In August 1996, Tom Cruise was vacationing near the island of Capri, Italy aboard a rented superyacht with his then-wife Nicole Kidman and their children. What started as a quiet Mediterranean holiday turned into something straight out of one of his films - except this time, the danger was completely real.

A Yacht in Flames

Cruise's crew spotted a 63-foot yacht that had caught fire after an electrical short circuit. The blaze spread rapidly. The Lejeune family - French newspaper publisher Jacques Lejeune, his wife Bernadette, their seven-year-old daughter Eugenie, and two crew members - made it off the burning vessel into a rubber lifeboat, but the burning boat was going down fast.

The Skiff Goes Out

Cruise immediately ordered his yacht's smaller boat deployed. His crew reached the survivors and brought all five people aboard Cruise's vessel. The rescued family and crew stayed on Cruise's yacht for roughly 30 minutes - until the Italian coast guard arrived to take them back to shore. The burning yacht sank shortly after the last person was pulled to safety.

What He Said Afterward

Cruise's publicist kept the response brief: the actor "did what any decent person would do." It was not his first act of this kind. In previous years, Cruise had stopped to help a hit-and-run victim in California and had intervened to help a child in London. The Capri rescue, however, was the most dramatic - five lives saved from a sinking vessel in the Mediterranean.

The Real-Reel Echo

Cruise had already become famous for performing his own stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise, insisting on doing the dangerous sequences himself. The 1996 rescue - just months after the first Mission: Impossible hit theaters - gave that reputation an entirely new dimension. The man who sprinted across movie sets to simulate danger had, on a quiet August afternoon off Capri, done the genuine article.

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