Tom Cruise’s First Girlfriend Tells All About Teaching Him ‘How to Kiss’: Actor ‘Was a Fast Learner’

Just a few years before Risky Business made Tom Cruise an A-list heartthrob, he was an awkward teenager.

“He wasn’t at all what you’d call cool,” Laurie Hobbs — who met Cruise when he was 15 and attending St. Xavier’s all-boys Catholic high school in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1978 — told the National Enquirer in an exclusive interview in 1990.

“He struck me as being shy, sort of uneasy around girls,” she added, explaining that he had “a secret fear that girls wouldn’t like him because he was so small.”

But Hobbs, who was also 15 and went to the nearby all-girls school, Sacred Heart Academy, asked Cruise — then using his real last name, Mapother — to escort her to a school dance.

And during their date, she also made the first move by touching his hand as they sat next to each other on a friend’s couch. “We just lunged toward each other awkwardly and started kissing,” she recalled. “But we didn’t seem to be able to get our mouths in the right place at first. I kept thinking, I hope I don’t start laughing!’

But the teens got the hang of it pretty quickly. “My head was spinning and I could hardly breathe,” gushed Hobbs. “I could hear my heart banging away in my eardrums. First kisses are like that — you think you’re going to faint. Once or twice, I opened my eyes to make sure his eyes were closed, and they were, so I knew he meant it. Tom was a fast learner!”

The pair dated for a few months but lost touch when his family moved to New Jersey. Within three years, the actor made his film debut in 1981’s Endless Love — and was quickly on the path to Hollywood superstardom.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t been so lucky in his love life. The Mission: Impossible star, now 64, has been married and divorced three times: to Mimi Rogers from 1987 to 1990; Nicole Kidman from 1990 to 2001; and Katie Holmes from 2006 to 2012.

“These days I often wonder what life would be like if Tom and I had gotten married,” Hobbs told the Enquirer. “And now and then, I flatter myself that I actually taught the world’s sexiest man to kiss!”

In 2025, nearly 50 years after their first kiss, the Enquirer again caught up with Hobbs, who is still living in Louisville and working as a hospitality supervisor — but she insisted on keeping her lips shut.