Tom Hanks

Lore & Background

Hanks was born at the Mount Diablo Hospital in Concord, California. His mother, Janet Marylyn, was a hospital worker. His father, Amos 'Bud' Hanks was an itinerant cook. His mother was from a Portuguese family; their surname was originally 'Fraga'. His father had English ancestry, and through his line, Hanks is a distant cousin of Nancy Hanks and her son President Abraham Lincoln and children's host Fred Rogers (whom Hanks has portrayed in a film role). Hanks' parents divorced in 1960. Their three oldest children, Sandra, Larry, and Tom, went with their father, while the youngest, Jim, remained with their mother in Red Bluff, California. In his childhood, Hanks' family moved often. By age ten, he had lived in ten different houses. His family's religious background was Catholic and Mormon. One journalist characterized Hanks' teenage self as being a 'Bible-toting evangelical' for several years. In school, he was unpopular with students and teachers alike, later telling Rolling Stone magazine, 'I was a geek, a spaz. I was horribly, painfully, terribly shy. At the same time, I was the guy who'd yell out funny captions during filmstrips. But I didn't get into trouble. I was always a real good kid and pretty responsible.' Hanks acted in school plays, including South Pacific, while attending Skyline High School in Oakland, California. Having grown up in the Bay Area, Hanks says that some of his first movie memories were seeing movies in the Alameda Theatre. Hanks studied theater at Chabot College in Hayward, California, and transferred to California State University, Sacramento after two years. During a 2001 interview with sportscaster Bob Costas, Hanks was asked whether he would rather have an Oscar or a Heisman Trophy. He replied that he would have rather won a Heisman by playing halfback for the California Golden Bears. He told New York magazine in 1986, 'Acting classes looked like the best place for a guy who liked to make a lot of noise and be rather flamboyant. I spent a lot of time going to plays. I wouldn't take dates with me. I'd just drive to a theater, buy myself a ticket, sit in the seat and read the program, and then get into the play completely. I spent a lot of time like that, seeing Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Ibsen, and all that.' During his years studying theater, Hanks met Vincent Dowling, head of the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, Oh

Reader's Guide

Hanks rose to fame with leading roles in the comedies Splash (1984), The Money Pit (1986), Big (1988), and A League of Their Own (1992). He won two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor, playing a gay lawyer suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia (1993), then the title character in Forrest Gump (1994). Hanks has collaborated with Steven Spielberg on five films—Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004), Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017)—and three World War II-themed miniseries: Band of Brothers (2001), The Pacific (2010) and Masters of the Air (2024). He has also frequently collaborated with directors Ron Howard, Nora Ephron and Robert Zemeckis. Hanks cemented his film stardom with lead roles in the romantic comedies Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You've Got Mail (1998); the dramas Apollo 13 (1995), The Green Mile (1999), Cast Away (2000), Road to Perdition (2002), Cloud Atlas (2012) and News of the World (2020); and the biographical dramas Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Captain Phillips (2013), Saving Mr. Banks (2013), Sully (2016), A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) and Elvis (2022). He played the title character in the Robert Langdon series (2006–2016), voiced Sheriff Woody in the Toy Story franchise (1995–present) and multiple roles in The Polar Express (2004). Hanks directed and acted in That Thing You Do! (1996) and Larry Crowne (2011). His breakthrough television role was a co-lead in the ABC sitcom Bosom Buddies (1980–1982). He has hosted Saturday Night Live ten times and launched a production company, Playtone, which has produced various limited series and television movies, including From the Earth to the Moon (1998), Band of Brothers, John Adams (2008), The Pacific, Game Change (2012) and Olive Kitteridge (2015). He made his Broadway debut in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy (2013), earning a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.

Did You Know?

• Hanks is a distant cousin of Nancy Hanks and her son President Abraham Lincoln and children's host Fred Rogers.
• Hanks won the Cleveland Critics Circle Award for Best Actor for his 1978 performance as Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
• Hanks was born at Mount Diablo Hospital in Concord, California.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American film actor, director, voice-over artist, writer and film producer. He is of English, German and Portuguese descent." — Tom Hanks "Thank you. I'm standing here in lieu of my fellow nominees who are just as deserving, if not more so of this moment." — Tom Hanks "I'm standing here because of an army of people who over the course of a back-breaking schedule that was set by Bob Zemeckis worked much harder than I did and who had much more at risk if our efforts were not successful." — Tom Hanks "I'm empowered to stand here thanks to the ensemble of actors, men and women, who I shared the screen with and who in ways they will never understand made me a better actor." — Tom Hanks