Tom Cruise staff blast claim he fell to death off cliff

TOM Cruise's staff say internet reports claiming he died at a luxury New Zealand golf resort are just a tasteless spoof.

Reports said the Top Gun star died after falling 20 metres off a clifftop at the Kauri Cliffs course near Matauri Bay, on the north island, The Sun newspaper reported.

The "tragedy" at Kauri Cliffs was claimed to have occurred while Cruise was filming a new movie.

But the star, husband of Katie Holmes and father of three, is alive and well, said his baffled spokesman.

"This is completely not true," Cruise's publicist Jeff Raymond told E! News. "Tom is not in New Zealand nor has he been there recently. This is erroneous and unreliable internet garbage."

It's also unoriginal.

The bogus web report follows an identical hoax two years ago, which falsely claimed Tom Hanks had fallen to his death off the same cliff.

The untrue Hanks story was later attributed to fakeawish.com, a site that serves as a fake news generator and allows users to plug a celebrity's name into made-up stories. A top option on the site today was to plug a male celebrity's name into a "dies in New Zealand" article.

Meanwhile, Cruise is expected to appear in the audience tonight when Katie Holmes makes her opening night debut in All My Sons in a Broadway production.

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