Cruise met Mimi Rogers in 1985 at a dinner party when she was dating a friend of his.
They quietly tied the knot on May 9, 1987, in upstate New York. Emilio Estevez was Cruise’s best man. His mother, Mary Lee South, toldPeople her new daughter-in-law was “top notch.”
The Gung Ho actress was previously married to Scientology counselor Jim Rogers, and is said to have introduced Cruise to the religion. “She took him under her wing,” Cruise biographerWensley Clarkson toldEntertainment Weekly in 2000. (Rogers has since left the church.)
The actors announced they were divorcing in January 1990.
“Is that the story, that I was bored with that child and threw him over, chewed him up and spat him out?” Rogers fired back at Playboy in 1993 when asked why her marriage to Cruise didn’t work out. “Well, here’s the real story. Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. At least for that period of time, it looked as though marriage wouldn’t fit into his overall spiritual need. And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument.” She added, “My instrument needed tuning.”
Rogers, six years older than Cruise, told the Telegraphin 2001, “The stardom wasn’t really a problem.What did annoy me, though, was the age thing. Some of the tabloids brought it up all the time, and exaggerated the gap between Tom and me. Every six months they seemed to add a year to my age. If Tom and I were still married, the tabloids would probably have me in my sixties by now.”