Tom Cruise's Irish roots run deeper than almost anyone in Hollywood

Tom Cruise is back on the silver screen this month with "Digger", and audiences who have spent four decades watching him play the all-American hero may be surprised by how far his own family tree reaches across the Atlantic. His line in Ireland runs back some eight centuries, taking in farmland north of Dublin, a village in County Roscommon, and a crossing to New Jersey in the years before the Famine.

In 2013, while promoting "Oblivion," Cruise traveled to Dublin and was presented with a Certificate of Irish Ancestry at a government reception hosted by then Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore at Iveagh House on St. Stephen's Green.

Speaking at the ceremony, as reported by IrishCentral at the time, Cruise said, "I am very proud to be Irish." He went on to say that this was precisely why he had wanted to make "Far and Away," the 1992 emigration epic he shot in Ireland with Nicole Kidman.

He also told the room that learning the full history of his family had been incredible, and that while he had always known he was Irish, he had no sense of how deep it went.

The research behind that certificate was carried out by genealogists Fiona Fitzsimons and Helen Moss of the heritage company Eneclann, working on behalf of Tourism Ireland. Fitzsimons said afterward that the key to the whole project was identifying the one person who formed the bridge between Ireland and America, and that once the US census, civil registration and famine emigration records had established a profile over two generations, the Irish records could be used to join the dots backward.

Former Minister for the Arts, Micheal D. Higgins and Tom Cruise, photographed in 1995.

What they found starts in the twelfth century. According to research published by EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin, a Cruise was among the knights who arrived in Ireland with Strongbow, the Norman invasion that began the English conquest. The family was granted land in north Dublin and stayed put for generations, holding on to both their Catholicism and their standing through the upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries. One branch became known as the Russell Cruises. There is a pleasing footnote in there for a movie star, which is that some of the family's holdings sat in a townland called Hollywood in north County Dublin.

The link to America comes in 1825, when Patrick Russell Cruise, the actor's great-great-great grandfather, married Teresa Johnson. The family sailed for the United States around 1826, leaving the Irish land in the hands of a local agent. That arrangement soured. EPIC's research records that Patrick grew unhappy with the agent, who had driven tenant families from their homes, and that he returned to Ireland around 1843, in the years immediately before the Famine, to give the lands back to those tenants.

His youngest known child, Mary Paulina Russell Cruise, was born in New Jersey in 1832. In 1858 she married Dillon Henry Mapother, an engineer from Dublin whose family came from Kilteevan, near Knockcroghery in County Roscommon. They had several children before Dillon died around 1874. Mary Paulina, then in her early 40s with a large family to support, later married Thomas O'Mara, and their son, born in 1876, was Tom Cruise's great-grandfather.

That son took the surname Cruise Mapother to match his half siblings, a decision genealogists have linked to a possible inheritance from the Mapother estate in Ireland. Had he not, the name on the posters outside your local theater this week would read Tom O'Mara.

Tom Cruise in "Far and Away".

Roscommon has long claimed him, and not without reason, though the picture is complicated. The Irish Times reported in 2013 that despite carrying the Mapother name, Cruise is not a blood relative of the Kilteevan Mapothers, a finding that disappointed people in the county who had hoped to welcome him as one of their own. Local memory of the connection runs deep all the same. The last of the Kilteevan Mapothers, a Miss Mary, died in 1932, and the family vault and headstones remain in the old graveyard at St. Kevin's.

Cruise himself is said to have visited the parish as a boy with his father, Thomas Mapother III, and local accounts suggest he came back quietly while filming "Far and Away" on the Dingle Peninsula. The mayor of Roscommon at the time of the 2013 ceremony, Tom Crosby, told reporters he had always thought the actor looked like a west of Ireland man.