"Show me the money!"

Cruise found himself on the acceptance speech thank-you end of another Oscar-winning performance in somehow-not-sickly romcom Jerry Maguire (1996). The scene of phone-screaming, capitalist abandon spawned another classic Cruiser moment - and made Cuba Gooding Jr. a star for five minutes. 

Seduce & Destroy

The really shocking thing about Cruise's appearance in PT Anderson’s operatic modern classic Magnolia (1999) wasn’t that he used the ‘c’ word, or that his self-help misogynist Frank TJ Mackey played thrillingly against his cleaner-than-Jesus image... It's the fact that he was acting - which we’d all forgotten he could do.