Featured Image Credit: Mike Coppola/WireImage/Warner Brothers/Getty Images
Topics: Tom Cruise, Celebrity, News, US News, Entertainment
Britt Jones
Topics: Tom Cruise, Celebrity, News, US News, Entertainment
Hollywood actors are usually beloved by all, but what about those they work with?
With the preparation it takes to get into a role, actors need to groom, pluck, diet, exercise and even take dialect training to perfect their craft.
This kind of hard work often makes or breaks a performance and impacts how an audience will take away their opinion of a favourite actor.
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Though, what if fans found out that the person that they had been idolising for years was an “egocentric control freak”?
You’d better believe that this news would completely change an actor’s image and it could potentially destroy their career.
This is what Hollywood A lister, Tom Cruise is facing right now as details of his work ethic and bad antics have been leaked by a screenwriter who worked him.
While part of the writing team on the 1999 erotic drama ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Frederic Raphael, now 91, has come out to call the Hollywood star an “egocentric control freak,” and that’s not the worst of it.
In his new book, ‘Last Post,’ Raphael called out the star’s Scientology beliefs as well as his doomed marriage to Australian beauty Nicole Kidman.
After slamming the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick in his first book, ‘Eyes Wide Open’, he described how after criticising the director’s work methods, he was uninvited to the film’s premiere in Los Angeles.
But Raphael isn’t finished with the late filmmaker, as in his latest book he’s now taking aim at Kubrick’s wife, Christiane Harlan, and her brother Jan Harlan of messing with his image through Wikipedia entries.
Claiming that Cruise was in on the Wiki slander, he wrote: “The Harlans and Master Cruise have managed to insert some derogatory stuff in my Wikipedia entry,” as obtained by the Daily Mail.
With his belief that a section of the Wikipedia entry talking about film critic Roger Ebert’s interview with Cruise in 1999 was reason enough to accuse the actor as it took Kubrick’s side.
In an interview, the ‘Mission: Impossible’ star is quoted as saying: “[Raphael] wouldn’t have written it if Stanley had been alive.”
He continued: “Opportunistic. Self-serving. Inaccurate. I don’t know that man at all and I’ve never met him. It’s been interesting seeing how people have behaved afterwards.”
But Raphael continued to lash out at Kubrick, his wife and Cruise, writing: “I have never been called a liar by anyone as I have been by the Harlan clan and by Tom Cruise, an egocentric control freak to whom I have never spoken.”
Even after the production of the Kubrick classic ended, apparently Cruise offered the writer a job, but he believes that it was an attempt to control him.
He wrote: “The better to have me on a leash, no doubt.”
“In his turn, he too seems to need the control he finds in Scientology,” Raphael quipped.
After deeming the actor a control freak, he also decided that there was an ulterior motive for casting his then-wife in the movie.
He wrote: “Was there something just a touch naïve in your idea that casting a married couple as a married couple would enable you to put ‘the truth’ on the screen?”
Writing about the authenticity of Cruise-Kidman marriage, the writer went on to hit out at their union: “One thing you can be pretty sure of: whatever any conjugal duo may disclose in public about their relationship, they rarely let any crucial cat out of the bag. Did you honestly suppose Cruise and Kidman were bound in genuine passion, rather than embraced in a careerist merger?”
Though, Cruise and Kidman did divorce just two years after the movie was made following a decade of marriage.