Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

  • Tom Cruise struggled with dyslexia throughout his childhood and early career in Hollywood.
  • Cruise says Scientology helped him overcome his dyslexia and transformed his ability to learn.
  • While Cruise’s beliefs fueled his ambitions and rise to megastardom, they also led to controversies.

Before he became one of the biggest movie stars of all time, Tom Cruise struggled with a disability that could have derailed his dreams: dyslexia. Diagnosed as dyslexic when he was seven years old, Cruise described himself as a “functional illiterate” while growing up.

“My childhood was extremely lonely,” Cruise told Parade in 1986. “I was dyslexic and lots of kids [would] make fun of me. That experience made me tough inside, because you learn to quietly accept ridicule.”

When Cruise would get to the end of the page of the book he was reading, he’d have “very little memory of anything I’d read,” he told People magazine in 2003. “I would go blank, feel anxious, nervous, bored, frustrated, dumb. I would get angry. My legs would actually hurt when I was studying. My head ached.”

Cruise relied heavily on memorization to navigate school and, eventually, movie scripts. “I had to train myself to focus my attention. I became very visual and learned how to create mental images in order to comprehend what I read,” he told People.

Though Cruise got to the point where he could operate on the “force of sheer will,” he knew he “was flying by the seat of my pants”—and that if he didn’t solve his dyslexia, “the trapdoor was going to open up and that would be it.”

Cruise found his solution when he joined the Church of Scientology in the late 1980s. He became a student of the religion, founded by writer L. Ron Hubbard, through his first wife, actress Mimi Rogers. Cruise told People that he used Hubbard’s three-pronged “Study Technology” method, which pinpoints three barriers to learning, to overcome his dyslexia.

“Many people had tried to teach me,” he told People, “but no one had taught me how to learn or how to study. I had been told I had all the symptoms of dyslexia, but no one had given me a solution. I realized I could absolutely learn anything that I wanted to learn.”

Cruise soon emerged as one of Scientology’s most high-profile and outspoken members. While his beliefs have led to some controversies—like when he publicly denounced psychiatry and modern medicine—Cruise has said Hubbard’s teachings have fueled his discipline and focus, propelling him to mega-stardom in iconic films like Top Gun and the Mission: Impossible series.

To read more about how Cruise cemented his place in cinematic history, read Tom Cruise’s complete profile on Biography.com.

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