Inside Tom Cruise’s Brief (but Intense) First Marriage, to Mimi Rogers

Tom Cruise, star of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, is about to celebrate a whopping 45 years in Hollywood. Over the years, his offscreen life has captured nearly as much attention as his onscreen performances—particularly his marriage to Nicole Kidman, which began in 1990 and ended 11 years later. Before then, though, Cruise had relationships with several other actresses and artists—including Cher. In 2018, the Oscar winner dished about their fling in the Daily Mail. She and Cruise bonded, Cher said, in 1985, at a White House event organized by Nancy Reagan.

“The White House invited a group of dyslexic people to an event to talk about this learning disorder that, oddly enough, both Tom and I suffer from,” explained the singer and actor, who is 15 years older than Cruise. “Of course, nothing happened there. In fact we didn’t start dating until later. But the connection between us started that particular night.”

When they were both teenagers, Tom Cruise had a brief relationship with fellow actor Melissa Gilbert. He reportedly dated Rebecca De Mornay, his co-star in 1983’s Risky Business: “It’s no secret that Tom engaged in an intense affair during the shooting with De Mornay,” their costar Curtis Armstrong wrote in his memoir. He dated singer Patti Scialfa before she married Bruce Springsteen.

But the woman who most shaped Tom Cruise in this era was actress Mimi Rogers, who is six years his senior. Rogers’s father, civil engineer Philip C. Spickler, was a very prominent member of the Church of Scientology, and very close to its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. At the time, Rogers was also a Scientologist. (She has since left the church.) According to reporter Kim Masters, Rogers was the one who introduced Cruise to Scientology.

It took her a while to get into acting. Initially, Rogers was a social worker; she did not move to Los Angeles until she divorced her first husband, Jim Rogers, in 1980. After her move, she shared an apartment with fellow Scientologist Kirstie Alley and began her career as a performer on television, in episodes of series of the time like Hill Street Blues and Magnum, P. I.

Mimi Rogers y Tom Cruise en la premiere de El color del dinero en 1986, cuando aún eran novios.Jim Smeal/Getty Images

When she met Cruise in 1985, he was already a superstar—he was preparing to film Top Gun—and she was still waiting for her big break. (Her first starring film role didn’t come until 1987, when she headlined Ridley Scott’s Someone to Watch Over Me.)

A year later, Cruise confirmed in a cover interview for Rolling Stone that he was with Rogers, whom he had met at a party and found to be an “extremely brilliant” woman. At the time, he was 23, and she was 29. In 1987, they became husband and wife at an intimate ceremony in upstate New York, with a few witnesses as guests—including Cruise’s close friend Emilio Estevez, who had recently broken an engagement to Demi Moore.