I was born on July 3rd 1962, in Syracuse, New York

My family moved around a great deal when I was a child in order to accommodate my father’s career as an electrical engineer

My parents divorced when he was 11, and we moved with my mother to Louisville, Kentucky, and then to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, after her remarriage

Like my mother, a teacher and amateur actress, and my three sisters, I suffered from dyslexia, which made academic success difficult for me

I excelled in athletics and had considered pursuing a career in professional wrestling until a knee injury sidelined me during high school in Glen Ridge

At age 14, I enrolled in a Franciscan seminary with thoughts of becoming a priest, but I left after a year

When I was 16, a teacher encouraged me to participate in the school’s production of the musical Guys and Dolls. After I won the lead of Nathan Detroit, I found myself surprisingly at home on the stage, and a career was born.

I set a 10-year deadline for myself in which to build an acting career. I left school and moved to New York, struggling through audition after audition before landing an appearance in 1981’s Endless Love, starring Brooke Shields, and a small role in the military school drama Taps, also released in 1981

I married the actress Mimi Rogers in 1987; we divorced in 1990, the same year in which I made the race-car drama Days of Thunder with a young Australian actress named Nicole Kidman

In 2000, I starred in the long-awaited smash hit Mission: Impossible 2. Recent projects include Vanilla Sky, my second collaboration with director Cameron Crowe, and Minority Report, a project directed by Steven Spielberg.