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Tom Hanks

b. 1956 Specialist

A theater dropout from ten houses in ten years became America's default nice guy

Portrait of Tom Hanks — Raph_PH — 2023 — CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Tom Hanks was born in Concord, California, and his parents divorced when he was four, after which he moved constantly — ten houses by the time he was ten years old, by his own count. At Skyline High School in Oakland he acted in productions like South Pacific, then studied theater at Chabot College and California State University, Sacramento, before an internship at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland pulled him away from finishing his degree. In 1978 he won the Cleveland Critics Circle Award for Best Actor playing Proteus in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the next year he moved to New York with no job and no plan beyond acting.

Hanks made his film debut in He Knows You're Alone in 1980, then broke through on the ABC sitcom Bosom Buddies, where he met Rita Wilson, the woman he would eventually marry. Splash, in 1984, made him a star; Big, in 1988, earned his first Oscar nomination. He won back-to-back Best Actor Academy Awards for Philadelphia in 1993, playing a gay lawyer dying of AIDS at the height of the epidemic, and for Forrest Gump the following year. Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away, The Green Mile, and four Toy Story films as the voice of Woody followed across three decades, alongside war miniseries he produced with Steven Spielberg — Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Masters of the Air. The Presidential Medal of Freedom followed in 2016, capping a career built almost entirely on roles audiences trusted.

His first wife, Samantha Lewes, married in 1978 and divorced in 1987, was the mother of his two eldest children, Colin and Elizabeth; she died of bone cancer in 2002 at 49, years after Hanks's public life had moved on to a second marriage and a level of fame she had not shared in. In 2013 he disclosed that decades of gaining and losing weight for roles — fifty-plus pounds up for Cast Away, then back down again — had left him with type 2 diabetes, a private cost behind the easygoing screen persona that made him famous in the first place.

Hanks continues acting into his late sixties, with worldwide grosses past nine billion dollars, among the highest of any actor alive. He has also become a published writer — a short story collection, Uncommon Type, in 2017, and a novel in 2023 — and an evangelist for an obsolete technology, restoring manual typewriters and building an app that teaches a new generation what they sound like. His reputation remains almost uniquely uncomplicated for someone this famous this long: no scandal has defined him, and the nickname that stuck, America's Dad, is not one he has had much reason to fight.