U.K. film industry honors Cruise

ETOnline and Reuters:
Dad and hubby-to-be TOM CRUISE made us laugh in ‘Jerry Maguire,’ he made us cry in ‘The Last Samurai’ and he scared the heck out of us in ‘Collateral’ and Thursday night in Beverly Hills, the A-list star was recognized for his many contributions to film.

Cruise took time out of his ‘Mission Impossible III’ shooting schedule to head to the BAFTA/LA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts/Los Angeles) Cunard Britannia Awards where he was honored along with three other distinguished recipients.

Anthony Hopkins, who starred with Cruise in ‘Mission Impossible 2,’ presented the ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ actor with the coveted Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film. He declared “I don’t actually know Tom that well” and recounted that when he turned up to the Australian shoot of “Mission: Impossible 2,” Cruise embraced him and lifted him off the ground, and asked him about the nonexistent script while eating an enormous club sandwich. “I still don’t know what the film was about because all I remember is a whole lot of technical dialogue about a body in a suitcase,” Hopkins said. But he Tom as a pure Hollywood star in the mold of icons like James Cagney, Paul Newman and Gregory Peck. “Everyone today is so laid-back and cool and it’s kinda boring, but Tom is the opposite of that,” Hopkins said.

Tom played it straight as he accepted the award. He paid a lengthy tribute to Kubrick, who died in 1999 just after finishing work on “Eyes Wide Shut,” in which Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman starred, and said the award was “a recognition of the magnificent power that films possess to effect positive change in the world.”

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