Rags To Riches: Celebs Who Turned Their Pain Into Their Passion

3. Tom Cruise

Speaking to Parade magazine, Cruise said of his father, Thomas Cruise Mapother III, “He was a bully and a coward – the person where, if something goes wrong, they kick you. … It was a great lesson in my life, how he’d lull you in, make you feel safe and then, bang!”.  When Cruise was 12, his mother left his father, taking Cruise and his sister Lee Anne with her. Ten years later, when his father “was in the hospital dying of cancer, and he would only meet me on the basis that I didn’t ask him anything about the past.”  Despite his tumultuous and abusive past, Cruise turned out to be an amazing and uber successful actor and father of his own children, two with Nicole Kidman and one with current wife, Katie Holmes.