Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have sensationally revealed they are divorcing after five years of marriage.
The Hollywood superstar, 49, said he was ‘deeply saddened’ that his younger wife, 33, had filed for a separation.
He revealed the former Dawson's Creek actress had initiated the split, bringing a dramatic end to one of Hollywood's most high-profile romances.
In a surprise move, Katie is understood to have filed for sole custody of the couple's daughter Suri, six.
Split: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are divorcing after five years together
'This is a personal and private matter for Katie and her family,' Holmes's lawyer Jonathan Wolfe said in a statement to People magazine.
'Katie's primary concern remains, as it always has been, her daughter's best interest.'
A spokesperson for Tom, who is currently in Iceland filming his new sci-fi movie Oblivion, said: 'Kate has filed for divorce and Tom is deeply saddened and is concentrating on his three children.'
The actress filed documents in New York this week citing 'irreconcilable differences'.
She has asked for legal custody, primary residential custody and a 'suitable amount' of child support from her husband, TMZ reports.
Separate lives: Katie and her daughter Suri were spotted in New York yesterday
Focused on work: Tom is currently in Iceland filming his new sci-fi film Oblivion
In addition she has asked for the division of their property, although no mention of their pre-nuptial agreement is mentioned in the documents. The couple are worth around $275 million - much of that owing to Tom's box office success.
Tom is believed to have 'not seen' the divorce coming.
But sources insist that she did tell her husband of five-and-a-half years that she was filing for divorce – but she didn’t give him a chance to control the spread of the news, as he did with Nicole Kidman.
The fact that she issued a solo statement speaks of some heat around the final extinguishing of the marriage.
The pair have not been seen together in public for almost three months - they were pictured on April 5 while in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Apart: Katie, seen here with Suri on June 26, did not join Tom, pictured right on June 8, as he promoted Rock of Ages
Miss Holmes failed to turn up to at any of the worldwide premieres of her husband’s latest film Rock of Ages, despite Cruise’s constant protestations of love for his wife.
The final arguments seem to have been over where Cruise was going to spend his 50th birthday on Tuesday.
He told her that he was planning to be on the set of his latest film Oblivion in Iceland and that seems to have been the last straw for her.
The statuesque brunette had frequently been pictured looking drawn and exhausted during her marriage. One Hollywood source said she had been ‘utterly miserable with Tom for months, if not years’.
Indeed, the row over his birthday followed another bust-up over what Miss Holmes felt were embarrassingly bad taste pictures of him on the cover of W magazine last month.
He was dressed – or rather undressed – as the rock star Stacee Jaxx, the character he plays in Rock of Ages. Two half dressed blondes were wrapped around him, one licking his face.
Miss Holmes, a nice girl from Ohio who is nevertheless very aware of why Cruise feels the need to play the macho card in public, was apparently ‘speechless’ with disgust and felt the pictures laid both of them open to ridicule.
Carrying the load: Katie has been left looking after Suri on her own this month - pictured here on June 14, June 19 and June 22
Miss Holmes has chosen to stay with Suri in Cruise’s New York apartment while he has travelled the world working.
The little girl has been her constant and only companion. They are often out together until late at night, and Miss Holmes – who gave up all the threads of her old life to become Mrs Tom Cruise – seems to have no other friends at all.
One Hollywood source told said today: ‘It was an open secret that she was utterly miserable with Tom, and had been for months if not years. They really couldn’t drag out the pretence any longer.’
When Cruise was filming Rock of Ages in Miami, Miss Holmes came along with Suri and they made a family holiday of it. But since then they have spent no more than a handful of nights under the same roof.
Miss Holmes, who used to have a poster of Cruise on her bedroom wall, found that being married to an intense, workaholic, and deeply religious megastar was no picnic.
In pictures of her going about her daily business she looked completely worn out. Her brown hair was prematurely grey, she never wore make up. One shapeless cardigan was succeeded by another baggy jumper.
No sign of trouble: The couple were last pictured together in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on April 5
Meanwhile, those close to her said that she felt he wasn’t putting any effort into her or the marriage.
She found herself raising Suri effectively as a single mother. Her once promising film career – she had been the love interest in Batman Begins – had been completely stifled. Roles evaporated. She ended up trying to find work as a fashion designer, endorsing the line Holmes and Yang.
She missed all the premieres for Rock of Ages – officially she was said to need to attend a skating tournament in Asia, which seems bizarre to say the least.
The bigger picture is that this is the end of the third of Tom Cruise’s marriages and a spectacular failure of his strategy to relaunch himself as a ‘regular guy’.
The couple’s2006 Italian wedding was choreographed like a massive movie premiere, with more bodyguards than guests and the ultimate goal seemingly the fantastically romantic images which were released to the media of the A list star and his pretty bride.
Dream wedding: The pair married in an Italian castle in 2006
This came in the wake of the president of Paramount Sumner Redstone complaining that women found the actor ‘creepy.’
When the romance began – Katie had met Tom to discuss the possibility of appearing in Mission Impossible III – she was immediately sent on an intensive and lengthy study course about the religion founded by sci-fi author L Ron Hubbard in 1954, which holds that humans are descended from an exiled race of aliens called Thetans.
She was ‘audited’ by Scientology counsellors, and unlike Penelope Cruz and Nicole Kidman before her, has totally embraced the movement.
Despite earlier reports that there would be a Roman Catholic ceremony of some sort – Katie was born a Catholic, and her parents and family remain of that faith – it was a Scientology wedding.
What’s more it was conducted by David Miscavige, Tom Cruise’s very best friend who is the head of the movement.
And if the union was supposed to cease gossip about Scientologist Cruise and her personal life, in particular rumours of his homosexuality – always denied – it failed utterly.
For some time – indeed pretty much since they returned from their fabulously opulent wedding in Italy – Katie has looked unhappy.
Gossip suggesting that she wanted to leave the marriage was always denied by Cruise’s people. But over the past few weeks, the briefings have become more insistent.
Friends say Katie was deeply unhappy, and felt betrayed over his continuous globetrotting.
Crazy in love: Tom, giddy over his budding relationship with Katie, famously jumped on Oprah Winfrey's couch in 2005
They were leading separate lives, and she was said to be ‘depressed and angry’ about the state of their union.
Suri's first shoot: The couple presented their daughter to the world on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2006, five months after her birth
‘Katie spent her time avoiding him, and they rowed terribly,’ one Hollywood source claimed.
From the outset she struggled to ever settle in the menage in Los Angeles, where Cruise lived with his sister and her family and her mother as well.
Katie never felt that the massive mansion, stuffed with bodyguards, was her home. Everyone who came through the doors was a Scientologist.
He asked for a pre-nuptial to be put into place, but obviously that mostly protects Tom Cruise rather than Katie Holmes. Their joint worth stands at around £180million.
Katie will no doubt get enough to keep Suri in her favoured Ferragamo bags.
Who knows, now that Katie has walked away from Tom perhaps the little girl will be allowed to go to a regular school, rather than being home schooled and taken out on the town until midnight.
The world which Katie and Suri have lived in has been one of great luxury but also great isolation.
The Cruise family lives in a £20 million house with 13,000 square feet of space. Cass Mapother is a key figure here, Tom’s sister – and her three sons share the house with Tom and his two adopted children Conor and Isabella.
All the children have been raised as Scientologists.
Cruise’s devotion to the cause is great – as was shown in an embarrassing leaked clip in 2008 when he ranted: ‘I have to tell you something, it is rough and tumble, and it’s wild and woolly, and it’s a blast, it’s a blast, it really is fun because, dammit, there is nothing better than going out there and fighting the fight and suddenly you see things are better.
‘I do what I can, and I do it the way I do everything. There’s nothing part of the way for me.’
His devotion to the cause meant that he was widely regarded as ‘weird’. The Andrew Morton book repeated claims that Suri was thought by some to have been conceived using the frozen sperm of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
After he split from Nicole Kidman in 2000, he endured much of the same king of gossip. Some of it was squashed by his romance with Penelope Cruz, and that was followed by dates with the voluptuous Sofia Vergara.
You wonder, though, if he will be all the more damaged still by what has happened to Katie Holmes.
Before they met she was a natural beauty, with a dewy complexion and pink cheeks. They both looked ecstatic when he proposed at the Eiffel Tower. At the time she was so young and naïve that she preferred cherry coke to champagne and had barely been out of America before.
Her physical decline in the five and a half years that followed is almost shockingly obvious.
Cruise proposed on June 17, 2005 on the top of the Eiffel Tower following a famously embarrassing declaration of his love on Oprah Winfrey’s show, where he jumped up on the couch yelling ‘I’m in love, I’m in love, I can’t be cool, I can’t be laid back.’
Cruise’s first wife was actress Mimi Rogers, 56, whom he married in 1987 before they divorced only three years later in 1990.
He then married Moulin Rouge star Nicole Kidman, 45, later that year, and they adopted two children in Isabella, now 19, and Connor, now 17, but divorced in 2001.
Katie was previously engaged to American Pie star Chris Klein.
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