How Katie Holmes outmanoeuvred Hollywood's most powerful PR machine

TOM Cruise blinked. In the space of a week he went from the world's most bankable star to a sinister villain.

TOM Cruise blinked. In the space of a week he went from the world's most bankable star to a sinister villain.

His wife of five years, a former TV actress with little Hollywood experience, took on one of the industry's most powerful PR machines and won.

Reports suggest Katie Holmes managed to settle the divorce on her terms, securing primary custody of the couple's six-year-old daughter, Suri, and what is likely to be a sizeable share of their assets.

Cruise has been on the back foot since Holmes announced she was filing for divorce a little over a week ago. The star had been in Iceland filming his new movie, Oblivion, and was said to have been blindsided by the news.

The deluge of negative stories that Holmes's announcement triggered was in stark contrast to how controlled Cruise's split from Kidman was more than a decade ago.

Claims that Holmes wanted out because she feared Cruise wanted to brainwash Suri with Scientology have been widely reported. Stories of Scientologists tailing her around New York and claims she fired her assistants because they were too close to Cruise and his church added fuel to the fire.

News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch predicted a massive fallout from the divorce. "Scientology back in news," he tweeted. "Very weird cult, but big, big money involved with Tom Cruise either number two or three in hiearchy [sic] … Watch Katie Holmes and Scientology story develop. Something creepy, maybe even evil, about these people."

Cruise was losing the publicity war and he knew it. Pictures of Holmes cradling Suri on the streets of New York showed her to be maternal and protective, while daily Scientology exposes depicted him as a dangerous kook.

The floodgates were open and anyone who had a grudge against Cruise or an embarrassing story involving him was suddenly getting a fair hearing. Claims that he cut Kidman off from their children resurfaced.

In a rare flash of anger, Cruise's lawyer accused Holmes of playing the media at the weekend. "We are letting 'the other side' (Katie and her team), play the media until they wear everyone out and then we’ll have something to say," Field told the BBC.

"It's not Tom’s style to do this publicly. He is really sad about what’s happening."

Reputation is everything in Hollywood. Cruise knows this more than most stars. His career appeared to be over six years ago after a string embarrassing interviews and public spats.

His couch-jumping display of love for his then-fiancée Holmes turned him into a joke while a string of PR disasters connected to his beliefs (including fights with Brooke Shields and Today Show host Matt Lauer over post-natal depression) showed an uncaring almost nasty side to his personality.

Both certainly played a part in Paramount Pictures' decision not to renew his lucrative producing deal a year later. A string of flops that followed seemed to suggest the public was over him. It took an inspired cameo as a foul-mouthed Hollywood exec in the 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder to kick-start his career and a return to the Mission: Impossible franchise to propel him back to the top of the tree.

Last week Forbes named him the highest paid performer in the world after he raked in $70 million in the past year. Although 50, Cruise has aged incredibly well. Unlike other stars he can still convincingly headline an action movie, and unlike Scientology’s other high-profile celebrity, John Travolta, he is still very much a movie star.

The first trailer for his new thriller, Jack Reacher, was released last week, with the film - the start of a franchise - to hit cinemas in December. Next year will see Cruise star in the sci-fi films Oblivion and All You Need is Kill and begin work on a new Mission: Impossible film and a reboot of Van Helsing.

But his split put all of that at risk. A nasty court fight would without a doubt turn the public against him and drown out any attempts to sell his movies. Mel Gibson's spectacular fall from grace would have been at the forefront of his publicists’ minds.

More importantly, Holmes had nothing to lose. When Cruise divorced Kidman, she was a rising star and he was at the height of his power. She couldn’t afford to alienate him with stories of what went on in their marriage. Holmes’s movie career never really started; her biggest role to date was in 2005 as the female lead in Batman Begins but she bowed out of the sequel The Dark Knight and now spends most her time on her fashion line. She could afford to ignore any "you'll never work in this town again" threats.

That is why Cruise settled and settled quickly.