TORONTO -- Act with dignity and show some respect: That's what Tom Cruise wants from the media and the public when it comes to his private life.

"That stuff," he told The Sun here yesterday about the on-going firestorm of gossip and year-long intrusion into his private life, "well, you've got to learn to live with what you can learn to live with -- and then you hopefully encourage people to have a little more dignity or more respect."

Cruise was in Toronto yesterday as part of an intense publicity tour for his new film Vanilla Sky, writer-director Cameron Crowe's re-make of a provocative 1997 Spanish thriller called Open Your Eyes. It opens next week. Both films co-star Spanish actress Penelope Cruz, who is the new woman in Cruise's life after his highly publicized divorce from Nicole Kidman.

While he continued to be discreet and polite about his divorce with Kidman as well as his relationship with Cruz, Cruise opened up slightly about the situation yesterday because of the way it has impacted on his work as a film producer and actor.

"Nic and I," he offered, "we know what the truth is, you know. The first thing that hits is that you realize you're not talking just about you. I've got a mother. I've got sisters. I've got their kids, my nieces and nephews, and I've got our kids (his children with Kidman, eight-year-old Isabella and six-year-old Connor). And they've all been through it with me.

"It's how it affects their lives. So you just get smart about it and you learn a lot about life. Now, when other people are going through things, it certainly gives me more compassion for what they go through and a greater understanding of what they go through. That's what it has done for me."

That is precisely the feeling he wants to bring to his work, Cruise said. Including in Vanilla Sky, a twisted love story as well as a labyrinthian, surreal thriller and a re-affirmation of deep moral values in life.

"I don't feel disconnected when I'm acting. It (his life experience this year) does connect me more."

Cruise, who was born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV in Syracuse and who spent part of his school life in Ottawa, turned 39 on July 3. He has been an actor for 20 years.

As a Toronto Sun film writer, I first met Cruise on the set of a trashy teen comedy called Losin' It, the story of a young California man who loses his virginity in Tijuana, Mexico. It was filmed in Calexico, a grungy cattle town on the U.S. side of the Mexican border.

When I reminded him yesterday, he was astounded, in part because most people have never even heard of the movie that helped propel his career and launched both Shelley Long (into Cheers) and director Curtis Hanson (of L.A. Confidential fame).

"Calexico was hot, hot," Cruise says. "And I almost got killed on that movie." He means it literally. I could have been writing his obituary instead of a feature story on a then-unknown.

Cruise was in his movie trailer one night when he heard a disturbance. Two men were outside fighting. "And this one guy was just whaling on this other guy. I yelled: 'Hey, hey, hey, enough.' I jumped from my trailer and knocked this guy down and I was holding him and his arm was going like that (a pumping action) trying to hit me and I'm dodging it."

Teamsters from the movie crew finally came along and stopped the fight. That's when Cruise saw what the psycho fighter had in his hand: "An icepick!"

He survived to tell The Sun then that he had a lot of ambition and a lot of dreams to succeed. So yesterday I asked if he was satisfied with how it has turned out.

"It's beyond the kind of career I envisioned, what I had hoped. It's beyond! The people that I've worked with, the adventures that I've had, it's been extraordinary for me, extraordinary. I feel as if everything I've learned culminates in being able to work with Cameron Crowe on this picture (Vanilla Sky) and be part of producing a picture like this and to play a character like that. It's been an extraordinary run."

Cruise stars as an arrogant, rich, New York playboy whose life is thrown into turmoil when his obsessed lover (Cameron Diaz) stages a suicidal car wreck after he falls in love with another woman (Penelope Cruz). His face is horribly disfigured and the rules of his life have to change.

"You know, I love that I have these great scenes to work on with these great actors." Cruise says that Diaz and Cruz are "two vibrant unique artists" whom he respects highly as actresses. "Both of them have their own light and their own very distinct ways of working."

In the case of Diaz, whose character may be psychotic, Cruise says Crowe saw the right level of pain inside the actress. "You see such a beautiful woman, but she brought to it that break, that fragility, that desperate quality."

In Cruz's case, "there is depth," says Cruise. She is "deeply romantic," he adds, referring to her screen work. "It's a fragility and yet this strength comes up and there is a poetry that she brings."

But whatever poetry Cruz brings him in their private life is staying just that -- private.


More Artists