Elsewhere in these pages we offer a comprehensive account of the slide in global revenues from films starring Tom Cruise, and of his professional divorce from Paramount Pictures after 14 years of decreasingly successful Cruise control by the studio.

The sagging bottom line and the parting of the ways are, of course, connected. No studio chief can swagger authentically from his Bentley to Spago Beverly Hills having promised a star 20 per cent of the gross of a film that barely recoups its budget. It is also entirely plausible that executives at Paramount, in common with most of America, were, like, totally weirded out when Cruise decided last year to jump up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa and talk about his thinking.

This will have compounded the effects of a strong long-term contributor to the Cruise weirdness quotient — his belief as a Scientologist in multiple reincarnation and deep-seated psychological trauma inflicted on humans by extraterrestrial dictatorships.

But the real reason for Cruise’s abrupt marginalisation is his nose. Commonly thought of as a conventionally handsome boy-next-door, he boasts, in fact, an intriguingly large and asymmetric “straight-off-the-forehead” schnoz that has contributed substantially to his appeal precisely for being unconventional. It has, however, been eclipsed by that of Owen Wilson, whose has brought his twice-broken staircase nose to London this week for the launch of You, Me and Dupree and is as much an icon for Naughties slacker chic as Cruise was for the tightly wound Eighties. Neither man deserves pity, but there is room for only one of their noses in our hearts.