Tom Cruise (1989), Cruise received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama and his first Academy Award for Best Actor nomination. In the 1990s, Cruise starred with Jack Nicholson in the legal drama "A Few Good Men" (1992) and starred in a number of box office hits including "The Firm" (1993) and "Interview with the Vampire" (1994), before starring as IMF agent Ethan Hunt in the action spy thriller "" (1996), the first of a commercially successful six-film series. In 1996, Cruise also starred as the title character in the romantic comedy-drama "Jerry Maguire", earning him the Golden
Tom Cruise Paula Wagner to form Cruise/Wagner Productions in 1993, and the company has since co-produced several of Cruise's films, the first being "" in 1996 which was also Cruise's first project as a producer. Cruise is noted as having negotiated some of the most lucrative film deals in Hollywood, and was described in 2005 by Hollywood economist Edward Jay Epstein as "one of the most powerful – and richest – forces in Hollywood." Epstein argues that Cruise is one of the few producers (the others being George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Jerry Bruckheimer) who are regarded as able to guarantee the