movies, we go out to dinner, and we never, never have a
problem. We're not real provocative. We don't inspire cloak-and-dagger tactics."
Despite his initial trepidations regarding marriage, Cruise also seemed to enjoy being
a husband. The star told Rolling Stone in 1990 that he and Rogers always visited each
other on set and offered unconditional support to one another. He even gave her
credit for his emotional "Born on the Fourth of July" performance, saying,
"I wouldn't have been able to make it through 'Born,' I don't think, without her being there."
When asked about his romantic past,
Cruise told the mag he had never been in love before Rogers and that meeting her
changed everything. Confessing he had been lonely and angry as a single guy, he gushed:
"I care about my wife more than anything in the world. She's my best friend. I just
really like being with her, you know? I love her."
In a bizarre twist, on January 16, 1990 — less than a week after that Rolling
Stone interview was published — Tom Cruise and Mimi Rogers announced their divorce.
Speculation about the reason was rampant. Perhaps fame was an issue. Recalling her first brush with
Cruise's superstardom, Rogers told the Chicago Tribune that attending the 1986 premiere of
"The Color of Money" as his girlfriend was a wild time. As she described the scene:
"There were 10 million photographers, all going mad, pushing and shoving, trying to get a picture
of Tom and Paul Newman and Marty Scorsese. I was just madly trying to get out of the way."
"Heh heh, it's like a nightmare, isn't it?"
She did have specific concerns. For one, she was adamant that her career stay separate from
her husband's, saying that she deserved to be treated as an actor in her own right.
She also worried about the possibility of being cast in a film opposite her husband,
perhaps because of the media frenzy that would go along with it. Still, it may not have been
the fame that came between them, but their age gap. Rogers later told The Telegraph in 2001:
"The stardom wasn't really a problem. What did annoy me was the age thing. Some of the
tabloids brought it up all the time, and exaggerated the gap between Tom and me."
Tom Cruise may be the most well-known Scientologist in the world, but it
was actually Mimi Rogers who introduced him to the religion. As The Hollywood Reporter noted,
Rogers' father was an avid member and so was she. Rogers shared her religion with Cruise
and brought him to his first meetings at a Scientology center in Hollywood.
"'What is this?' you know? They said, 'Scientology.' I
said, 'Oh, I'm very interested.' And hat's when I became a Scientologist."
However, the church played a role in their demise as a couple, according to
Marty Rathbun. Vanity Fair described Rathbun as the number two man in the organization,
second only to David Miscavige. He confessed to helping break up Rogers and Cruise,
and later, Cruise and Nicole Kidman, saying:
"I participated in the Mimi divorce and in the Nic divorce. Both women got cold
on Miscavige. He was integral to the breakup of the marriages."
However, as Rogers tells it, it was a different religion
that drove them apart. Speaking with Playboy in 1993, she said,
"Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. At least for that period of time,
it looked as though marriage wouldn't fit into his overall spiritual need. He thought
he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument. My instrument needed tuning."
Fame, religion, age — these factors were all blamed for Tom Cruise and Mimi Rogers'
divorce. But according to two authors who wrote unauthorized biographies about Cruise,
none of those were the true cause of the split. Wensley Clarkson,
who wrote "Tom Cruise: Unauthorized," told Entertainment Weekly that he believes
they simply matured in different directions, speculating that Cruise just "outgrew" Rogers.
Andrew Morton, who penned "Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography," made a similar case,
quoting an interview with Talk magazine in which Cruise shared,
"It was just two people who weren't meant to work
and it wasn't what I wanted for my life. I think you just go on different paths."
Morton also cited a statement made by the couple after their split in which they appeared to imply
they had tried their best, but it just wasn't meant to be. They said in a joint release:
"While there have been positive aspects to our marriage, there were some issues
which could not be resolved even after working on them for a period of time."
Tom Cruise met his second wife, Nicole Kidman, on the set of 1990's "Days of Thunder" while he
was still married to Mimi Rogers. They were instantly drawn to each other and weren't
shy about telling Vanity Fair in 1995 that it was a sexual connection. Kidman gushed:
"I thought he was the sexiest man I'd ever seen in my life, so it started on lust."
Cruise was in full agreement, adding:
"Instant lust, that's what I felt. I thought she was amazingly sexy and stunning."
"You can do this at home at night. You don't have to do this on the…what, is the tension there?"
"Well with Nicole, it's always very exciting."
According to Andrew Morton's "Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography," that connection was
the catalyst for Cruise leaving Rogers, writing that Cruise's legal team filed
for legal separation on December 9, 1989 – in the middle of shooting for "Days of Thunder."
However, the public didn't learn about the split until over a month later, and that was on purpose.
As journalist Richard Corliss, who interviewed Cruise at the time, explained in Morton's book,
"His marriage to Mimi Rogers was a fiction he wanted to maintain — at least until the
magazine profiles attending the release of 'Born on the Fourth of July' were published."
In the end, Cruise's divorce from Rogers was finalized in February 1990, per Us Weekly,
and he married Kidman in December 1990.
"Good, good. How tall are you?"
Following their divorce, Tom Cruise didn't waste any time moving on. As for Rogers, it took her a
little longer to meet her new beau — producer Chris Ciaffa — but the pairing proved to be a
lasting one. They married in 2003, had two kids and, as of 2022, they are still happily married.
Clearly, both exes have moved on from one another, but even so, Rogers hasn't been able to fully
escape her past. She didn't mince words when she announced she was sick and tired of being asked
about her ex. In 1995, she told People she was tired of answering questions about him. Then,
in 2006, she told Today she was still getting questions about Cruise anyway, saying:
"I've had two kids since then, I can barely remember my own name let
alone be remembering something almost seventeen years ago."
Apparently, reporters simply couldn't resist asking her questions about the actor's personal
life, and she wasn't exactly appreciative. As she told the outlet, not only was she not interested
in the topic, but she also wasn't exactly qualified to share an opinion on the matter.
"Any time anything happens with him I get a call:
'What do you think of Katie? What do [you] think about this?' [...] 'Do you think he'll
be a good father?' How do I know any more than I would know what kind of parent you would be?"