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Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes's Relationship Timeline: A Look Back

Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise were married for nearly six years before they called it quits.

Krista Carter is a writer and editor with nearly a decade of experience working in beauty and fashion.

Has anyone ever been more in love than couch-jumping Tom Cruise and  Katie Holmes ? We'll wait. Beginning in 2005, the actress and  fashion icon  (not just anyone can  pull off socks over sweatpants , alright?) engaged in a whirlwind romance with PDA-filled red carpet appearances that solidified their public image as TomKat. Within a year of meeting, they were engaged and welcomed a child together. A few months later, they tied the knot (Holmes's first marriage and Cruise's third). While many believed that the union wouldn't last — and it ultimately didn't — the pair still went on to share nearly six years together as husband and wife.

Since their 2012 divorce, we're remembering the Hollywood couple that once gave every teenager a glimmer of hope that it was possible — although highly unlikely — that maybe, just maybe, the dream of marrying their celebrity crush could become a reality.

Here's a look back at Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's relationship.

April 2005: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes first meet and are spotted together

As the story goes, after Cruise divorced  Nicole Kidman  and subsequently  split from then-girlfriend Penelope Cruz , the  Mission: Impossible  actor's beloved Church of Scientology set out to find him a worthy (and malleable) wife. After reportedly courting (and ultimately scaring off) famous women like  Sofía Vergara  and  Scarlett Johansson , the task proved more difficult than expected.

Eventually, church officials' prayers were answered through a  Seventeen  article,  per HuffPost . In October 2004, Holmes (then  engaged to Chris Klein ) told the teen magazine, "I used to think that I was going to marry Tom Cruise." 

Six months later, Klein and Holmes announced their breakup, and on April 27, 2005, Cruise and Holmes were first spotted together in Rome. TomKat made their red carpet debut as a couple two days later on April 29 at the David di Donatello Awards. Coincidence? We may never truly know.

"When I met Tom, I was completely in love, and, yes, I admired him growing up — he's Tom Cruise!" she reportedly told  T: The New York Times Style Magazine  ( via  People ).

May 23, 2005: Tom Cruise declares his love for Katie Holmes on The Oprah Winfrey Show

Cruise jolted daytime television when he appeared on  The Oprah Winfrey Show  and ecstatically jumped on her couch while professing love for his new girlfriend (who he subsequently brought out from backstage). The appearance went viral, with many questioning Cruise's sanity, as well as the relationship's authenticity.

June 16, 2005: Tom Cruise announces engagement to Katie Holmes

Gregg DeGuire / WireImage / Getty Images

Shortly after going public with their relationship, Cruise announced at a press conference for  War of the Worlds  that he and Holmes were engaged. According to  The Hollywood Reporter , Cruise, then 43, proposed to Holmes, then 26, with a five-carat yellow diamond ring at a restaurant atop the Eiffel Tower.

"Today is a magnificent day for me; I'm engaged to a magnificent woman," he said, per  People . 

April 18, 2006: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes welcome their first child together

Holmes gave birth to a baby girl, Suri, in Santa Monica, California, in April 2006. Their newborn daughter made her public debut on the October 2006 cover of  Vanity Fair. 

The  Dawson's Creek  alum  told the magazine , " The moment the doctor handed me Suri, I was just ready. The feeling is indescribable. All I can say is the moment I looked in her eyes, I felt like ... Mom." 

Since then, the celeb offspring and fashionista has inspired one of our favorite pop culture artifacts of all time:  Suri's Burn Book . 

November 18, 2006: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes get married

Robert Evans / Handout via Getty Images

In November 2006, the  Batman Begins  actress's schoolgirl fantasy of marrying Cruise came true. Their wedding was marked by an extravagant ceremony and reception at an Italian castle that cost more than $3 million, according to E! Online .

The star-studded guest list included couples  Jennifer Lopez  and Marc Anthony, John Travolta and the late Kelly Preston, and  David Beckham  and  Victoria Beckham , among others. As for the bridal party, Holmes had her sister Nancy Blaylock as maid of honor, while Cruise chose Scientology leader David Miscavige as his best man.

June 2012: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes divorce

John Shearer / WireImage / Getty Images

Interestingly, after Cruise gave a  Playboy  interview in which he praised Holmes, she filed for divorce. Although the  Top Gun  star admitted that he "didn't expect" the divorce —  per CBS News  — the legal proceedings ran smoothly, and a settlement was reached in just 11 days.

Cruise and Holmes have rarely spoken on the record in regard to their split, but it's rumored that Holmes's motivation was to free her daughter from the unique constraints of Scientology. During his deposition against Bauer Media Cruise (whose tabloids claimed he'd abandoned Suri), Cruise was asked if Holmes left him "in part to protect Suri from Scientology." 

Insulted, he said, "There is no need to protect my daughter from my religion." 

However,  according to ABC News , when prodded again, specifically as to whether Holmes had mentioned that she was leaving in an effort to protect Suri from Scientology, Cruise responded, "Did she say that? That was one of the assertions, yes."

Holmes was granted primary custody of Suri in their divorce. Though Cruise was afforded ample visitation, it was widely reported that he rarely saw his daughter. In 2016,  InTouch Weekly  asserted  that the actor hadn't seen or spoken to his youngest child in over 1,000 days (or two-and-a-half years).

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A Complete Timeline Of Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes's Relationship

TomKat happened quickly. In spring 2005, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were about to begin dating one another in a highly publicized romance, surprising fans and the media. But even more surprising was the speed at which their romance progressed. Within weeks of meeting, the two became engaged. Within less than a year, they were expecting a baby. Suri Cruise was born in 2006.

Scandals related to Cruise's erratic behavior plagued the union, and rumors swirled that Scientology was behind the pairing. Many also believed the relationship was a publicity stunt - both Cruise and Holmes had movies coming out during the beginning of their romance, the height of their very public courtship.

Although Cruise was venerated in 2005 for his successful movies , his career has since taken a downhill turn. Exposés about Scientology have discredited the church and its followers, and Cruise's odd behavior makes him an eccentric figure in the minds of many. Cruise and Holmes's whirlwind romance ended in divorce, but it's hard to forget the strange Scientology-laden saga of their relationship.

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October 2004: In An Interview, While Engaged To Chris Klein, Holmes Said She Always Wanted To Marry Tom Cruise

While Katie Holmes was still engaged to actor Chris Klein, she told Seventeen magazine, "I think every little girl dreams about her wedding. I used to think I was going to marry Tom [Cruise]."

Just two months later she broke off her engagement with Klein. The pair had begun dating as teenagers , and they said the split was as amicable as could be.

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April 2005: Cruise Asks To Meet With Holmes

After Holmes told Seventeen magazine she dreamed as a child of marrying Tom Cruise, the actor contacted Holmes's manager and asked to meet with her. The meeting happened under the pretense that the creators of Mission: Impossible  were considering Holmes for a role.

Holmes said of first seeing Cruise, "I knew in an instant that we were going to be together, that we were going to get married."

April 2005: Cruise And Holmes Go On A Series Of Dates

After a four-hour meeting with Cruise, Holmes and Cruise went on a series of dates . A simple dinner date with Cruise was no ordinary event: the pair ate in his private jet. Their next date was on the back of Cruise's motorcycle on a ride to the beach.

Holmes was enamored: "Here I was in Los Angeles [on] my first motorcycle ride to the beach. It was all so amazing and fast. I was in love from the moment I shook his hand for the first time."

April 27, 2005: The Pair Make Their First Public Appearance In Rome

Cruise and Holmes, less than a month after meeting for the first time, made their first appearance as a couple in Rome, Italy.

They attended the David di Donatello film awards together. 

May 2005: Cruise Jumps On Oprah's Couch While Declaring His Love For Holmes

In a now infamous interview, Cruise appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show , where he displayed erratic behavior . He jumped up and down on Winfrey's couch and, with conviction, fell to his knees as he expressed excitement about his relationship with Holmes.

Winfrey later told the press she was confused by Cruise's behavior, and a poll on People found his actions convinced 63% of readers the Cruise-Holmes union was a publicity stunt.

June 2005: Holmes Explores Scientology

After Holmes started dating Cruise, she began making decisions that upset those close to her. For one, she fired her manager and publicist for undisclosed reasons. She also began exploring the Church of Scientology, which Cruise belonged to. The Church of Scientology assigned Holmes a "Scientology assistant" named Jessica Rodriguez, who followed Holmes everywhere she went.

In an interview with W magazine, Rodriguez was present to coach Holmes through her answers. Holmes  said of Scientology, "You know, it's really exciting.. I just started auditing, and I'm taking some courses, and I really like it."

A source told  People  magazine that Holmes never became a "full-fledged member" of the church.

June 2005: They Were Engaged Just Eight Weeks After Meeting

The pair got engaged in June, just eight weeks after their first meeting in April. Cruise proposed at the top of the Eiffel Tower, where the two dined at Le Jules Verne. Shortly after, Cruise called a press conference to announce their engagement.

In a callback to when Cruise leaped off Oprah Winfrey's couch, he said of the wedding, "I’ll be jumping on couches for a very long time."  People reported that Holmes and Cruise didn't touch during the entire press conference.

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Mid-2005: Holmes Turns Down A Role In 'Factory Girl,' Allegedly Due To Scientology's Views On Psychiatry

Holmes was originally slated for a role in Factory Girl , which the Weinstein Company released in 2006. The movie is about actress-model Edie Sedgwick, known for starring in Andy Warhol's films. Holmes dropped out of the project at the last minute, however.

The media speculated Holmes's decision was a reflection of her newfound involvement in Scientology, which doesn't believe in psychiatry. Throughout her life, Sedgwick was in and out of mental institutions and perished from taking too many hard substances.

Cruise also said in an interview that he didn't want Holmes to play victims and preferred she stick to portraying strong women.

October 5, 2005: Holmes And Cruise Announce They're Expecting A Baby

In early October, six months after meeting, Cruise and Holmes announced they were expecting their first child together.

Cruise had already adopted his ex-wife Nicole Kidman's children, and the baby would be Holmes's first.

April 2006: Suri Cruise Is Born During What Might Have Been A 'Silent Birth'

Scientology practices silent births , where the person giving birth is supposed to be completely quiet, "as calm and no-talk as possible." The birth is also supposed to feel relaxing for the mother.

It's possible Holmes went through this process when delivering Suri.

September 2006: Holmes And Cruise Present Suri To The Public

Holmes and Cruise introduced Suri to the public in early September, four months after her birth. Because the pair waited so long to share a photo of the child, people began speculating Suri was ill, or that Cruise and Holmes had made up the pregnancy entirely to garner publicity for their films  War of the Worlds and Batman Begins , respectively.

Holmes and Cruise chose Vanity Fair as the magazine where Suri made her debut .

November 2006: Holmes And Cruise Wed In Italy

Over a year after their engagement, Holmes and Cruise tied the knot at a ceremony in Bracciano, Italy. They had their wedding at Odescalchi Castle and spent $3 million on the ceremony. Giorgio Armani, himself a wedding guest, designed the two dresses Holmes wore that night - Swarovski crystals adorned one of the dresses, which is rumored to have taken 305 hours to make.

Holmes's friends were notably absent from the wedding. Celebrities and Scientology officials were the primary guests in attendance. Stars like John Travolta, Jennifer Lopez, and Will and Jada Pinkett Smith came to the event. But Holmes's Dawson's Creek co-stars were missing.

May 2010: Holmes Performs A Seductive Dance For Cruise At A Charity Event

In May 2010, Holmes and Cruise performed together to raise money for the Motion Picture and Television Fund.

Holmes performed a sultry dance to "Whatever Lola Wants," while Cruise had his own choreography.

March 2011: Holmes Stops Talking About Cruise As Often As She Once Did

Holmes eventually stopped speaking about Cruise like she did in the beginning of their relationship. She no longer gushed over her husband, instead focusing more on talking about her acting roles.

She told  Marie Claire , "I feel ready. For the next chapter in my life. I’m excited to begin a new phase: roles I might have been afraid to play, places I want to travel with my daughter."

June 2012: Cruise Premieres His Film 'Rock of Ages' Without Holmes

In June 2012, Cruise showed up to the premiere of his film Rock of Ages . Holmes was notably absent. Cruise made brief mention of Holmes on the red carpet, calling her "an amazing woman."

He also raved about Holmes in an interview with Playboy :

She is an extraordinary person, and if you spent five minutes with her, you’d see it. Everything she does, she does with this beautiful creativity. She’s funny and charming, and when she walks into the room, I just feel better. I’m a romantic. I like doing things like creating romantic dinners, and she enjoys that.

June 2012: Holmes And Cruise File For Divorce

Holmes is rumored to have thought Cruise might send their daughter Suri to the Sea Org, a Scientologist organization where children are subjected to forced labor at sea. Holmes filed for divorce, and just 10 days later, the pair reached a settlement that gave Holmes custody of Suri .

The settlement allegedly prevents Suri from becoming involved with Scientology. Because Scientologists have to cut off family members who leave the church, Cruise has gone for long periods of time without seeing Suri.

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Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s Relationship Timeline: The Way They Were

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Out of the spotlight. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes ' marriage — and subsequent split — has been a major topic of conversation over the years. The couple first sparked dating speculation after they were seen on a trip to Europe together in 2005. Following a whirlwind romance, Cruise and Holmes got engaged later that year before welcoming their daughter in 2006. During their courtship, the Abandon star confirmed that she was going to convert to Scientology. "You know, it's really exciting," Holmes told W Magazine in 2005 about the controversial religion. "I just started auditing and I'm taking some courses and I really like it. I feel like it's really helping." The Dawson's Creek alum exchanged vows with the Top Gun: Maverick star in 2006, shortly after they expanded their family. Cruise and Holmes shocked fans when they announced their separation in June 2012 after five years of marriage. At the time, a source exclusively told Us Weekly that the Batman Begins actress was "very happy" that she could "move on and finally live her life." Less than one year later, the Oscar nominee noted in an interview that that he "didn't expect" his ex to file for divorce in 2012. Holmes, for her part, opened up about making plans to return to her acting career. "Even early on, when I was a young actor and all of a sudden people knew who I was, my dad told me, 'Don't let that change how you live your life.' I've always sort of approached it that way," she detailed to DuJour magazine in 2014. "You have to continue to do the things you want to do and not let outside forces dictate." The New York native continued: "I think I've gotten more comfortable with acting over time. Early on, I could never get out of my head. I'd be thinking, 'I have to get the job.' And even when I had the job, I was afraid that I was going to get fired, or I just had the mentality of, 'I need to be good enough.'" Holmes said she was looked forward to getting to explore her passion again, saying, "But the more projects you do, the older you get, the more life experience you get, you start to understand storytelling better. So you're a little bit more confident going in. You're not afraid of getting fired: You just want to contribute." The Miss Meadows star clarified that she didn't blame her marriage for her career hiatus. "It's the life of an actor. We don't really have a lot of choice in the matter. You have dry spells, and then you have times when there is a lot of opportunity," she concluded. Nearly a decade after ending her marriage, Holmes opened up about the challenges of being a single mother. "That time was intense," she recalled to InStyle in April 2020. "It was a lot of attention, and I had a little child on top of it. [We] had some funny moments out and about in public. ... I feel like I can be more creative and have more time, have my voice." Holmes dated Jamie Foxx from 2013 to 2019. She was later linked to chef Emilio Vitolo and Bobby Wooten III. Cruise, for his part, previously sparked romance rumors with Hayley Atwell but has remained tight-lipped about his personal life.Sign up for Us Weekly's free, daily newsletter and never miss breaking news or exclusive stories about your favorite celebrities, TV shows and more! Scroll down to relive Cruise and Holmes' relationship:

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Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes: A Look Back at the Whirlwind Romance, High-Profile Marriage and, Of Course, Couch-Jumping

Wow. Would you think me naive for being shocked at the news of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes divorcing? (I can hear you yelling YES.) The thing is, they always seemed so gritted-teeth determined to PROVE they were in LOVE, I just kind of went along with it.

In any case, the five-year marriage--Katie's first, Tom's third--is kaput . (As of now, reports are alleging that Katie is seeking full custody of Suri.)

And if this divorce seems more world-rocking than other celeb splits, it's probably because their romance started off so oddly and so unbelievably high-profile. Let's take a look back--it's even more stunning now than it was then, how fast all of this happened.

2005: Weeks after Katie breaks off her engagement with longtime beau Chris Klein , Tom calls her out of nowhere and asks her out. Hmm.

Los Angeles, 12-08-04<br />

Here's one of the first shots of them in public:

Tom Cruise and his new fianc?e Katie Holmes arrived in Rome early in the morning on a private airplane from the U.S.A. The couple is staying in a suite in the Hassler Hotel, the same Hotel he visited during last vacation to Rome with Penelope Cruz before their split. Tom requested an enormous bunch of red roses and a ring for Katie. The couple only left the hotel for supper at the Piperno restaurant, another place that he frequented with Penelope Cruz.

Shortly afterwards, the couch-bounce seen round the world happens.

Then, in June, Tom proposes to Katie at the Eiffel Tower. (This is them the same month.)

April 2006: Suri is born...

Katie Holmes has given birth to a baby girl named Suri. Tom Cruise's fiancé gave birth on Tuesday morning, according to Cruise’s publicist Paul Bloch. Despite speculation the actress would have her child at home in Cruise's heavily-guarded Beverly Hills mansion, the star was admitted to hospital to give birth under the supervision of a team of doctors. According to Paul Bloch: “Both mother and baby are doing well.” The 27-year-old Batman Begins star became pregnant in June, just six months after meeting Cruise, 43. They announced their engagement in France after Tom popped the question on the top of the Eiffel tower. In the days leading up to the birth, a hugely-pregnant looking Holmes has been making almost daily shopping trips to expensive boutiques in Beverly Hills, picking up designer shoes, handbags and last minute baby items. She was last seen in public three days ago, on April 15, when she was driven to Maxfield's in West Hollywood. FILE PIC-Superstar Tom Cruise and his very pregnant fiancee actress Katie Holmes are all smiles as they arrive at Beverly Hills High School to see Tom's daughter Isabella play in her championship basketball match today. Isabella is part of the Duke's Blue Devils girls basketball side who were playing a finals match. After the game, Isabella was presented with a trophy for her part in getting the team to the finals. Isabella's adopted brother Conor was also present to cheer his sister to victory and is photographed wearing a skull cap similar to the one his father was wearing.

Pictured: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes

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And not seen in public until October, when she makes her debut with her parents on the cover of Vanity Fair .

Source: sudarikova.com via Anya on Pinterest

November 2006: The couple marries in Bracciano, Italy.

Source: google.com via Sandra on Pinterest

2007: Really, this haircut was practically a third member of the relationship. Attention must be paid.

Katie Holmes shows off new hairstyle in Duesseldorf. She appeared with Tom Cruise at the Bambi Awards.

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Picture by: Schroewig / Splash News

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2008: The whole family in New York.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and daughter Suri out and about in NYC.

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Picture by: Jackson Lee/Andrew Rocke/Splash

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2009: At the Berlin premiere of Valkyrie .

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes attend the German premiere "Valkyrie" in Berlin, Germany on January 20, 2009.<br />

2010: Tom, Cruise and Suri on a trip to Prague.

Actor Tom Cruise and wife actress Katie Holmes headed out for a lovely Italian meal in Prague, Czech Republic on September 21, 2010 with their four-year-old daughter Suri and her buggy. Tom has brough his family along for the location scout that he has taken upon himself to find the best locations for the fourth Mission Impossible film for which Tom is not only the lead actor but also apart of the writer and production team on the film. Little Suri decided she was tired of pushing her cart around and had Dad give her a lift while mom took on the toys. RESTRICTIONS APPLY: USA ONLY

March 2011: Katie files a $50 million lawsuit against Star magazine, which had claimed that she was a drug addict and couldn't leave Tom because of her addiction. Her suit states that "[Katie] has no intention of leaving her husband, and is not prevented from doing so by any drug addiction." [ via TMZ ]

February 2012: Tom and Katie at the Vanity Fair Oscar party--their last red carpet appearance together, as far as I can tell from the photo wires.

February 26, 2012: Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise attending 2012 Vanity Fair Oscar Party at Sunset Towers in Los Angeles, California. Mandatory Credit: INFphoto.com Ref: infukyo-01|sp|NO UK, NO GERMANY.

June 2012: Katie and Suri have been bopping around New York for the last week without Tom.

Suri Cruise shows a wide range of expressions as she walks with Katie Holmes in NYC.

Pictured: Katie Holmes and Suri Cruise

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Picture by: Jackson Lee / Splash News

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Katie Holmes’ Dating History: Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Emilio Vitolo Jr. and More

Katie   Holmes   may tend to keep the details of her love life private, but the general public has long been intrigued nonetheless.

The Dawson’s Creek alum has been linked to many high-profile men over the years, among the most notable being Tom Cruise . While engaged to Chris Klein in 2004, she told Seventeen magazine that she “used to think that I was going to marry” the Mission: Impossible actor.

Holmes  began dating Cruise in 2005, the same year she called off her engagement to the Sweet Magnolias actor. The First Daughter star revealed her plans to convert to Cruise’s religion, Scientology, that June and they announced their engagement later that month.

The A-listers welcomed their daughter in April 2006 and tied the knot in Italy that November. Nearly six years later,  Holmes  filed for divorce. The case was finalized in August 2012 .

Holmes  spoke to InStyle in March 2020 about the aftermath of her divorce from Cruise , in which she moved with their daughter to New York City. “That time was intense. It was a lot of attention, and I had a little child on top of it,” she explained. “We had some funny moments out and about in public. So many people I didn’t know became my friends and helped us out, and that’s what I love about the city.”

A year after her divorce from Cruise, the Batman Begins actress sparked dating rumors with Jamie Foxx — the Top Gun: Maverick actor’s costar in 2004’s Collateral . The twosome mostly hid their romance from the public. They would, however, eventually part ways in 2019 after six years together .

At the time of their split, an insider exclusively revealed to Us Weekly that  Holmes   was the one to pull the plug on their relationship . News of their split came days after the Just Mercy actor was spotted with singer Sela Vave .

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The Brahms: The Boy II actress, meanwhile, went on to start dating Emilio Vitolo Jr. in September 2020. The pair were seen together in New York City on two occasions, one of which they were caught engaging in PDA . In May 2021, Us broke the news that they split .

All in all,  Holmes ’ primary focus over the last few years has been caring for her only daughter. “My child is the most important person to me, and her upbringing is paramount to my work right now,” she told Town & Country in March 2017. “It’s very important that I’m present and she has a stable, innocent childhood. I feel so blessed to do what I do, but there’s nothing in the world better than watching your child succeed.”

Scroll down to explore  Holmes ’ dating history over the years.

Credit: Shutterstock (3)

Katie   Holmes   may tend to keep the details of her love life private, but the general public has long been intrigued nonetheless. The Dawson’s Creek alum has been linked to many high-profile men over the years, among the most notable being Tom Cruise . While engaged to Chris Klein in 2004, she told Seventeen magazine that she “used to think that I was going to marry” the Mission: Impossible actor. Holmes  began dating Cruise in 2005, the same year she called off her engagement to the Sweet Magnolias actor. The First Daughter star revealed her plans to convert to Cruise’s religion, Scientology, that June and they announced their engagement later that month. The A-listers welcomed their daughter in April 2006 and tied the knot in Italy that November. Nearly six years later,  Holmes  filed for divorce. The case was finalized in August 2012 . [sendtonews type="float" key="jnXfFeqAzp-2839666-14453"] Holmes  spoke to InStyle in March 2020 about the aftermath of her divorce from Cruise , in which she moved with their daughter to New York City. “That time was intense. It was a lot of attention, and I had a little child on top of it,” she explained. “We had some funny moments out and about in public. So many people I didn’t know became my friends and helped us out, and that’s what I love about the city.” A year after her divorce from Cruise, the Batman Begins actress sparked dating rumors with Jamie Foxx — the Top Gun: Maverick actor’s costar in 2004’s Collateral . The twosome mostly hid their romance from the public. They would, however, eventually part ways in 2019 after six years together . At the time of their split, an insider exclusively revealed to Us Weekly that  Holmes   was the one to pull the plug on their relationship . News of their split came days after the Just Mercy actor was spotted with singer Sela Vave . The Brahms: The Boy II actress, meanwhile, went on to start dating Emilio Vitolo Jr. in September 2020. The pair were seen together in New York City on two occasions, one of which they were caught engaging in PDA . In May 2021, Us broke the news that they split . All in all,  Holmes ’ primary focus over the last few years has been caring for her only daughter. “My child is the most important person to me, and her upbringing is paramount to my work right now,” she told Town & Country in March 2017. “It’s very important that I’m present and she has a stable, innocent childhood. I feel so blessed to do what I do, but there’s nothing in the world better than watching your child succeed.” Scroll down to explore  Holmes ’ dating history over the years. [podcast_block]

Credit: Shutterstock

Joshua Jackson

The pair dated sometime after meeting on the set of Dawson’s Creek back in the late 1990s, but they called it quits in 1999. After dating Diane Kruger for a decade, Jackson went on to marry Jodie Turner-Smith in 2019. The pair welcomed their first child together in 2020.

Chris Klein

Sometime after breaking off things with Jackson, Holmes started dating the American Pie actor. They got engaged in 2003 and split in 2005. Klein later wed Laina Rose Thyfault , with whom he shares son Frederick, in 2015.

Holmes and Cruise were married from 2006 to 2012. She has primary custody of their daughter.

Credit: MEGA

Us broke the news of their relationship in 2015 after they were initially spotted together in The Hamptons in 2013. They had a low-key romance for six years before calling it quits in August 2019. An insider told Us at the time of their split that the two actors’ “lives were different,” adding: “His partying ways don’t fit with hers as she’s focused on raising her daughter and working.”

Credit: Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock; Courtesy Emilio Vitolo/Instagram

Emilio Vitolo Jr.

One year after her relationship with Foxx wrapped, Holmes sparked dating rumors with Vitolo Jr. in September 2020. The twosome were spotted grabbing dinner in New York City. Days later, they were caught packing on PDA in the Big Apple. Eight months later, Us confirmed exclusively that the pair split. "Katie and Emilio really enjoyed their time together — it just simply didn't work out," a source told Us at the time. "She's focusing on being a mom and her upcoming projects."

Credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP/Shutterstock

Bobby Wooten III

In April 2022, Holmes was spotted kissing and holding hands with the musician during a New York City outing. Wooten was also photographed hugging Katie's mother, Kathy Holmes, during the fun day in Central Park.

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Tom cruise and katie holmes: a timeline.

THR revisits the major milestones for the divorcing couple, dubbed "TomKat" by the media.

By Seth Abramovitch

Seth Abramovitch

Senior Writer

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Tom Cruise Katie Holmes 2009 - H 2012

From a childhood crush to hyperspeed courtship, parenthood and a storybook wedding, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes ‘ Hollywood romance seemed to defy all odds. But the fairytale ended today, with news that Holmes has filed for divorce from Cruise, short of their sixth anniversary. Here now is a chronology of major events in their high-profile, and ultimately doomed, relationship.

1980s According to later interviews, as a young girl growing up in Toledo, Ohio, Holmes always had a crush on Tom, her movie star idol.

October 2004 A year after she’d left her defining role as Joey Potter on Dawson’s Creek , Holmes gives an interview to Seventeen magazine, in which she says, “I think every little girl dreams about (her wedding). I used to think I was going to marry Tom Cruise.”

April 2005 Katie meets Tom for the first time, ostensibly regarding a role in Mission: Impossible 3 .

STORY: Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes Divorcing 

April 27, 2005 The couple makes their new love public by appearing together in Rome, where Cruise had traveled to receive a David di Donatello Award for lifetime achievement. Both had major films ( War of the Worlds and Batman Begins ) coming out around the time, leading many to speculate the romance was a publicity stunt.

May 23, 2005 Cruise appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show and declares his love for Holmes, prompting him to punch the floor, grab Winfrey’s hands and, most memorably, jump on her couch with joy. He also pulls Holmes out from backstage. The appearance instantly becomes infamous, known as Cruise’s “couch jumping” episode.

June 13, 2005 Holmes converts from Catholicism to the Church of Scientology.

June 16, 2005 The couple announce their engagement, just shy of eight weeks from having first met. Cruise proposed to Holmes in Paris at the Eiffel Tower at a restaurant on the Tower’s second floor. He does not get on one knee, but he presents her with a ring reportedly containing a five-carat yellow diamond. She says yes. No date is announced.

June 24, 2005 Cruise and Matt Lauer face off for a heated argument on The Today Show over comments Cruise made criticizing Brooke Shields for using the anti-depressant drug Paxil to battle postpartum depression. Cruise calls Lauer “glib” in his defense of psychiatry as a real branch of medicine.

October 6, 2005 The couple, dubbed TomKat by the media, announce they are expecting a child.

December 1, 2005 Cruise purchases a sonogram machine to track his baby’s development, eliciting a warning from The Food and Drug Administration saying private use of a sonogram violates the law.

April 18, 2006 At Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., Holmes gives birth to a baby girl weighing 7 pounds, 7 ounces. They name her Suri . A statement from the couple on the significance of the name says Suri “is a word with origins in both Hebrew and Persian. In Hebrew, it means ‘princess’ and in Persian, ‘red rose.’”

VIDEO: Tom Cruise on Becoming Stacee Jaxx in ‘Rock of Ages’ 

November 18, 2006 At a lavish affair at the 15th-century Odescalchi Castle in Bracciano, Italy, the couple wed. Holmes wore a Giorgio Armani gown featuring an ivory skil train adorned with lace and Swarovski beaded crystals. Cruise wore a navy-blue tuxedo, also by Armani. Celebrities in attendance include Will and Jada Pinkett Smith , Jim Carrey , Jenna Elfman , Victoria and David Beckham , Jennifer Lopez and then-husband Marc Anthony , Jerry Bruckheimer and JJ Abrams .

August 22, 2006 Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone announces that Paramount Pictures is ending its 14-year relationship with Cruise, citing the damage done by his various public controversies to his box office viability.

January 15, 2008 An internal Scientology video featuring Cruise discussing what the Church means to him is leaked onto Gawker.com, and instantly goes viral. The video inspires scores of parodies.

August 14, 2008 Tropic Thunder opens, in which Cruise wears heavy makeup and a fat suit to play Les Grossman, an obnoxious, hip-hop-loving studio executive. His performance earns positive reviews, and is seen as a step towards improving Cruise’s public image.

September 21, 2009 Suri is photographed by paparazzi wearing high heels.

June 15, 2012 Cruise plays against type again, starring as Stacee Jaxx, a hair-metal rock star in New Line’s Rock of Ages . The film underperforms, taking in $14.4 million at the box office in its opening weekend, giving it a third-place finish. Still, Cruise receives positive notices for his portrayal.

June 29, 2012 Holmes files for divorce from Cruise, making it the third divorce for him and her first. In a statement to the media, Cruise’s attorney calls it “a private matter” and that her primary concern is “her daughter’s best interest.” Cruise’s rep offers that the actor is “deeply saddened” about the news and is “concentrating on his three children.”

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Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes Divorce Settlement: 6 Unsolved Mysteries

Six unanswered questions in the wake of the former couple’s swift and secretive divorce settlement, from how the two met to how much money Katie will get.

Lizzie Crocker

Danny Moloshok / Landov

How did they meet?

Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise ’s whirlwind romance was a mystery from the day they met. They made their first public appearance in Rome on April 27, 2005. One month later Cruise, then 42, was bouncing up and down on Oprah’s couch, flailing his arms as he announced to the public that he was crazy ... in love with the 26-year-old actress. In a 2007 interview with Harper’s Bazaar , Holmes said their first date was “in Los Angeles, my first motorcycle ride ... to the beach. It was amazing and fast. I was in love from the moment that I shook his hand for the first time."

Somehow the paparazzi missed that public display of affection, perhaps because Holmes made it up after watching Top Gun one too many times, while strapped in a chair in a dark dungeon wearing some device that forced her not to blink (you never know with these two). In his book , Blown for Good: Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology , former Scientologist Marc Headley claimed that Cruise “auditioned” a series of actresses to play the role of his wife, including Penélope Cruz, fellow Scientologist Erika Christensen, and Scarlett Johansson. Holmes reportedly was scouted for the part after she said in an interview that she’d like to marry Tom Cruise. Somewhere between the Sistine Chapel and the Church of Scientology, Holmes got pregnant with Suri, who was born only one year after the couple “met” in Rome.

Were they ever actually in love?

Absolutely, if the robotic declarations of love that effused from Holmes’s mouth in the early years were sincere. “I’ve found the man of my dreams,” Holmes told W magazine in an interview six weeks into dating Cruise, at which point she was already engaged. “From the moment I met him, it just felt like I’d known him forever. I was blown away. He’s the most incredible man. He’s so generous and kind, and he helps so many people, and, um, he makes me laugh like I’ve never laughed, and he’s a great friend ...” Robert Haskell, who interviewed Holmes and wrote the W cover story, astutely noted: “This is how the conversation begins; this is also how it continues, and how it ends. No question can do much to change its course.” Did it ever cross her mind that maybe they were rushing into things? “Tom is the most incredible man in the world.” Did she feel even the slightest bit of pressure from Cruise to get married? “That’s ludicrous, because I mean, you have to know Tom. He is the most loving, generous man who ... first of all, he wants to help people. He doesn't put pressure on people. He is the kindest, smartest, most adoring man. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be with him.”

Seemingly, not much had changed as of March 2007, when Holmes talked about her hubby in Harper’s Bazaar. “Tom makes me feel like the most beautiful woman in the world and has since the day I met him. I love being with him. I love calling him husband." Katie has been more focused on motherhood in recent years, though Tom continued gushing about their love up to a few months ago. “I’m just happy, and I have been since the moment I met her, ” he told Playboy while promoting Rock of Ages . “What we have is very special.”

When did the “honeymoon phase” end?

In the interview with W, Holmes vowed she and Cruise would “always be in the honeymoon phase.” The rose-colored glasses have since come off and the honeymoon phase presumably ended some time ago—but when exactly? One might posit that Holmes was beginning to see straight in the fall of 2009, when she enrolled daughter Suri in a Catholic pre-school . No home-schooling with a Scientology chaperone for her.

How much of Tom Cruise’s $250 million net worth will Katie Holmes get?

We can only guestimate on this one, since no details were released in the divorce settlement, though Holmes asked for a “suitable amount” in child support from Cruise in her divorce papers. According to their 2006 prenuptial agreement, Time reported , Holmes is entitled to at least $15 million—$3 million a year for each year they were married. Who gets the Beverly Hills manse? And the one in the Hollywood Hills? And the three other properties they share?

Their prenup states that Katie is entitled to keep the $35 million, 10,286 square-foot Beverly Hills mansion she and Cruise purchased in April 2007, as reported in The Daily Mail . Of the four other homes that the former couple shared, Cruise gets to keep the Hollywood Hills house, as well as the ranch in Telluride, Colo., since he bought them both before he met Holmes. We’ll have to wait and see about their $15 million brownstone in Manhattan and another mansion in Montecito, Calif.

Will Suri be lured back by Xenu?

For those who are unfamiliar with Xenu , the dictator of a Galactic Confederacy who figures prominently in Scientology’s mythology, he’s a pretty powerful overlord and could end up giving Suri nightmares for years. But according to TMZ , part of the divorce settlement stipulates “restrictions” on the extent to which either Cruise or Holmes can discuss religion with Suri, including Scientology, until a certain age. So at least Cruise won’t be able to reference Xenu in Suri’s bedtime stories.

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How Katie Holmes Took Control

Inside the actress's decision to leave Tom Cruise – and how she landed a speedy settlement

Katie Holmes knew she had to make a drastic change .

The actress, 33, was increasingly unhappy in her five-year marriage to Tom Cruise as she realized “she no longer had the life she wanted, in terms of her career, her way of life, everything,” a source tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story.

So she took action – quickly.

“Once she decided to go, she was done,” says the source.

With help from her unflinching attorney father Martin , she orchestrated a secretive exit strategy that included moving into a new downtown Manhattan apartment, switching cell phones and keeping her megastar husband in the dark – until a bombshell phone call in which she broke the news to him.

“She knew she had to have everything locked down before she pulled the trigger,” says the source, “because there could be no wiggle room if she didn’t want this to turn into a long, drawn-out battle.”

PHOTOS: The Holmes-Cruise Family in Happier Times

The strategy worked, and on July 9 – just 11 days after Holmes revealed her divorce filing – lawyers on both sides announced they had reached a lightning-fast settlement that sources say gives Holmes what she wanted most: primary custody of their 6-year-old daughter Suri.

Cruise, 50, will have generous visitation rights.

The still-stunned actor “was a happy man and thought he had a happy life,” says another source. “He keeps asking, ‘What’s happening?’ ”

For much more on why the marriage crumbled, the phone call that ended it all and what role Scientology will play in Suri s life, pick up this week’s issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday

Tom & Katie’s 1st Year of Marriage

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This Is Why Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes Really Divorced

Back in 2012, the former Hollywood power couple  Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes announced to the world they were getting a divorce after six years of marriage. According to Ranker , news of the A-list split sent shockwaves throughout the world of show business and sparked waves of rumors and speculation as to why the pair decided to call it quits. So, why exactly did Cruise and Holmes get divorced?

As Extra reported, the former husband and wife first began dating in 2005. In June of that same year, the former "Dawson's Creek" star revealed that she and Cruise were engaged and that  she planned to convert to Cruise's religion of Scientology. Four months later, in October 2005, Holmes announced that she was pregnant with her first child. In April 2006, the pair welcomed their baby daughter, Suri Cruise — who has undergone a stunning transformation —  and seven months later the pair tied the knot in a luxurious Italian wedding ceremony. 

As per the Mirror , the star-studded Scientologist wedding was held at Odescalchi Castle in Italy on November 18, 2006. The nuptials were attended by some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including the likes of Victoria Beckham, Jennifer Lopez, John Travolta, and the former Scientologist, Leah Remini . Holmes and Cruise looked like they were well on their way to a fairytale ending.

Katie Holmes has remained quiet about her divorce from Tom Cruise

According to InStyle , both Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise have remained tight-lipped about the exact reasoning behind their divorce. However, the "Mission Impossible" actor previously revealed that he "didn't expect" his wife to file for divorce. Although neither party has confirmed why the highly publicized breakup actually took place, there are plenty of rumors surrounding Holmes' decision to get out of the marriage. One of the primary rumors was reported by HuffPost in 2013, when Cruise discussed Holmes' aversion to raising their daughter, Suri, in the Scientology religion.

While the "Top Gun" actor was being questioned during a deposition for a defamation case involving Bauer Media, a lawyer asked whether the "Dawson's Creek" alum had requested a divorce "in part to protect Suri from Scientology," (per HuffPost). The outlet went on to say that Cruise initially reacted with frustration, indicating, "there is no need to protect my daughter from my religion." However, as the attorney continued to press Cruise on the matter, the movie star admitted that Holmes' desire to keep Suri from Scientology, " ... was one of the assertions, yes."

Despite her newfound freedom as a single woman, Radar Online reported in 2016 that Holmes had made a "secret divorce deal" with Cruise that allegedly forbid her from publicly commenting on their separation or dating someone else for five years after their breakup. Though almost a decade has passed since their divorce, the "Batman Begins" actress has still remained quiet about the situation.

Tom Cruise backed up a long-standing rumor about his divorce

The most commonly accepted cause surrounding the demise of the couple's relationship is that Katie Holmes wanted to remove herself and their daughter Suri from any involvement with the Church of Scientology. Per InStyle , Tom Cruise appeared to back up this theory by admitting that one of the reasons his ex-wife filed for divorce came down to the controversial religion itself during his defamation case against Bauer media.

During the 2013 deposition, Cruise also revealed that his daughter Suri, who was just seven years old at the time, was no longer a practicing member of the Church of Scientology (via HuffPost ). This particular revelation came as a surprise to many, primarily because those who leave the Church are deemed a "Suppressive Person" and are eventually cut off from other practicing members — which includes immediate members of their own family. According to the Mirror , Cruise and Holmes' divorce settlement afforded Holmes "sole custody" of Suri, and reportedly included "'ironclad' rulings that Suri would not be exposed to anything Scientology related."

Recommended

Tom Cruise reportedly didn't care about his relationship with Katie Holmes: 'I never saw any level of intimacy'

• Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise were married from 2006 to 2012.
• They weren't intimate with each other, according to a former member of Cruise's security team within the Church of Scientology.
• After Nicole Kidman divorced Cruise in 2001, the Church reportedly tried to find him another wife.
• During his relationship with Holmes, Cruise spent little time with her or his three children, according to the former security official.

Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise had a famous and much talked about romance. From the unforgettable moment when Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch to profess his love to all the shocking claims that have been reported about their marriage since , the former couple continue to fascinate.

But according to Brendan Tighe, a former member of Tom Cruise's security unit within the Church of Scientology , the pair did not seem close to one another throughout their marriage from 2006 to 2012.

"I never saw any level of intimacy," Tighe told the Australian magazine New Idea . "Only when they were going to the gym and the Fourth of July fireworks display in 2007 — which was also his birthday — and she presented him with a motorbike."

During his relationship with Holmes, Tighe says Cruise hardly paid attention to her or their children — Suri, his biological child with Holmes, and Isabella and Connor, who he adopted with Kidman.

"Most of the time, Katie looked like a deer in the headlights, like she was being dragged around and having a hard time keeping up with him. Cruise is on the go all the time," Tighe told The Daily Mail. "I never saw him with his kids, apart from one time in 2007 when it was his birthday."

Tighe was a Scientologist for 30 years, but left the church in 2011 after conflicts with higher command, he told The Daily Mail.

In response to questions from INSIDER, Karin Pouw, the head of public relations at the Church of Scientology, dismissed Tighe as a disgruntled ex-Scientologist but didn't deny any of his specific claims.

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"False tabloid stories like the ones you are asking about can always be sourced to the same discredited ex-Scientologists — a small group of expelled members with sordid pasts looking to make money by spreading lies," she said. "And that of course includes Brendan Tighe."

According to Tighe, the relationship between Cruise and Holmes was strange from the start. The Church of Scientology, where Cruise is one of the most powerful figures, reportedly struggled to find a partner with the right image for him after he divorced Nicole Kidman in 2001. The search was a priority for David Miscavige , the longtime head of the church, according to Tighe.

"They were looking at Hollywood stars, Tommy was getting grilled on them: Who didn't have a porn past? Who hadn't done nude scene in movies? Who hadn't a major drug history?" Tighe told The Daily Mail. "So many prospects had done something wrong, like sex movies that had been leaked; it was impossible to find someone qualified."

Tighe said the church considered Scarlett Johansson, as the friend of Scientology member Erika Christensen. According to Tighe, the church judged her on  Scientology's "tone scale,"  which supposedly measures emotion.

"Scarlett was 1.1 on the tone scale, which meant covert hostility, it's considered the worst on the backstabbing scale," Tighe said.

The reported meetings between Johansson and Cruise were also around the time they considered working together. But Johansson's longtime publicist told INSIDER the story about her interviewing to be his partner is false.

"The story is complete BS. She never 'interviewed' to date Cruise," Johansson's representative told INSIDER. "The story was fake then and always has been."

A representative for Holmes declined to comment. A representative Cruise didn't immediately respond to INSIDER's requests for comment.

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Watch: How they filmed Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane in "Mission: Impossible—Fallout"

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The Real Truth About Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes' Break-Up

There's no end to news about Tom Cruise. Some of it's great, like the fact that "Top Gun: Maverick" was his first movie to gross over $100 million on its opening weekend . Nicely done. And some of the news is a little more exciting and sometimes bizarre. Some of the more disturbing things about Cruise's life have to do with his involvement in the Church of Scientology. He's also not a bit shy to take on studio executives if he feels he has a better way of doing things. For example, when Paramount proposed a release plan for "Maverick" that would bring it to a streaming platform after only 45 days in theaters, Cruise allegedly showed up with a lawyer and insisted on a three-month theater showing.

On a more badass level, Cruise can freak out his family and friends with his insistence on doing his own stunts , some of which are outright dangerous. In 2021, when Cruise was filming "Mission: Impossible 8," fans got footage of him strapped to a 1941 Boeing B75N1 Stearman biplane, The Sun reports, and the plane flipped and nosedived while Cruise was on the wing. Clearly, there are no stuntmen required for these projects!

But perhaps most exciting of all is Cruise's relationship history and, as far as we know, no stuntmen were hired for these gigs either. He's certainly made an impression because all of his exes had things to say about time spent dating him. But of all of these exes, Katie Holmes might have the most to say.

The strange selection process for Tom Cruise's girlfriends

Before Katie Holmes came onto the scene, Tom Cruise had an unusual way of finding love. As Maureen Orth reported for Vanity Fair in 2012, the Church of Scientology had a way of vetting women to fill the role of Cruise's girlfriend. Apparently, Cruise's adherence to the church was a source of tension in two of his previous relationships with Mimi Rogers and Nicole Kidman. "There were allegations and counter-allegations about fidelity, but the central problem was Nicole did not want to deal with Scientology," a source told Vanity Fair.

Allegedly, A-listers like Sofia Vergara had been scouted but turned down the offer. Brendan Tighe, a former Scientologist, said on " Megyn Kelly Today " that Scarlet Johansson had apparently tried out for the role, a comment that garnered a response from the actor herself.

"The very idea of any person auditioning to be in a relationship is so demeaning," Johansson said in a statement, per a later publication by Vanity Fair . "I refuse for anyone to spread the idea that I lack the integrity to choose my own relationships. Only a man, a.k.a. Brendan Tighe, would come up with a crazy story like that." Orth reported on the experience of actor and activist Nazanin Boniadi as she was scouted and molded by Scientology, which included the encumbrances of being constantly accompanied by handlers. Boniadi was also never allowed to criticize the church. It didn't last, but it sure gave a heads up for what Katie Holmes was in for.

How an article for Seventeen changed everything

Of all things, it was an interview that set things in motion between Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise. In 2004, Holmes was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, after playing Joey Potter on "Dawson's Creek" and engaged to actor Chris Klein, per HuffPost . She was interviewed by Deb Baer for "Seventeen" magazine and was, naturally, being asked about upcoming wedding plans. Holmes quite innocently said, "I think every little girl dreams about (her wedding). I used to think I was going to marry Tom Cruise," (via The Hollywood Reporter ).

The behind-the-scenes workings of the Church of Scientology are unknown, but sure enough, six months after the article hit the press, Holmes and Klein broke off their engagement. Shortly after, Homes was introduced to Cruise on the pretext that there might be a part for her in "Mission: Impossible 3." However it happened, Holmes' admission of her childhood crush on that fateful day set the wheels in motion.

Baer later lamented her interview with Holmes in an op-ed for HuffPost, where she admitted that Holmes struck her as overly trusting and far too idealistic to see a relationship with Cruise for what it really was. "She was ridiculously easy prey," Baer wrote, noting that Holmes was young enough that she was still easily "starstruck" and lonely. "Once Katie was firmly in Tom's clutches, sometimes I'd lay awake at night, tossing and turning realizing that the quote I'd gotten from her at the first interview probably ruined the poor girl's life," Baer ominously wrote.

The couch-jumping episode

It's not every relationship that gets a defining moment that involves Oprah Winfrey. Maybe Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are one of the few other couples who can compete with such an illustrious milestone. For Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, it came via the infamous couch episode. It was in 2005 and Cruise was wild in the interview, throwing around power poses, fit pumps, and athletic arm swings. "Something happened to you, something happened to you," Winfrey repeated. "I'm in love," Cruise told the audience with a radiant smile, followed by the actor taking a knee and giving another low fist pump.

"We've never seen you behave this way before," Winfrey said. It was after this comment that Cruise jumped on the couch. Hey, we've always known he's done his own stunts. It was as erratic and enthusiastic as anyone could imagine but Winfrey, being the pro she is, took it in stride. Cruise then ran backstage to get Holmes, who was 26 at the time, and brought her out in front of the audience. She continued to hug Cruise and looked charmingly shy.

Cruise was supposed to be promoting his 2005 film "War of the Worlds," directed by Stephen Spielberg and distributed by Paramount Pictures. Needless to say, the production company wasn't overly pleased,  The New York Times noted, when any talk of the upcoming film was completely derailed by Cruise's antics. No one remembered a movie after that.

Suri Cruise was born in silence

Tom Cruise didn't get down on one knee when he proposed to Katie Holmes in Paris in June 2005. The two dined at one of the restaurants in the Eiffel Tower, The Hollywood Reporter notes, and it was here that Cruise asked her. While Holmes didn't get a traditional, kneeling proposal, she did get a five-carat yellow diamond ring by famed jeweler Fred Leighton.

In October 2005, the couple broke the news that they were expecting a baby. In an interview with Barbara Walters for her special "The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2005," he admitted that he made a big, baby-related purchase. "I bought a sonogram machine," Cruise said, (via People). "I am gonna donate it to a hospital when we are done," he added, admitting that he was going to perform the sonograms himself. The news was worrying to many doctors, a later article by NBC News noted, stating that such procedures should be performed by a trained professional.

Thankfully, everything went off without a hitch and daughter Suri was born on April 18, 2006 in Santa Monica, California. But there was one unusual detail. Holmes had to deliver Suri in silence. The unusual requirement hailed from Cruise's belief in Scientology, where founder L. Ron Hubbard stated that words and sounds created by pain were harmful to both the mother and the baby, Today notes. We wonder what Holmes thought of this belief.

Katie's parents were upset about the relationship

While Tom Cruise was jumping on Oprah Winfrey's couch, Katie Holmes' parents were allegedly a lot more skeptical about the budding relationship. When it came to Holmes and Cruise's 2006 wedding at the Odescalchi Castle in Italy, the Mirror notes, it was rumored that her parents were going to skip the wedding because they were so disappointed in the pending nuptials. They may have been worried about Cruise himself but they were also upset about Holmes' religious shift. She had been Catholic but dipped into the waters of Scientology, since it was a must in becoming Cruise's leading lady. As Catholics, they felt they could not attend a Scientology wedding.

Her father, lawyer Marty Holmes, wasn't one to have his leadership contested. "Marty is very rigid — it's his way or the highway," an insider told People . However, whatever differences her parents felt, they put it aside, at least for her rehearsal dinner. "It didn't take much time before I realized this Tom guy was a special guy — that he loved Katie, that he cared for her and supported her," Holmes' father said in a speech, per People. "Tom expressed his love many different ways — I like that. I respect men who are not afraid to show their feelings. I respect Tom for the commitment he has made to provide happiness and love to Katie." While they might not have loved her choice in partner, they at least stood by their daughter for part of the ostentatious events.

Why there were red flags at their wedding

Despite the fact that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes had a $3.5 million dollar wedding at the Odescalchi Castle in Lazio, Italy, there were some unusual moments about their big day. With all of the guests assembled and Cruise waiting at the front, Holmes kept everyone waiting for an uncomfortably long time. Leah Rimini, a Scientologist at the time, later wrote in her book "Troublemaker," that Cruise stood there smiling "for the next twenty minutes (but what seemed like an eternity)." Rimini also wrote that Holmes and Cruise asked her to invite Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony to the wedding, since Rimini was friends with them, per Vulture .

The wedding was, unsurprisingly, a ceremony of Scientology and, as the Mirror reports, some of the vows were a little unusual. "Girls need clothes and food, tender happiness and frills, a pan, a comb, a cat," Cruise allegedly said to Holmes as part of his vows in a way of promising to provide for her during their marriage.

Besides some of the more unusual moments, the wedding was also lavish and magical. Giorgio Armani designed both of Holmes' dresses for the day, as well as Suri's dress, per People . When asked who was responsible for the whimsy of the evening, a guest said, "It was all Katie. It was the wedding every little girl dreams of." It definitely sounds like it was unreal. "It was so beyond what your mind could compute," Remini said.

People noticed that Katie started acting robotic

While Katie Holmes looked blissed out at her wedding, people started to notice a change in her during her marriage to Tom Cruise. No doubt, the stringent requirements of a life in Scientology meant that Holmes was constantly monitored. As Maureen Orth reported for Vanity Fair , Cruise and Holmes were always surrounded by handlers, even in their own home. On top of that, Holmes had to re-start her own life so it would fit in Cruise's world. "Holmes disappeared for a couple weeks after she and Cruise met, and she distanced herself from old friends," Orth wrote. Orth also noted that in 2010, she sat with Holmes and Cruise at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where the couple was bombarded by fans throughout the entire meal. "My goodness," Orth addressed Holmes, "if this is what you go through here, what must it be like when you go outside?" Holmes replied, "Oh, we don't go outside very much."

Deb Baer, who interviewed Holmes for that famous "Seventeen" article that started it all later wrote of what she observed in Holmes throughout her marriage to Cruise. "I'd see her on Letterman or Leno, robotically calling Tom amazing for the 400th time and think, that is NOT the down-to-earth girl I met," Baer wrote for the HuffPost .

Jenna Miscavige Hill, daughter to Scientology powerhouse David Miscavige, later wrote in support of Holmes by sharing her own experience, per The Hollywood Reporter . "My experience in growing up in Scientology is that it is both mentally and at times physically abusive," she wrote.

If you or someone you know is dealing with spiritual abuse , you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233. You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website .

Tom Cruise didn't see their divorce coming

On June 29, 2012, Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise after five years of marriage, a move that allegedly blindsided Cruise, according to The Hollywood Reporter . "I didn't expect it," Cruise admitted to the German network ProSieben (via CBS News ). "Life is a tragicomedy. You need to have a sense of humor," he added. News of the divorce landed right before Cruise's 50th birthday. "To be 50 and to have experiences and to think, you have a grip on everything, and then it hits you: This is it, what life can do to you," Cruise added.

Despite Cruise's brave attitude, TMZ reported that both Cruise and Holmes were seen wearing their wedding rings after the divorce filing. Allegedly, Cruise's two children, whom he adopted with ex-wife Nicole Kidman, Connor Cruise and Isabella Cruise, stayed close by his side during the experience. "Kate has filed for divorce and Tom is deeply saddened and is concentrating on his three children. Please allow them their privacy to work this out," a rep for Cruise stated.

Meanwhile, Holmes' attorney, Jonathan Wolfe, released a statement as well, according to People . "This is a personal and private matter for Katie and her family," Wolfe said. "Katie's primary concern remains, as it always has been, her daughter's best interest." Despite the big changes to come to both of their lives, reports aired that Holmes was photographed in New York looking happy and relieved.

Why Scientology factored into their split

After the news broke about Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's divorce, Cruise admitted that a major reason for their divorce was Scientology. Radar  got access to Cruise's deposition, which was eye opening when it came to the actor's religion and the impact it had. Lawyers asked Cruise if Holmes left in order to protect their daughter, Suri, from Scientology. "Listen, I find that question offensive," Cruise heatedly responded. "I find it, those statements offensive. Like with any relationship, there are many different levels to it. You know, I, I find it very offensive. There is no need to protect my daughter from my religion."

Cruise relinquished a little during the deposition. A lawyer asked him, "And Ms. Holmes has never indicated in any way that was one of the reasons she left you? ...To protect Suri from Scientology?" Cruise replied, "Did she say that? That was one of the assertions, yes." When asked if Suri was currently practicing Scientology, Cruise said that she wasn't.

Jenna Miscavige Hill, a former Scientologist, told The Hollywood Reporter that she understood Holmes' decision to protect Suri. "As a mother myself, I offer my support to Katie and wish for her all the strength she will need to do what is best for her and her daughter," Miscavige Hill said in a statement. Holmes asked for sole custody of their daughter, so clearly she wanted to make sure that she was in charge of parenting.

Finances after their divorce

It was very advantageous for Katie Holmes that her father, Marty Holmes, was a lawyer and one who really went to bat for his daughter when she divorced Tom Cruise. Marty, of course, wasn't the only lawyer on Holmes' side, but he was a key one. In fact, he had brought his legal talent to his daughter's aid even before her wedding. He had negotiated her prenup with Cruise, a document that "reportedly filled five bankers' boxes," Vanity Fair notes. It was shrewd planning on his part. "Because of it, when Katie Holmes made her bombshell announcement late last June that she was divorcing Tom Cruise, the case was able to be resolved in a mere 11 days," the outlet noted.

Interestingly though, Holmes didn't make out with as much money as one might have expected, considering Cruise's net worth of $600 million, per Celebrity Net Worth . Cruise only gave Homes $400,000 a year for child support, which will end when Suri turns 18, according to TMZ , totaling $4.8 million. Cruise was also made responsible for any other expenses, including medical costs, related to Suri.

There was considerable speculation as to why Holmes settled for so little. As CafeMom hypothesized, Holmes was able to maintain more autonomy in how she chose to raise Suri, including schools, because it would give Cruise less control over. Had Holmes gotten more money from Cruise, he would have had more say, which might have included an education in Scientology for Suri.

How Katie started to thrive after her divorce

There was something remarkable about watching Katie Holmes after her divorce from Tom Cruise. She moved to New York City with her daughter, Suri, and friends told InStyle that Holmes was a resurrected woman, up for all that the city had to offer and eager for new adventures. "I feel like I can be more creative and have more time, have my voice," Holmes told InStyle. "It's sort of, like, just put your stuff out there and be yourself. It takes a while to be comfortable, though." Holmes admitted that she's never felt so creative and so peaceful at the same time. "You can get consumed by what people think, but suddenly you just decide to do things on your own terms," Holmes added. "I feel like I'm finally figuring that out. I'm getting the projects I want made and just relaxing a little."

Holmes found love again too with actor Jamie Foxx. The only problem was that Holmes had, as Radar  reported, signed an agreement in her divorce settlement that she wouldn't date anyone publicly for five years after her split from Cruise. On top of that, Holmes was forbidden to introduce any new love interests to Suri. Foxx and Holmes began dating in 2013 but ended up splitting after six years, People notes. However, the relationship was an emotional breakthrough for Holmes. "I don't have any fear now, I don't have a lot of rules for myself, and I don't take myself that seriously," she told People in 2014.

Tom Cruise's relationship with his children today

Tom Cruise shares two children with ex Nicole Kidman. The couple adopted Connor and Isabella Cruise, whom he remains connected to still. Isabella, who goes by Bella, is an artist and social media shy, though she does have an Instagram account where she showcases her art. Bella is still a member of Scientology and married Max Parker in London, according to the Daily Mail . Neither Cruise nor Kidman attended her wedding, which naturally led to speculation that her relationship had frayed with her parents. But she later cleared the air. "Of course [we talk], they're my parents," Bella told the Daily Mail. "Anyone who says otherwise is full of s**t."

Conner, who was born in 1995, has a few film credits under his belt and works as a DJ but, like his sister, he's media shy and rarely posts photos with his parents. However, in 2019, Conner and Cruise were photographed together in London, according to People , where they bonded over a private helicopter. Cruise learned how to fly choppers for "Mission: Impossible" because... of course he did.

As far as Cruise's relationship goes with daughter Suri, whom he shares with Katie Holmes, there's less evidence of a bond. In fact, as Hollywood Life notes, Cruise and Suri haven't been photographed together since 2012. "As challenging as things have become for him and his daughter, he still loves her," a source told the outlet in 2019 and added that Cruise hopes to rekindle the relationship.

Who else they've dated since their divorce

Tom Cruise started dating British actor Hayley Atwell in 2020 when they met on the set of "Mission: Impossible 7," where they filmed together in London and Rome. An insider on production told The Sun that they were a great pair. "Tom and Hayley hit it off from day one," the source said. "They've been meeting up after hours, and she's been to his London pad. They get on brilliantly, and both seem very happy." Atwell was even at the premiere for Cruise's next film, "Top Gun: Maverick."

However, things got rocky between the two and they split once, reconciled, got back together, and split again. In June 2022, they had called it quits, a later publication by The Sun reports. There was no evidence that Scientology was a factor in their breakup.

Meanwhile, Katie Holmes found love after Jamie Foxx with chef Emilio Vitolo but after eight months, they split in May 2021, per Us Weekly . Holmes then began dating musician Bobby Wooten III, who is ten years her junior, Page Six notes. They seem to have quite the New York romance and have been photographed smooching in Central Park and walked the red carpet at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2022 for Holme's film "Alone Together." Their relationship continues to be a delightful hit and Holmes looks happy. She's come a long way since that Seventeen article.

16 Things You Didn’t Know About Katie Holmes And Tom Cruise’s Relationship

By ActiveBeat Author

The marriage between Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise has to be one of the weirdest we’ve ever seen. From a relationship that appeared to move at the speed of light, to their erratic behavior in front of the cameras, we can’t say we were surprised when TomKat’s marriage came to an end. We’ve made a list of 16 things you may not have known about their relationship.

16. Whirlwind Romance

Tom and Katie’s relationship moved incredibly fast. In 2004, Katie told Seventeen, “I think every little girl dreams about (her wedding). I used to think I was going to marry Tom Cruise.” He was also a fan of hers. According to him, he admired the work she did in Dawson’s Creek and in film. In April 2005, they finally met when he invited her to L.A. to meet about a possible role in Mission: Impossible 3. She didn’t get the role, but she got the guy!

15. Weird Signs Of Affection

Only a month after meeting, Cruise made his famous appearance on Oprah where he confessed his love for Katie. “I’m in love! I’m in love,” Cruise exclaimed while jumping on Oprah’s couch. “I can’t be cool. I can’t be laid-back. It’s something that has happened, and I feel I want to celebrate it. I want to celebrate her. She’s a very special woman.” In a poll by People, 63 percent of readers thought Cruise’s behavior was a publicity stunt. Even Oprah admitted that Cruise was acting bizarrely.

14. Love at First Sight

According to Tom and Katie, it was love at first. “I fell for him from the minute that I shook his hand for the first time,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “Tom makes me feel like the most beautiful woman in the world.” According to Tom, he loved Katie from “the moment he met her.” “I’m a romantic. I like doing things like creating romantic dinners, and she enjoys that. I don’t know what to say – I’m just happy, and I have been since the moment I met her. What we have is very special,” he told Playboy. He knew he wanted to marry her after their first date. “As a young girl, Kate said she dreamed of marrying me. And I said I wouldn’t want to disappoint her. I knew I wanted to marry Kate when I met her. After our very first date, I was sure. So I bought the ring shortly after that first date. At one point, I thought she was going to ask me to marry her first and I put her off by changing the subject. I wanted to ask her,” he told T Magazine.

13. Quick Engagement

Cruise proposed to Holmes at the Eiffel Tower in Paris with a tear-shaped diamond back in June 2005. The couple had been dating for less than three months at the time. “Today is a magnificent day for me, I’m engaged to a magnificent woman,” he had said during a press conference at the Eiffel Tower.

12. Baby Before Marriage

Before she began dating Tom, the Dawson’s Creek actress had said that she was planning to remain a virgin until her honeymoon, but that obviously changed when she met the Oscar-nominated actor. In October 2006, less than six months after going public with their relationship, the couple announced that they were expecting. In April 2006, she gave birth to Suri.

11. Lavish Wedding

They were married on November 18, 2006, at Odescalchi Castle in Italy. The couple went to great lengths to have a lavish wedding ceremony. Katie’s dress was designed by Georgio Armani, and her veil took more than 70 hours to make. Several celebrities were in attendance including Jim Carrey, Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, Kristie Alley and John Travolta. Their daughter Suri was also in attendance, having been born earlier that year on April 18, 2006. The evening ended with an extravagant fireworks display.

10. Waiting At The Altar

Despite being a luxurious wedding, not everything went as planned. Leah Remini’s tell-all memoir, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, talks about the awkward moments at the couple’s wedding. After Tom took his place at the altar, Remini says he was left standing there “for the next twenty minutes (but what seemed like an eternity)” and tried to maintain “that everything-is-great look plastered on his face even as the crowd grew uncomfortable.” Remini sat next to her friend, Jennifer Lopez, who asked her, “Do you think Katie is coming?

9. He Performed a Song from Top Gun at the Wedding

At their wedding, the actor performed The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” to his bride. Some found this strange seeing as the song is about a failed relationship, but Katie was completely touched by Cruise serenading her, according to Leah Remini.

8. Scientology

In 1986, Tom Cruise joined the Church of Scientology. He was 24. The actor claimed the religion’s study methods helped him to come over his dyslexia and have a successful career. Since this time, his relationships have been greatly affected and controlled by the Church. Katie was heavily influenced by Cruise, and converted from Catholicism to the Church of Scientology after less than 2 months of dating, but she left after she filed for divorce from Cruise.

7. Monitoring

According to Vanity Fair, Katie and Tom never lived alone. They were closely monitored by an entourage from the Church of Scientology. In addition, Katie distanced herself from her good friends, and fired her agent, manager, and publicist. Katie was also assigned a chaperone, Jessica Rodriguez, who was referred to as her “best friend.” In 2005, Rodriguez attended Katie’s interview with W, and took over the conversation in an attempt to deflect attention away from Cruise’s involvement with Scientology.

6. He Didn’t Call Her Katie

When the two began dating in 2005, the Top Gun actor made a point of calling her “Kate” instead of “Katie.” “Katie is a young girl’s name. Her name is Kate now – she’s a child-bearing woman,” he said during an interview with All Headline News. Katie reportedly decided to start going by the name “Kate” after she discussed it with Tom.

5. Blindsided Divorce

After 7 years together, the couple divorced in August 2012. Holmes initiated the split that reportedly left Cruise blindsided. Just a month prior to the news of the divorce, Cruise gushed about his relationship with Holmes. He told Playboy, “I’m just so happy, and I have been since the moment I met her. What we have is very special.” Several reports say that Katie went about the divorce plans secretly, like using a disposable mobile phone to contact lawyers from 3 different firms in 3 separate states. There’s also claims that she leased a secret apartment in order to keep her daughter Suri safe from Scientologists. Cruise was away in Iceland at the time and was working on the film Oblivion.

4. Solid Prenup

According to a report from Gawker, Katie had a solid prenuptial agreement that enabled her to get out of her marriage with Tom quickly. Katie’s father is a lawyer and ensured that the agreement was detailed and comprehensive. Vanity Fair claimed the agreement “filled five banker’s boxes.” As part of the agreement, Katie will receive $400,000 a year until Suri turns 18 years old, plus medical and educational expenses for their daughter. In return, Katie has stayed quiet about Scientology since their divorce.

3. Her Career Suffered

Prior to her marriage to Cruise, Holmes was on her way to becoming a successful actress. In 2005, she had roles in Batman Begins and Thank You for Smoking, both of which were box office successes. However, once she married Cruise, her career suddenly stalled. While she initially took a break from movies to raise Suri, once she came back, many of her films underperformed at the box office. There were rumors that Cruise had taken control of Holmes’ career during their marriage; however, she has since negated that.

2. Defamation Case

In 2013, Tom Cruise pursued legal action against Bauer Publishing Company, which owns Life & Style and In Touch. Cruise challenged the company’s claim that he had “abandoned” his daughter after the divorce. While the defamation case was dropped later that year, some interesting details emerged about the private proceedings of Tom and Katie’s divorce. According to the deposition obtained by RadarOnline, Cruise admitted that Holmes had left him in order to protect their daughter from Scientology. When lawyers first asked him if this was true, the actor responded that he felt the question was “offensive,” and that “there is no need to protect my daughter from my religion.” When probed further as to whether or not Holmes had said she left to protect Suri, Cruise said, “Did she say that? That was one of the assertions, yes.”

1. Moving On

While Katie has remained quiet about the specifics of her divorce from Tom, it’s clear it wasn’t one of the prouder moments of her life. In a 2014 with People the actress stated, “I don’t want that moment in my life to define me, to be who I am. I don’t want that to be what I’m known as. I was an actor before, an actor during and an actor now.” She has sole custody of Suri who, according to reports, has not seen or contacted her in more than three years.

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An Inquiry Into the Very Public Private Marriage of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise

What Was That? Part I

Four months before Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise, the couple walked into the Mark Taper Forum, in downtown Los Angeles, to see a performance of Clybourne Park. A thirty­something film marketer in the audience, out with his ready-to-burst wife for one last pre-baby hurrah, turned to her and said, “If he sees you, he’ll talk to you, because you’re pregnant.

“Because that’s what Tom Cruise does,” the husband says. “He helps people.”

Sure enough, at intermission, as the expectant mother stood in line for the bathroom, Cruise told her to go ahead of them. “Katie looked great,” says the husband. “Cruise looked like a tourist: dumb designer jeans and a white button-down shirt and J.Crew earthy-type shoes. He has amazing posture. He walks on his tippy toes. He seemed to be maximizing his height with each step.”

Cruise and Holmes stood in a darkened area near the bathrooms. “Everyone’s just staring at them. And he and Katie were extremely touchy-feely. They’re giggling. He was kissing her. And everyone’s like, Wow, this is real —because no one believes it’s real. But if they weren’t real, why would they be all over each other? Everything they do in public is over-the-top. But there was practically no audience. There were only five people waiting for the bathroom.”

Soon, though, the make-out session started to take on a different complexion. “This went on and on,” the witness recalls. “He keeps kissing her. And we’re like, This is strange that they’re still kissing. Who goes out and has a make-out session with their wife? I mean, really. It felt like a poorly directed love scene. It’s like you’re kissing your girlfriend on the subway—if you kiss her fifteen times, it starts to be less cool. By the end, I was just confused.”

M:I 5—Holmes Protocol

When news broke online , on June 29, that Holmes had filed for divorce, it seemed an inevitable denouement to everyone except Cruise, who told people he’d been “blindsided” by the news. The most common story line, soon purveyed from TMZ to Us Weekly to E!, was that Katie Holmes, an American sweetheart indentured into celebrity servitude by her No. 1-box-office-star husband and mind-controlled by an evil octopus-like religious empire, had found untapped inner reserves of strength and courage and pulled off a daring, meticulously planned ninja escape to save 6-year-old daughter Suri. There were reports of disposable cell phones, fired security staff and publicists, a secretly rented apartment in a strategic jurisdiction. Right there in the newspapers every day, plain to see, were the vindicating photographs of a reborn Holmes, smile back on her face, bounce back in her step, as she went about her new life right here in New York City, happy at last. In a stroke, Holmes had rebooted the Mission: Impossible franchise with a female lead—now she was the one dropping silently on a wire into a room bristling with retinal scanners and motion detectors. In the first tent-pole role of her career, she had hit all her marks and won the summer. But as the theater lights came back on, something felt slightly off—the story too scripted; surely it concealed a more complicated human truth.

The enduring, trashy mystique of celebrity super-couples, with their cartoony portmanteaus—Bennifer, Brangelina, TomKat—has something to do with 1 + 1 = 3 fame math, but more to do with category confusion, the blurring of real people into characters and lives into plots. The tabloid media have long been seen as the main shapers of these narratives—but that view under-weights the creative input of the stars themselves, who, by the nature of their vocation and also concern for their own tiny little zones of privacy, have always been comfortable with a high level of falsehood in the public presentation of their romantic lives. TomKat took the phenomenon to a new level, making for the richest, most layered and indeterminate story of celebrity couple-dom ever told.

The most basic reason for this is Cruise. There’s a kind of unholy contiguity between Tom Cruise the man, formerly Thomas Mapother of New Jersey, and Tom Cruise the empire, brand, and action hero made flesh. He rides motorcycles, flies planes, does his own stunts—he jumped off the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world, for ­ Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol. Even his religion, Scientology, boasts a cinematic good-versus-evil morality. When it comes to women, he’s an unrelenting star-fucker (the narcissistic apex being his homonymous alliance with Penélope Cruz). His whole life is performative.

Cruise’s marriages offer a new dimension to these self-­inventions, an extra frisson, because of the presence of another human being, who would presumably have to be in on the show, whether for the money, or fame, or (apparently unlikeliest) love. Because Cruise, for all his wealth and blinding, dimpled smile, has a whole wagon train of baggage. At the heart of this story, as of all Cruise stories, is the central Cruisean mystery, the conundrum of his thought-policing religion, Scientology, and the degree to which he is in its grip. Is Cruise really the short-circuited Scientology android he appeared to be when he was first courting Holmes? A prevailing unified field theory of the Cruise-iverse—one that purports to explain everything from his PR meltdown seven years ago to his oddly theatrical relationships to the incessant rumors about his sexuality—is that everything flows out of his wacky religion. But Holmes complicated this theory. Why would a 26-year-old actress with a healthy career—Catholic, no less—fall for someone like that?

What Was That? Part II

Cruise’s boyishness and modest stature had always played oddly with the womanly glamour of his previous paramours (Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman, Cruz); he could seem more like their son than their lover. On the other hand, Holmes, the apple-cheeked innocent from Dawson’s Creek, 26 to his 43 when they met, seemed more like his daughter than his lover, cute and childlike to the point that MSNBC repeated a British tabloid claim that she was still a virgin.

As a teenager crushing on Cruise, Holmes had told her sisters, “I’m going to marry him one day,” as she recalled in a Seventeen interview in October 2004. A few months later, Cruise called Holmes’s manager and asked to meet her, ostensibly for a role in Mission: Impossible III. Holmes, who only the previous month had broken off her engagement to the actor Chris Klein, was living in New York and flew to L.A. “I knew in an instant that we were going to be together, that we were going to get married,” she would later recall. Soon Cruise was flying Holmes to Rome, where he had the bed in their $3,500-a-night hotel room strewn with rose petals.

This wasn’t real life. It was a beat sheet for a Nickelodeon special. Cruise operates at a level of bludgeoning, on-the-nose symbolism, and for his first date with Holmes, he took her on a high-speed motorcycle ride to Santa Monica. His preferred flowers to give were red roses. He flew her in his 1944 Tuskegee Airmen P-51 Warbird, which he painted with the name Kiss Me Kate. Though twice-divorced, Cruise waited only two months to propose marriage, and he did so in Paris, on top of the Eiffel Tower, after dropping to one knee and presenting Holmes with a five-carat yellow-solitaire-diamond ring. Cruise then arranged a press conference to disseminate the news. “Sometimes dreams do come true,” Holmes said. Her love for Cruise was, “like, wow … When Tom calls for me, I’m coming … I miss him right now, and it’s been like one hour.” There was a distinct staginess about the relationship: Cruise sent an armed courier to deliver a Chanel diamond necklace in the middle of an interview Holmes was doing with W. “He’s my man, he’s my man!” Holmes gushed. “Tom and I will ­always be in the honeymoon phase,” she said.

But the TomKat plot quickly threatened to go off-genre. Barely a month after meeting Holmes, Cruise made the now infamous appearance on Oprah , where he jumped on the sofa, pumped his fists, and otherwise proclaimed how gaga he was about his new girlfriend. Sixty-three percent of respondents in a People magazine poll said they ­believed the relationship was a publicity stunt. Winfrey later ­admitted to finding his behavior perplexing.

There was a certain amount of evidence for the interpretation that Scientology was behind Cruise’s peculiar mania, and that TomKat was a puppet show. Even before the engagement, Holmes converted to Scientology. In quick succession, Holmes fired her manager, her agent, and her publicist. On the promotional tour for her movie, she was accompanied by a Scientology “handler,” who, when Holmes paused before answering an interviewer’s question about how she felt about Cruise, fed her the line: “You adore him.” Holmes then said, “I feel so lucky and so—like I’ve been given such a gift.”

The narrative quickly forked into parallel stories connected only by the names of their main characters. The one found in magazines like Star and InTouch, and around the Internet, was gothic opera (“Hollywood’s Most Suspicious Couple,” Life & Style screeched in 2006). The other, peddled by Cruise and Holmes, was a saccharine fairy tale.

In the tabloid/Internet telling, even Holmes’s pregnancy was a font of sinister implications. When Cruise bought an expensive sonogram machine for home use—not all that crazy for a celebrity who has to worry about a nurse’s aide selling out intimate prenatal secrets—bloggers pronounced him the next Wacko Jacko. “Silent birth,” a Scientology practice, was something Cruise was “forcing [Holmes] into … on a boat” ( Star ), and the couple’s derelict failure to cough up Baby Suri for the hungering cameras in her first several months led to ominous speculation (birth defects?): “Baby Mystery. Where’s Suri? Inside Tom & Katie’s Big Secrets” ( Us Weekly ). The tabs, regarding Holmes as a brainwashed zombie, reveled in publishing hostage photos of Stepford Wife Katie Holmes, her “dead eyes” proof that she was being held against her will. In March 2011, Holmes told an interviewer, “Our relationship is great.” By the end of the year, though, a subtle shift had occurred in Holmes’s interviews, as she seemed to downplay Cruise’s role in her life. In a November article for Marie Claire, Galt Niederhoffer, who had directed Holmes in The Romantics, profiled the actress, calling her “a devoted wife and mother” and noting, without irony, that one of her and Holmes’s favorite BFF pastimes was “devising stories about people we do not know.” The sole reference to Cruise was a simple “husband Tom,” and there was a foreshadowing quote: “I feel ready. For the next chapter in my life. I’m excited to begin a new phase: roles I might have been afraid to play, places I want to travel with my daughter.”

Cruise seemed not to have gotten the memo. In May, just a month before Holmes dropped the D-bomb, Cruise told a red-carpet reporter, “She’s an amazing woman,” and in ­ Playboy, he called her “an extraordinary person.”

“I’m just happy,” Cruise said, “and I have been since the moment I met her. What we have is very special.”

Katie! Katie! Katie!

Around 8:30 a.m. on Friday, July 6, Day 8 of the tabloid serial “TomKat: The Divorce,” the paparazzi are clustered on the sidewalk outside Whole Foods in Chelsea. A few minutes earlier, Katie Holmes had gone in.

More shooters arrive on bicycles. This is the biggest story in the world right now, and the last week has seen a rotating encampment of Telephoto-wielding freelancers, who wait hours to get a shot of Holmes and/or Suri outside the Chelsea Mercantile building on Seventh Avenue, where Holmes has rented an apartment. There’s Jackson Lee from Splash News, a leading pap who got the first shots of George Clooney after his motorcycle accident in New Jersey in 2007. Marcus Santos, the Daily News photographer who two weeks earlier made news when Alec Baldwin allegedly punched him, has been reluctantly dispatched here. “It’s a crazy shit show,” says Santos, who has spent most of his career on disaster reporting. “None of us wants to be here.”

For the last week, the TomKat media have been shrugging off the disdain of passersby—“Vultures,” “Parasites,” “Get a life,” “Did you go to journalism school for this?”—while idly chatting about Holmes and Cruise:

“I think she’s a nice person.”

“She’s kind of gangly and dorky-looking.”

“She’s with a 50-year-old man?”

“Suri’s a bitch.”

“He’s a fruitcake,” a photographer says.

“Then how come no one’s ever come forward to say they were in a relationship with him?” asks a paparazzo.

They compare the pap-friendliness of various celebrities. Among the best are Cruise, in fact, and Hugh Jackman. Scarlett Johansson, who always runs, scowling, is “the worst.” They scoff at the hypocritical attention-seeking of celebrities (“Why do you think Alec Baldwin tweets his location?”). A middle-aged woman with curly gray hair, tinted granny glasses, and a Hawaiian shirt wanders over. She’s pet-sitting for someone in the building, and she wants to know why the media won’t pay this kind of attention to the problem of puppy mills. Craigslist has really become lax, she says. There’s a “secret kill site” on 110th Street. There’s also—

“Katie! Katie! Katie!”

Holmes, accompanied by a bald, burly off-duty police officer, has emerged from Whole Foods and begun the half-block walk back to the entrance of her building. She’s wearing a salmon blouse and blue jeans, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The puppy-mills lady is left talking to the air as eight paparazzi swoop in front of Holmes, forming a solid wall of jutting lenses that moves furiously backward, calling her name as their legs backpedal and their shutters snap, keeping a few feet ahead of her as she proceeds up the sidewalk, eyes down, her crooked half-smile fixed on her face, and then ­disappears inside the building.

An intern from People who’d followed Holmes into the ­supermarket reports that she was in the five-items-or-less aisle. Someone notes that she was wearing heels, which she rarely did with Cruise, clearly “a sign of her new freedom.” The paps have already scattered to their cars and scooters to upload the fresh pictures and try to make a sale.

The Micro-Science of Super-Couples

From the point of view of a tabloid editor, the beginning of any celebrity marriage is also the beginning of a countdown to the inevitable celebrity divorce, and the Kremlin­ology of celebrity-relationship reporting isn’t as random as it appears. The Daily’s senior gossip editor Melissa Cronin ­almost forensically tracks PR metrics. She predicted the ­Ashton Kutcher–Demi Moore split based on the dwindling number of interspousal tweets. Likewise the separation of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, who hadn’t been seen together in public in months.

The operative rule in megastar coverage is to watch what they do, not what they say. Cruise’s sunny Playboy interview in May notwithstanding, Cronin was skeptical: She had maintained a running tally on her calendar of days elapsed since Cruise and Holmes were last photographed publicly together—on April 1, in Louisiana, where he was shooting Oblivion. “We see thousands of pictures a day, and then for three months there were none.” Holmes also wasn’t doing any press with Cruise for Rock of Ages, and she didn’t attend the ceremony for his Friars Club Entertainment Icon Award ­(instead going to China for a “random ice-skating thing”). And Holmes, who early in the marriage went to Scientology’s Celebrity Centre all the time, hadn’t been seen there in months. “I was like, They’re gonna split up ,” Cronin says. Counting photos gives the closest approximation of truth in the fuzzy science of celebritology.

Cruising Cruise

Everybody knows that Tom Cruise loves to suck dick. Everybody knows that the creepy Church of Scientology “auditions” wives for him, and that his marriages are based on secret contracts written to conceal his sexuality in exchange for cash and the promise of fame. Right? That’s basically what one of our most eminent highbrow journalists recently tweeted, anyway. ( @GeraldoRivera : “Does Scientology have a special program to provide cover for closeted gay superstars?”)

You probably already know that Cruise once hired a male porn star, Chad Slater, to meet him in a boxing ring for some top-secret nude wrestling (as reported in the French gossip rag Actustar ; Cruise sued Slater for $100 million and won a default judgment). Surely you are aware that Katie Holmes was impregnated with the frozen spunk of L. Ron Hubbard, Suri’s real dad (one of the more preposterous claims aired in Andrew Morton’s biography of Cruise, yet one that the Church of Scientology felt it necessary to publicly refute). It must be old news to you that Cruise is sterile (a claim Cruise has sued various publications over, and which Nicole Kidman’s two failed pregnancies during their marriage, and the birth of Suri, would seem to rebut). And everybody knows how Marisol, wife of Matchbox 20 lead singer Rob Thomas, found him abed with TC, as a viral e-mail revealed in 2005. (A viral e-mail! That’s the source of the claim! Thomas has since said: “If I were gay, Tom wouldn’t be on the top of my list. It would be Brad Pitt.”) More recently, Gawker breezily announced the Holmes-Cruise split with this headline : “Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes Divorcing Because They Couldn’t Fake Being in Love Forever and Plus She’s Not a Dude.” And ­Jezebel weighed in with : “Katie Holmes Maybe, Possibly, Walked in on Tom Cruise Extramaritally Bending It With David Beckham.” Because everybody knows everything.

My cousin George is in the Cruise-is-totally-gay camp. George also happens to live in the Chelsea Mercantile, where Holmes is living, and on the evening of July 9, Day 11 of ­“TomKat: The Divorce,” I visit him in his apartment. Earlier in the day, Holmes’s lawyer announced that a settlement had been reached. The quick, abrupt end to what had been excitedly anticipated as a drip-drip-drip saga that could finally unravel some of the more unfathomable Cruisean mysteries has left the tabloids with major blue balls.

“I’ll tell you how I know he’s gay,” says George, who has lived on the twelfth floor since the Mercantile opened in 2000. He draws on his cigarette, then recounts riding in the elevator with his gay neighbor Demetrius, as we’ll call him, shortly after Cruise helped Penélope Cruz shop for an apartment for in this same building. “I say, ‘What’s the deal with that? Is he gay, or not?’ Demetrius says, ‘He’s gay.’ He says, ‘In the gay community, we know.’ I say, ‘What would you do if you ran into Tom Cruise in the elevator?’ He says, ‘I’d jump him.’ ”

This is George’s evidence?

“That’s from a gay elder statesman,” George says with all the conviction in the world. “They have servants in their house. Young buff guys who probably have fucked Tom Cruise. They wear leather wifebeaters. These are decadent gay men. There are Roman columns in the apartment. He said, ‘We know.’ ”

The First Law of Tabloid Dynamics

And so the story has ground onward , the daily headlines telling a clean, lean, high-­concept action-adventure tale starring Holmes:

“Creepy crew, reportedly from Church of Scientology keeping tabs on Katie Holmes, daughter Suri.”

“Katie Holmes’s Secret Escape Plan.”

“Katie Holmes Steps Out Smiling in Public for the First Time Since Filing for Divorce From Tom Cruise.”

“Holmes Had to Flee Tom’s ‘Cuckoo’ Scientology for Herself and Suri.”

If at times the narrative has seemed to run on autopilot, that’s because it has. “How the tabloid magazines work is they make a judgment about what the audience already thinks about a celebrity story—Angelina stole Brad, and Jennifer is miserable about it—and they just keep repeating the story because it reassures people that what they already think is true,” says Ben Widdicombe, former “Gatecrasher” columnist for the Daily News. “With Katie and Tom, it’s, ‘She was this poor innocent lost bride, and Tom was her jailer.’ That certainly rings true to me, but that’s as deep as tabs go, so it ­becomes a self-fulfilling story.”

Of course, there’s almost no real information to support any particular narrative. Everything is blind-sourced. Everyone’s publicists deny everything, including denying, off the record, that they’re even sources. It’s an information desert, or close enough, and the tabs wring cover stories from the merest specks of news, pseudo news, and non-news (viz., the “Scientology goons” staking out Holmes, who turned out to be Holmes’s own security detail). The show must go on.

A Humble Reconsideration of Tom Cruise

What if we have Cruise all wrong? The legend of TomKat is ultimately little more than a mobsourced Wiki text, massaged and ­exegeted day by day. It may be secular scripture, but it’s only loosely based on the lives of actual people named Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.

Consider, again, the supposed “contract” and “auditions.” These are thriller concepts, screenplay words. No doubt, Cruise and Holmes, and earlier Cruise and Kidman, did have a “contract” that included terms related to the length of their marriage; this is more generally known as a “prenup.” No doubt, Cruise did hold “auditions” for a new girlfriend-wife; these are more generally known as “setups,” or even “dates.” It’s not like Cruise is going to meet someone in a bar or on OKCupid. Ex-Scientologists say that after the divorce from Kidman, the church did try to introduce him to various ­Scientology women, but none took. And reports that in 2004 Cruise summoned various starlets to meet with him—Jessica Alba, Scarlett Johansson—hardly require a nefarious explanation. As the star of the Mission: Impossible franchise, it was business as usual for him to be involved in choosing his co-star, and he wouldn’t have been the first single male actor to simultaneously be evaluating the mating potential of a hot young actress. Finally, although everyone has a Cruise-is-gay story sourced from “someone who works in the business and would know,” who really has any idea what or who makes the needle dance on Cruise’s plethysmograph?

Actually, one person who knows what gets the needle jumping, albeit on a different device—Scientology’s lie-­detector-like E-meter—is Marty Rathbun, dissident former top-ranking executive of Scientology, who, before leaving the church in 2002, was Cruise’s personal “auditor.” He spent more than a hundred hours listening to Cruise’s innermost secrets, and while Rathbun has never disclosed the contents of those sessions, he does insist, about Cruise, “He is as hetero­sexual as they come.”

In 2001, an Australian magazine published a remarkable transcript, now floating around the Internet, of an intercepted cell-phone argument between Cruise and Kidman, and it’s impossible to read and still believe there was nothing real there.

“We’re hanging on by a fucking thread, okay? A thread,” Kidman says at one point, later adding, “I had a great relationship that is now not a great relationship.” Complaining that Cruise hasn’t visited her on the set of Practical Magic, she says: “Did you give me anything? Did you give me a note, did you give me a bunch of flowers?

Cruise responds: “Nic, did I get any flowers when I came back from Eyes Wide Shut ? I was waiting here, I had the candles lit, I had a bath ready for you.”
Kidman: “I don’t really want this, okay? I don’t want to spend my whole dinner break on the phone yelling.”

Eventually, Cruise, calling her “bubba” and “knucklehead” and “Niccy babes,” manages to lower the temperature with some Cruisean charm. “I’m a sweetheart,” he says. “Why don’t you just admit it? Just give in to it. Most of the time I’m adorable. I’m just absolutely adorable, Nic [ laughs ]. Come on, laugh a little.”

Kidman [ softening ]: “How is your foot?”

An Alternative Theory of Katie Holmes

Something didn’t quite track about the media consensus that insta-jelled around the story of Holmes leaving Cruise. Was it possible that the “feminist hero” in our midst, as one commentator styled her, was actually a character of much greater complexity and savvy and Atlas-shrugging, Cruisean will to power—“I’m going to marry him”—than anyone had assumed?

The details of Holmes’s “escape” are most remarkable for their deliberate and very public choreography. Consider:

• Instead of sitting down with her husband and saying she wanted a divorce, Holmes waited until he was in Iceland, then phoned him with the announcement, and was reportedly unwilling to reconsider.

• Holmes didn’t give Cruise any explanation for the decision, according to someone with knowledge of the situation.

• Afterward, according to the knowledgeable source, Holmes wouldn’t speak to her husband again, instead making him deal directly with her father (a ­divorce lawyer, as it happens).

• The story as it played out in the press was self-evidently driven by leaks from the Holmes camp.

• At the same time, false stories, uncorrected by Holmes’s publicists, ran, suggesting that Holmes had secured the new apartment without Cruise’s knowledge (in fact, according to Cruise’s publicist, Amanda Lundberg, Holmes and Cruise had agreed to get the apartment in mid-May).

• In Holmes’s daily photo ops, Suri was a conspicuous prop, as she has been for years. If you think this is just a case of a celebrity trying to live a normal life: When was the last time you saw a picture of Blue Ivy? Can you name any of Julia Roberts’s kids?

• Playing into the escape-from-­Scientology story line, it was reported that Holmes had now “registered” with a Catholic church. Who “registers” with a church? You just go.

• And Holmes wasted no time in starting filming of a new movie, based on her own screenplay about a single mom, Molly , on the day the settlement was announced.

The Mercantile is a curious choice for a woman in jeopardy. She has come to Manhattan, perhaps logically, since she has said she wants to do more Broadway. (Last Thursday, it was announced she’ll be in the comic play Dead Accounts , opening at the Music Box this fall.) But this is not some secluded building on East End Avenue. It’s in the center of the city, and the residents of its 354 units include Cruz and Javier Bardem, Bobby Flay, Lisa Stansfield, and Kyle MacLachlan. The building has a privacy-friendly underground garage, but so do dozens of other buildings in the city, and Holmes hasn’t even been taking advantage of it. If she wanted, she could exit the garage in a car with dark windows, and paparazzi would never catch a glimpse of her or Suri. Instead, every day, when she’s left the building for errands or meetings, she has promenaded out to a waiting car, in full view of photographers. Nor, when on foot, has she used the side entrance on 25th Street: She’s been stepping out right into the paparazzi maw for the sake of trivial grocery shopping. How about FreshDirect? One night, cousin George and I rode the elevator to the penthouse, to what George was certain was her apartment—its previous tenants included Marc Jacobs and Nick Jonas. I expected bodyguards, but George scoffed: “This building is a sanctuary.” We stood in front of the door for a minute, wondering how creepy it would be to knock, before we went back downstairs—and as it happened, Jonas still lives in the apartment; Holmes is on the eleventh floor.

 “I’m convinced that she’s the most fame-hungry person the world has ever seen,” says someone who’s worked with Holmes. Holmes’s entire divorce M.O. suggests an alternative gloss on her great escape. It’s implausible that Cruise’s workaholic lifestyle, or the rigors of Scientology, came as any surprise to her. To embrace the portrayal of her as a victim is to deny her agency.

If Holmes felt trapped, it may have just been in someone else’s movie. Promised above-the-title billing, she never managed to move beyond a supporting role. Where at 26 she found Cruise’s monster life “exciting,” at 33 it just made her feel smaller. And it doesn’t require any overt or conscious cynicism on Holmes’s part, or mean she wasn’t genuinely smitten with Cruise when they wed, for her also to have expected the union to be a boon to her career.

Marrying Cruise had done wonders for Nicole Kidman, who not only became massively more famous but whose acting career took off while she and Cruise were still together. And Holmes, who already had a hit TV series to her name and a $1 million role in Batman Begins at the time of her wedding, was starting ahead of where Kidman had. Indeed, marrying Cruise did make Holmes a lot more famous—there she was on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, styled by Victoria Beckham—but it also, because of Cruise’s bizarreries, drove her Q rating downward. When her character was reprised in the next Batman movie, The Dark Knight, Holmes was passed over for Maggie Gyllenhaal. She got parts in mostly small movies, but they bombed at the box office. The Times called Holmes the “weakest link” in Mad Money, and for her work in the Adam Sandler comedy Jack & Jill, she was nominated for Worst Supporting Actress at the 2011 Golden Raspberry Awards (her second nomination; she had received the first for Batman Begins ).

At the same time, unfavorable comparisons between her and fellow Dawson’s Creek alumna Michelle Williams became painfully inescapable. As Williams became a figure of sympathy because of her partner * (the late Heath Ledger), Holmes became a joke because of hers. Holmes is said (scout’s honor!) to have been enraged by Williams’s success. While Holmes was playing Jackie O. in a mini-series that ended up airing on Reelz—that’s Channel 238 in the Time Warner NY cable system, if you’re wondering—Williams was playing JFK’s sometime-mistress Marilyn Monroe, in a feature film, en route to a third Oscar nomination.

But Scientology, or rather its terrible reputation, offered a way out. Holmes, unable to get the kinds of roles she wanted, realized she could cast herself in the part of a lifetime. Like Truman in The Truman Show, she finally grasped her ontological status as a character in a fiction, and that self-awareness propelled her out of the story and crashing through the fourth wall. She knew a good third-act twist when she saw one.

“It’s not like she ever had a huge career to begin with. She was a rising star. Now she will have a huge career,” says an editor at a leading celebrity magazine. Holmes, emerging from a seven-year, one-on-one apprenticeship with the world’s most famous action hero, simply rewrote the script.

Or maybe she didn’t. But what a story.     

*   This article has been corrected to indicate that Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams were never married. It appeared in the July 30, 2012 issue of New York Magazine.

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• celebrity divorce

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Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes daughter, Suri Cruise, graduates high school under a new name

Suri Cruise is officially a high school graduate.

Over the weekend , the daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, received her high school diploma as her mom watched on.

Tom wasn't in attendance. But he was seen in the VIP tent at a Taylor Swift concert in London this weekend.

According to People, Suri, made the decision to distance herself from her father even more when she opted to drop her last name from the graduation program. Instead, the graduate when by her first and middle name, Suri Noelle.

Suri was just six years old when Katie and Tome divorced after six years of marriage.

While much of Suri's life growing up has been kept private, she's been included in a lot of Katie's work over the years. Katie has dedicated films to her, Suri has sung on Katie's films, and more.

In 2023, Katie told Glamour that it's "been really important for me with my daughter, because she was so visible at a young age, is I really like to protect her. I'm very grateful to be a parent, to be her parent. She's an incredible person."

And while it's important that she kept Suri's childhood private, Katie hopes that Suri would "always do something on my films. I always ask her. But both of those experiences came out of the same sense of what I love about our industry, which is, you have these projects and you become a family with people. And it's this safe, beautiful, creative space."

It's unclear if Suri will soon follow in her parents acting footsteps after college or if she'll continue honing her incredible singing voice as she showcased in her mom's movie.

A public video revealed that Suri is reportedly attending Carnegie Melon in the fall.

This post appeared first in Mamasuncut - https://mamasuncut.com/ , visit the original post here: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes daughter, Suri Cruise, graduates high school under a new name

How Suri Cruise’s Updated Name Is a Nod to Mom Katie Holmes

Tom cruise and katie holmes’ daughter suri recently opted to use noelle in lieu of her surname—and the reason is very sweet. .

Suri Cruise didn’t want to wait to show her mom Katie Holmes some love.

The 18-year-old recently dropped the surname she inherited from dad Tom Cruise at her high school graduation ceremony , and instead chose to go by “Suri Noelle” for the milestone.

And as it turns out, the choice of the name Noelle was a particularly sweet one: it’s her mother’s middle name.

Indeed, the choice to adopt Katie’s middle name is just one example in a long line that proves how close Suri and the Dawson’s Creek alum really are.

After all, Katie was at her daughter’s side for her high school graduation. For the June 21 ceremony, the 45-year-old looked classically chic in a monochromatic beige outfit, complete with matching trousers and collared sweater. She accessorized the look with silver heels and brown sunglasses.

Suri, meanwhile, donned a white, mid-length dress under her red cap and gown. The ensemble was topped off by a white stole emblazoned with the words “Vocals” and “Music.”

Tom—who also shares kids  Isabella , 31, and  Connor , 29, with ex  Nicole Kidman —was not seen at Suri’s graduation, though he did shake it off in the crowd of Taylor Swift ’s June 22 concert at London’s Wembley Stadium .

While neither Katie nor her daughter have publicly confirmed the new grad’s plans come the fall, Suri did participate in a friend’s TikTok earlier this month for their school’s commitment day. Smiling and dancing alongside her friends, Suri wore a Carnegie Mellon University sweater for the video, indicating she might be headed to Pennsylvania for her next step.

Yet while Katie—who divorced Tom in 2012—has kept mum on the personal details of her daughter’s life, she’s never shied away from expressing her love .

"I'm very grateful to be a parent, to be her parent," the  Batman Begins star told  Glamour  in April 2023. "She's an incredible person."

And when it comes to names, Suri is not the first member of Hollywood to switch up her moniker. For more celebrities who have opted to go by other names professionally, keep reading.

Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson

Though the singer initially released a Christian album under her birth name in 2001, she felt the stage name Katy Perry —inspired by her mom's maiden name—might meet pop fans more in awe, awe, awe. 

Cardi B took on the name Bacardi after family and friends started calling her sister Hennessy. Later on she shortened the name to something that suited her quite a bit more.

Before she became the Duchess of Sussex,  Meghan Markle  was briefly known as Rachel. 

Shania Twain shared the origin story of her stage name during an appearance on Apple Music's  Home Now Radio : "In short, I was born, Eilleen Regina Edwards, and then I was adopted and I became Eilleen Regina Twain. Then I became a professional singer and I needed a stage name that sounded a little less like my grandmother's name, because I'm named after my grandmother, both my grandmothers, Eilleen and Regina . I think, in my mind, I was just not really wanting to be called my grandmother's name onstage, so I decided to change it to Shania Twain. I met somebody with the name Shania, thought it was beautiful, and Shania Twain was born."

Oddly enough,  Gigi Hadid got her stage name in school when the teacher would confuse her and a girl named Helena. Since her mom called her "gigi" as a term of endearment at home, she told the teacher to just call her Gigi and it simply stuck. 

If you're looking for an explosive action-star name, how about Vin Diesel instead?

Miley Cyrus ' bright smile is what inspired her childhood nickname, Smiley. Eventually the name was shortened to Miley and it stuck. 

Apparently the singer looked more like a Bruno than a Peter, so one day his dad started calling him Bruno. Ever since, he has been known as Bruno Mars .

Before the meat dresses and chart-topping music, Lady Gaga was just an everyday girl from New York.

Jason Sudeikis confirmed on Today   that he was named Daniel after his father, but following some confusion, his mom started using his middle name Jason to avoid confusion. 

Emma Stone  ended adopting this stage name after finding out that the Screen Actors Guild already had a member registered under her birthname. 

Turns out Reese isn't even  Reese Witherspoon 's middle name. The actress chose the moniker in honor of her mother, whose maiden name is Reese.

Every artist has an alter ego, and  Lana Del Rey just happens to be the persona of choice for the singer. 

In 2014, Frank Ocean legally changed his name because, why not? 

A little known fact about 30 Rock 's  Tina Fey is that she is actually named Elizabeth. The comedian made a not so subtle tribute to her birth name by naming her character Liz Lemon.

This pioneer of West Coast rap would later go on to be known as Snoop Dogg .

Turns out the "Royals" singer is really into learning about the aristocracy, hence the reason why she chose the name  Lorde , but with a feminine 'e.'

Before he started shaking his bonbon for the masses, music superstar Ricky Martin went by this everyday name.

It's hard to believe that Iggy Azalea was born Amethyst Kelly!

Fans were confused when  Taylor Swift thanked then-boyfriend Adam in an acceptance speech, which lead people to the discovery that  Calvin Harris is simply a stage name. The DJ told  Shortlist  magazine he chose the name because his first single was more soulful and wanted something a bit more "racially ambiguous."

Before she became a household name, this was what erstwhile Friend Jennifer Aniston answered to.

Alicia Keys didn't always have such a musical name.

Before he became arguably the biggest movie star in the world, Tom Cruise went by this name.

Back when she was born in 1980, this was how the future bigtime actress Natalie Portman greeted the world.

Before she became a big-time TV star and married Ellen DeGeneres , this was the name Portia de Rossi answered to.

Guess music superstar Elton John didn't think his original name would be a hit with audiences.

Check The Simple Life alum  Nicole Richie 's birth certificate and this is the name you'll see.

All it took was a nickname from some high school friends, and U2 frontman Bono 's famous moniker was born.

We agree. Carmen Electra is much more effective when it comes to selling a sexy Baywatch persona.

"I went on as Eric Bishop, killed, standing ovation," Jamie Foxx has said of his early comedy days, revealing that for weeks after his fellow comedians blocked him from getting back onstage. So he took his act to a new location and wrote down three unisex-sounding names in the hopes of getting picked. "I go up and get a standing ovation, so the name sticks." 

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Katie holmes allegedly started a secret friendship with a fellow a-lister after filing for divorce from tom cruise.

by Delilah Gray

Delilah Gray

Trending News Editor

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“They may not hang out together,” they added. “But they have each other’s backs.”

For those that don’t know, Kidman and Cruise met on the set of the hit film Days of Thunder and tied the knot a year later on Christmas Eve in 1990 in Telluride, Colorado. They starred in two more films together, and even adopted two children together named Isabella Jane in 1992 and a son named Connor in 1995. He later filed for divorce from her in 2001 after she got him away from Scientology for a brief period.

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11 celebrities who don’t get along with Tom Cruise: From Brad Pitt to Justin Bieber

Celebs locked in feuds with Tom Cruise: A deep dive into Hollywood star's strained relationships

Tom Cruise, despite his enduring Hollywood success, has found himself embroiled in numerous feuds over the years. From personal disputes to professional disagreements, here are some of the most notable celebrities in Hollywood who have clashed with the iconic actor.

1. Katie Holmes

One of the most publicized feuds involving Tom Cruise is with his ex-wife, Katie Holmes. Their relationship, which began amidst speculation and secrecy, ended in 2012 amid rumors of Scientology's influence and disagreements over parenting, particularly concerning their daughter Suri.

2. Leah Remini

Leah Remini, once a close friend of Tom Cruise within the Church of Scientology, became a vocal critic after leaving the organization. She detailed her experiences in her book 'Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology', including unflattering portrayal of Tom Cruise's behavior and his alleged close ties with Scientology's leadership.

3. Nicole Kidman

Before Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise was married to Nicole Kidman for 11 years. Their divorce, which Kidman described as unexpectedly painful, reportedly left a lasting strain on their relationship. Kidman has been relatively tight-lipped about her ex-husband in public, but their split and subsequent fallout has been subject of much speculation.

4. Brooke Shields

Tom Cruise's public criticism of Brooke Shields' use of antidepressants for postpartum depression sparked a heated feud in 2005. Cruise's comments, deemed insensitive by many, prompted Shields to defend her choice publicly, highlighting their conflicting views on mental health treatments and drawing attention to Scientology's controversial stance on psychiatric medication.

5. Alec Baldwin

Known for his outspoken nature, Alec Baldwin once humorously criticized Tom Cruise's high salary in Hollywood, suggesting that Cruise could afford to reduce his earnings to balance out the industry's pay disparities. Baldwin's remarks underscored broader criticisms of celebrity salaries and the industry's wealth disparity.

6. Justin Bieber

In a bizarre turn of events, Justin Bieber publicly challenged Tom Cruise to a fight in 2019 via X (then Twitter), suggesting a UFC match and later posting a playful video hinting at a physical showdown. While Bieber later downplayed the challenge as a joke, his initial tweet stirred speculation and amusement among fans and media alike.

7. John Travolta

Tom Cruise’s relationship with fellow Scientologist John Travolta has been notably strained. Brendan Tighe, a former Scientology member, revealed that Travolta was envious of Cruise's close ties with David Miscavige, the head of Scientology. Tighe stated, "Cruise is the only celeb with a direct line to Miscavige. Travolta didn’t have that." This rift, marked by Travolta's lack of access to the perks enjoyed by Cruise, underscores their ongoing animosity, despite neither party having publicly confirmed their feud.

8. Brad Pitt

The tensions between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt reportedly date back to their collaboration on 'Interview with the Vampire' in 1994. Pitt’s discomfort with Cruise's demeanor was evident, with Pitt stating, “He bugged me. There came a point during filming when I started really resenting him. He’s North Pole, I’m South.” Pitt highlighted their stark personality differences, describing Cruise’s approach as overly formal, while his own was more laid-back. Their relationship remains strained, with no reconciliation in sight.

9. Mark Wahlberg

In 2013, Mark Wahlberg drew attention with his comment about the challenges faced by actors versus military personnel, specifically targeting Cruise. Wahlberg remarked that actors comparing their experiences to military service was disrespectful. “For actors to sit there and talk about ‘Oh I went to SEAL training,’ and I slept on the — I don’t give a f**k what you did,” Wahlberg stated, offending many, including Cruise. Despite Wahlberg’s clarification that his comments were not meant to offend Cruise, the remark highlighted a significant rift between them.

10. Russell Crowe

The animosity between Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe allegedly stems from Crowe’s loyalty to Nicole Kidman, Cruise’s ex-wife. Crowe's disdain for Cruise reportedly grew from Cruise’s treatment of Kidman during their divorce. A source close to Crowe mentioned, “Russell is a loyal guy and never forgave Tom for the way he treated Nicole.” Crowe’s longstanding friendship with Kidman, dating back to their early days in Australia, cemented his stance against Cruise. Crowe’s support for Kidman has consistently overshadowed any possibility of reconciliation with Cruise.

11. Mickey Rourke

Mickey Rourke has openly expressed his disdain for Tom Cruise, dismissing him as “irrelevant” and criticizing his acting career. During an appearance on Piers Morgan 'Uncensored', Rourke stated, “The guy’s been doing the same effing part for 35 years. I got no respect for that.” Rourke further emphasized that he values the work of actors like Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, and Robert De Niro, who he feels have demonstrated greater range and depth in their careers. Rourke’s harsh words underscore his lack of respect for Cruise’s approach to acting.

Katie Holmes & Tom Cruise’s Daughter Suri, 18, Drops Last Name for High School Grad Program

Katie Holmes and ex-husband Tom Cruise’s daughter celebrates her graduation under a new name “Suri Noelle."

Not too long ago, Suri Holmes was seen as the most fashionable toddler around New York City. Flash forward to now, the 18-year-old was captured at her high school prom, donning a 90s-like corset dress. More recently, the notable daughter of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise is ready to head to college and leave some things behind, including her last name. 

Recently,  Suri has adopted the name “Suri Noelle”. And at her graduation from Laguardia High School, she was listed among her peers without her father’s surname and with “Noelle”, which is Katie Holmes’s middle name. 

Katie Holmes, 45, has been standing by her daughter’s side celebrating major momentum like her daughters’ graduation, which the Mission Impossible star was noticeably absent from. Cruise has reportedly been in London, where he is filming for the next Mission Impossible film. However, during Suri’s graduation weekend, Cruise was spotted attending Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in London. 

This absence adds to the ongoing speculation about Cruise’s relationships with his daughter, as well as his adopted children with actress Nicole Kidman.

In 2013, Tom Cruise decided to pursue a $50-million lawsuit against some tabloids fighting claims that he “abandoned” his daughter after his divorce from Holmes in 2012. At the time, he countered the idea by mentioning they “spoke on the phone nearly every day” and that he “regularly asked for and received updates concerning her friends and school life”. The case was eventually dismissed, with each paying their own costs and attorney fees. 

Despite any rocky aspects of Suri Noelle’s relationship with her father, she seems to be doing her own thing, like getting ready for college. Though the mother-daughter duo has not officially confirmed what school she will attend, a classmate shared a TikTok where Suri sported a Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt.