The Full Biography
Tom Hanks. Actor. Producer. The Concord kid who made decency look like a leading-man job, then spent the next decades proving it could hold a war, a virus, and a toy cowboy.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a man on a bench with a box of chocolates, or a captain in the surf at Omaha Beach, or a sheriff’s voice inside a cowboy doll. The years are 1994, 1998, 1995. The pictures are Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, Toy Story. What the still cannot show is Thomas Jeffrey Hanks of Concord, California, a child of a broken household who learned Shakespeare in Cleveland, a sitcom odd-couple in women’s clothes, and a living star who has treated American history as a second beat to keep hitting until it is honest.
He was born on July 9, 1956, in Concord, in the East Bay. His father, Amos “Bud” Hanks, was a cook who moved for work. His mother, Janet Marylyn Frager, left when the boy was five. The children were split among households and new marriages. He has described the itinerant years without decorating them: a lot of kitchens, a lot of being the new kid. He went to Skyline High School in Oakland, then Chabot College, then California State University, Sacramento. The thing that held was theater. In the mid-1970s he interned and then acted at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, Shakespeare and the journeyman’s clock. He married actress Samantha Lewes in 1978. Their son Colin was born in 1977; a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1982. The marriage would end in 1987. The stage habit would not.
The door television opened was a sitcom. Bosom Buddies (1980–82), with Peter Scolari: two men in a women’s hotel, drag as a premise, Hanks as the one who could already make a joke land without begging. Film scouts noticed the timing. Ron Howard’s Splash (1984), opposite Daryl Hannah, is the first picture the country kept. A man in love with a mermaid, played without a wink that would have killed it. Bachelor Party the same year. The Man with One Red Shoe, Volunteers, The Money Pit, Nothing in Common opposite Jackie Gleason — a run of comedies that made him familiar before they made him essential. Penny Marshall’s Big (1988) is the first monument. A boy in a grown body, a toy-store floor, a piano. The performance is precise about wonder and about the cost of it. The Academy nominated him. He was thirty-two. The everyman file opened and has never really closed.
Punchline (1988), with Sally Field. The ’Burbs (1989). Turner & Hooch (1989). Then the 1990s, when the familiar face took the parts that hurt. Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own (1992) gave him Jimmy Dugan, a drunk manager whose most famous line — “There’s no crying in baseball” — is a character’s line, not a motto he lives by. Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993) asked him to play Andrew Beckett, a lawyer fired after an AIDS diagnosis, opposite Denzel Washington. He lost weight. He played the disease without making it a speech. On March 21, 1994, he won Best Actor. The speech named his high-school drama teacher Rawley Farnsworth and a classmate, John Gilkerson, “two of the finest gay Americans,” and then the line the night still carries.
I know that my work in this case is magnified by the fact that the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels.Tom Hanks, Academy Awards, March 21, 1994
The next year he won again. Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994) is a fable the country argued about and then memorized. Back-to-back Best Actor Oscars — the first man to do that since Spencer Tracy. He did not become only Forrest. Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995) put him in a capsule as Jim Lovell, a failure that became a rescue, NASA as a workplace. The same year he began voicing Woody in Pixar’s Toy Story, a cowboy doll with a panic about being replaced. He has kept that voice for three decades. It is not a cameo. It is a second career inside the first.
He directed That Thing You Do! (1996), a one-hit-wonder fable he also wrote, and then Larry Crowne (2011). The director file is smaller than the actor file and tells you what he thinks a movie is for: people, work, a joke that does not sneer. Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) is the third monument. Captain Miller, a teacher in a war, the first twenty-four minutes a civic object people still warn first-timers about. He produced, with Spielberg, the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001) and, years after, The Pacific (2010) and Masters of the Air (2024). The war work is not a hobby. It is a second beat he has kept hitting because the veterans he met on those sets treated the pictures as a record. Edward “Babe” Heffron, who jumped into Normandy, called him top shelf and meant the manners on a set, not the poster.
The Green Mile (1999). Cast Away (2000), a man and a volleyball, another nomination. Spielberg again: Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004), Bridge of Spies (2015), The Post (2017). Robert Langdon for Ron Howard in The Da Vinci Code and its sequels — popcorn he did not apologize for. Captain Phillips (2013). Clint Eastwood’s Sully (2016). A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), as Fred Rogers, a part that looks easy and is not. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022), as Colonel Tom Parker, a heel. A Man Called Otto (2022). He has been willing, in the last decade, to be disliked on purpose. The everyman file had become a trap. Parker is how he stepped around it.
He married Rita Wilson in 1988. Their sons are Chester and Truman. The marriage is the public fact that has lasted. They became Greek Orthodox together. In March 2020, on the set of a festival picture in Australia, both tested positive for COVID-19 in the first week the world learned the acronym; the photograph of a movie star in a mask became, for a moment, a civilian weather report. He has talked about type 2 diabetes as a management problem, not a tragedy. He collects typewriters. He writes. The novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece arrived in 2023. The short stories in Uncommon Type came first. The Kennedy Center Honors, 2014. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2016, from President Barack Obama. The industry’s easy sentence is that he is America’s dad. The file is a character actor who got famous enough to choose.
Playtone, the company he runs with Gary Goetzman, is the producing office behind the war catalog and behind pictures that do not have his face on them. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a Playtone object. So is the John Adams miniseries. He has used the famous name as a door for other people’s work, which is a different vanity than another Forrest. The typewriters are numbered and cleaned; he writes letters on them. The habit looks like a bit until you read the fiction and see that the bit is a practice. He has been, for thirty years, a man who treats American stories as a shop he is willing to keep open after the starring parts have already been played.
The turn is Philadelphia into Gump into the war pictures: a comic who decided the next job was gravity, and then made gravity a franchise of decency without making decency a sermon. A lot of beloved actors become their own warmth. He has kept taking parts — Parker, a film producer on the edge, a man stranded, a captain who might fail — that scrape the warmth and see what is under it.
Six things most people never knew
- Cleveland Shakespeare is the first clock. Great Lakes. The sitcom sits on a classical apprenticeship the stills skip.
- Colin Hanks was born before the marriage certificate. 1977. The household was already a working household.
- Back-to-back Oscars had not happened for a man since Tracy. Philadelphia, then Gump. He went back to work as if the statues were props.
- Woody is a thirty-year job. Not a favor to Pixar. A voice he has protected as if it were a child.
- The war producing is a second career. Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Masters of the Air. Veterans on the set treated him as a clerk of record.
- The 2020 diagnosis was a civilian bulletin. He and Wilson, Australia, March. The face the country trusted became a public-health still.
Friends from the Cleveland years describe a kid who stayed late. Friends from the HBO war rooms describe a producer who knows the difference between a tribute and a fact. Rita is the partner the speeches keep naming. Colin became an actor. Chet became a public weather of his own. The family is large and not a sitcom, which is the correct math for a man the culture keeps trying to hire as a father.
The later years
The later years are not a sunset special. They are a man in his sixties and seventies still taking parts, still producing the war catalog, still showing up to Harvard and to Kennedy Center rooms to talk about liberty as if it were a job site. He has played Rogers and Parker and a dying neighbor and a captain who already knows the landing will be a story. He has published fiction. He has kept Woody’s voice from becoming a replacement’s impression. He has, in the speeches, asked graduating classes to choose the kind of American who does the work of a more perfect union. The sentence would be frosting if the pictures had not already spent thirty years on the same theme: show up, tell it square, do not make a meal of your own goodness.
Home is Los Angeles and the work. The typewriter collection is real and slightly comic, which he knows. The Greek church is a practice, not a press release. Diabetes is a set of rules he keeps. The pandemic year put him, briefly, in the same boat as everyone else and then sent him back to a set, which is how he understands recovery. He has not retired the everyman. He has aged it. The face that sold Big now sells the cost of having been that man for a long time. Audiences still trust him. He has begun, carefully, to spend some of that trust on characters who do not deserve it. That is a late craft decision, and it is more interesting than another captain.
What those years actually hold is continuity. Spielberg still calls. Howard still calls. Pixar still needs the cowboy. HBO still wants the next chapter of a war he has been filing since Miller died on a bridge. He has the Medal of Freedom on a shelf and a call time in the morning. He has not become a politician. He has become the person a certain kind of American institution phones when it needs a citizen who can speak in complete sentences. He treats that as a duty with a time limit: say the true thing, sit down, go back to the make-believe, which is the other duty.
He is still married to the woman he thanked, voice breaking, in 1995. That is not nothing in his trade. The children are adults. The sitcom is a clip. The bench is a clip. The beach is a clip. The man who owns the clips is still working, which is the only later chapter he has ever offered.
Harvard, in 2023, heard him divide Americans into those who embrace liberty for all, those who will not, and those who are indifferent. Only the first, he said, do the work of a more perfect union. The speech is a citizen’s speech. It sits on thirty years of playing men who show up. He did not need the honorary circuit. He used it. That is the same instinct as the typewriter novel and the HBO war rooms: put the famous face in the service of a record. Then go back to the mark.
After the spotlight moved
It has not moved. It has settled on him like a weather the country prefers. Every decent leading man still pays him a tax. Every World War II series still owes his producing office a look. Woody still argues with Buzz. The Oscar speeches still play when someone needs to remember what a thank-you can do.
He came out of a split East Bay house, learned verse in Cleveland, wore a dress on television, became a mermaid’s husband and a boy in a man’s body, played a lawyer the streets of heaven were too full to ignore, ran through history in a box of chocolates, landed a broken moon shot, took a company through a French beach, voiced a cowboy, and kept the war catalog honest. If you only remember the bench, you have the still. If you remember Cleveland, Beckett, Miller, Woody, and the typewriters, you have him.
Portrait: Dick Thomas Johnson · CC BY-SA 2.5 · via Wikimedia Commons