Hanks' cement prints in front of the Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood
Gallery of Tom Hanks
1999
Tom Hanks in The Green Mile (1999)
Gallery of Tom Hanks
2000
Tom Hanks in Cast Away (2000)
Gallery of Tom Hanks
2008
Hanks at Post-Emmys Party
Gallery of Tom Hanks
2010
Hanks with Steven Spielberg at the National World War II Memorial in March 2010
Gallery of Tom Hanks
2013
Tom Hanks Movies: Captain Phillips (2013)
Gallery of Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies (2015)
Gallery of Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks in Cast Away (2000)
Gallery of Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks in Inferno (2016)
Gallery of Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks in Angels & Demons (2009)
Gallery of Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Gallery of Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks in Sully (2016)
Gallery of Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks in The Circle (2017)
Gallery of Tom Hanks
1996
Gallery of Tom Hanks
2017
Tom Hanks with his collection of typewriters
Gallery of Tom Hanks
2017
Tom Hanks promotes his first book 'Uncommon Type' in London
Achievements
Tom Hanks won two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor for starring as a gay lawyer suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia (1993) and a young man with below-average IQ in Forrest Gump (1994).
Membership
Awards
MTV Movie Award
1994
Tom Hanks attends the Third Annual MTV Movie Awards on June 4, 1994 at the Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California.
Kennedy Center Honors Medallion
2014
Tom Hanks is one of the five recipients of the 2014 Kennedy Center Honors, at the 2014 Kennedy Center Honors Gala Dinner at the U.S. Department of State on December 6, 2014 in Washington, D.C.
Presidential Medal of Freedom
2016
Pres. Barack Obama awards distinguished actor Tom Hanks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
French Legion of Honor
2016
Tom Hanks received French Legion of Honor for his presentation of World War II and support of World War II veterans, along with Tom Brokaw, retired NBC anchor, and Nick Mueller, President of the WWII Museum, New Orleans
People's Choice Awards
2017
Tom Hanks accepts Favorite Dramatic Movie Actor onstage during the People's Choice Awards 2017 at Microsoft Theater on January 18, 2017 in Los Angeles, California.
Academy Awards
Tom Hanks won two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor for starring as a gay lawyer suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia (1993) and a young man with below-average IQ in Forrest Gump (1994).
Golden Globes
Tom won his first-ever Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy after starring in Big.
Emmy Awards
Tom Hanks was awarded Emmy Award seven times.
Screen Actors Guild Awards
Tom Hanks won a Best Actor for his performance in "Forrest Gump." It was the first year of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards.
Walk of Fame
Tom Hanks's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
American Film Institute Awards
Tom Hanks was awarded American Film Institute Award in 2001 and 2002.
American Comedy Awards
Tom Hanks was a three-time recipient of the American Comedy Awards.
Hollywood Actor Award
Tom Hanks is a recipient of two Hollywood Actor Award for his work in Road to Perdition (2002) and in Sully (2016)
Tom Hanks is one of the five recipients of the 2014 Kennedy Center Honors, at the 2014 Kennedy Center Honors Gala Dinner at the U.S. Department of State on December 6, 2014 in Washington, D.C.
Tom Hanks received French Legion of Honor for his presentation of World War II and support of World War II veterans, along with Tom Brokaw, retired NBC anchor, and Nick Mueller, President of the WWII Museum, New Orleans
Tom Hanks accepts Favorite Dramatic Movie Actor onstage during the People's Choice Awards 2017 at Microsoft Theater on January 18, 2017 in Los Angeles, California.
Tom Hanks won two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor for starring as a gay lawyer suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia (1993) and a young man with below-average IQ in Forrest Gump (1994).
Tom Hanks won two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor for starring as a gay lawyer suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia (1993) and a young man with below-average IQ in Forrest Gump (1994).
(Woody has always been confident about his place in the wo...)
Woody has always been confident about his place in the world, and that his priority is taking care of his kid, whether that’s Andy or Bonnie. But when Bonnie adds a reluctant new toy named Forky to her room, a road-trip adventure with old and new friends shows Woody how big the world can be for a toy.
Tom Hanks, in full Thomas J. Hanks, is an American actor whose cheerful everyman persona made him a natural for starring roles in many popular films. In the 1990s he expanded his comedic repertoire and began portraying lead characters in dramas.
Background
Ethnicity:
His mother was of Portuguese ancestry (her family's surname was originally Fraga), while two of Hanks' paternal great-grandparents emigrated from the United Kingdom.
Hanks was born Thomas Jeffrey Hanks on July 9, 1956, in Concord, California. His father, Amos, was a restaurant chef; his mother, Janet, was a waitress. Hanks, the third of the couple's four children and the second of three sons, was five years old in February 1962 when his parents separated. Leaving their younger brother behind with their mother, Hanks and his two older siblings went with their father to Reno, Nevada, where they lived in a basement flat at 529 Mills Street. By April their father had married Winfred Finley, the owner of the Mills Street residence. Finley was herself divorced and living with five of her eight children, and the large Finley brood merged to become step-siblings with the Hanks children.
In 1964 the 10-member household moved to Pleasant Hills, California. Soon afterward, Amos Hanks and Finley divorced. The Hanks children were shuffled continuously between the homes of various relatives while their father established a residence near his family in the San Francisco Bay area. For a time the three children stayed in Red Bluff with their mother, who was three-times remarried by then. After leaving Red Bluff they spent time with assorted relatives of their father in San Mateo and Oakland.
The living arrangement stabilized after Amos Hanks met and married Frances Wong who brought three daughters of her own into the marriage. Thus, a large family was created anew, with six siblings in all. Hanks coped admirably with the unpredictability of his home life. He took judo lessons and participated in Little League, and the family enjoyed camping when circumstances allowed. Hanks, in fact, demonstrated a remarkable sense of resilience in the face of continuous upheaval. At home, he and his siblings learned to fend for themselves by doing their own laundry and preparing meals as much as possible.
Education
In school, Hanks was unpopular with students and teachers. Hanks acted in school plays, including South Pacific, while attending Skyline High School in Oakland, California.
After high school graduation in 1974, Hanks enrolled at Chabot Community College in nearby Hayward. For the next two years, he began a metaphorical love affair with the theater, appearing on stage and working as a stagehand. He took acting classes and developed a sincere appreciation of live theater. By the time he enrolled at California State University at Sacramento (CSUS) in 1976, his fascination with the theater could no longer be contained.
Through an extracurricular involvement with the Sacramento Civic Theater, Hanks developed a fortuitous acquaintance with director Vincent Dowling. A visitor to the Sacramento area, Dowling was affiliated with the Great Lakes Shakespearean Festival (now Great Lakes Theater Festival) in Cleveland, Ohio. Hanks appeared as Yasha in the Sacramento community theater production of Anton Chekhov's Cherry Orchard and at Dowling's invitation spent the summer of 1977 at the Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland as a volunteer intern. He quit his studies in 1977.
In the late 1970s Tom Hanks moved to New York City, where he had a small part in a horror film in 1980. Hanks gained notice for his comic abilities as a costar of the television series Bosom Buddies (1980–82). His work in the hit film Splash (1984) earned him leads in other comedies, including Bachelor Party (1984), Volunteers (1985), and The Money Pit (1986). He successfully mixed comedy with drama in Nothing in Common (1986) and Punchline (1988), and his portrayal of a boy in an adult body in Big (1988) earned him an Academy Award nomination and launched him on the path to becoming one of the era’s most popular stars.
After starring opposite actress Meg Ryan in the romantic comedy Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), Hanks reteamed with her in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998), both directed by Nora Ephron. He portrayed the drunken manager of a women’s baseball team in the comedy A League of Their Own (1992) and delivered an Oscar-winning performance as a gay lawyer with AIDS in Philadelphia (1993). Another Academy Award, for the phenomenally popular Forrest Gump (1994), made him the first actor to win back-to-back best actor Oscars since Spencer Tracy.
Hanks earned further Oscar nominations for outstanding dramatic performances in Saving Private Ryan (1998), which was directed by Steven Spielberg, and Cast Away (2000). Additional dramatic roles came in Apollo 13 (1995), The Green Mile (1999), and Road to Perdition (2002). In the blockbuster Toy Story series (1995, 1999, 2010, 2019), Hanks provided the voice of the animated cowboy Woody.
In 2002 Hanks starred with Leonardo DiCaprio in Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, and he portrayed Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology, in the 2006 film adaptation of Dan Brown’s hugely popular The Da Vinci Code; he reprised the role of Langdon in Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016). In Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), Hanks appeared as the real-life senator Charlie Wilson, who assisted the Afghan resistance to the Soviets in the 1980s, and he later portrayed a father killed in the September 11 attacks in the drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011). For the mystical epic Cloud Atlas (2012), which wove together multiple narratives, he took on six roles, ranging from a 19th-century surgeon to a post apocalyptic tribesman.
In 2013 Hanks made his Broadway debut in Lucky Guy, a play by Ephron based on the life of journalist Mike McAlary, and he captured a Tony Award nomination for his starring performance as the colourful hard-nosed newsman. Later that year he returned to the big screen with Captain Phillips, a drama based on the true story of an American cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates in 2009, and Saving Mr. Banks, a comedy based on the efforts of Walt Disney to obtain the film rights to P.L. Travers’s novel Mary Poppins (1934). Hanks then portrayed lawyer James B. Donovan, who defended (1957) Soviet spy Rudolf Abel and later orchestrated his 1962 release in exchange for American pilot Francis Gary Powers, in Steven Spielberg’s Cold War drama Bridge of Spies (2015).
A Hologram for the King (2016), an adaptation of a novel by Dave Eggers, starred Hanks as a salesman who journeys to Saudi Arabia in an attempt to revive his fortunes. Also in 2016 he appeared as the title character in Sully, Clint Eastwood’s drama based on the true story of a commercial airline pilot who made an emergency landing in the Hudson River. After starring in The Circle, Hanks reunited with Spielberg for The Post (both 2017), about the publication of the Pentagon Papers. In the drama, he portrayed Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post. Hanks portrayed Fred Rogers in Marielle Heller's biographical film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood for which he was nominated for his first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The film was released on November 22, 2019, by Sony Pictures.
In addition to his acting, Hanks wrote and directed the comedy That Thing You Do! (1996), about a fictional 1960s rock band. He later co-wrote, directed, and starred opposite Julia Roberts in the romance Larry Crowne (2011), playing an unemployed man who enrolls in community college. Hanks also produced a number of films and such television miniseries as From the Earth to the Moon (1998), which documents the Apollo space program, and the World War II dramas Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010). In 2009, he narrated Beyond All Boundaries, a documentary about World War II that used animation, archival footage, and sensory effects, including shaking seats; the 35-minute film was produced for the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. He also wrote the short-story collection Uncommon Type (2017).
The major religion he was exposed to in the first 10 years of his life was Catholicism. His stepmother became a Mormon. His aunt, whom he lived with for a long time, was a Nazarene, which is a kind of ultra-super Methodist. For years he went to Wednesday-night Bible studies with his church group. Therefore, he had this peripatetic overview of various faiths, and the one thing he got from that was the intellectual pursuit involved.
Hanks’ second and current wife, Rita Wilson, was raised a member of the Greek Orthodox Church and Hanks has taken on her religion. Hanks is said to be a deeply religious man and goes to church regularly. Hanks has said that his greatest motivation for being a church-goer is to come in contact with the great unanswered questions mankind has always asked, questions that, for the most part, only religion attempts to answer.
Politics
Hanks has made donations to many Democratic politicians and made public his presidential candidate choice in the 2008 election, endorsing Barack Obama. After several years, Hanks said he would back Obama again because he had exceeded his expectations.
Hanks has been open about his support for same-sex marriage, environmental causes, and alternative fuels. Hanks was extremely outspoken about his opposition to Proposition 8, an amendment to the California constitution that defined marriage as a union only between a man and a woman. He severely criticized the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who were major proponents of the bill, for their views on marriage and their role in supporting the bill.
Views
A proponent of environmentalism, Hanks is an investor in electric vehicles and owns a Toyota RAV4 EV and the first production AC Propulsion eBox. He was a lessee of an EV1 before it was recalled, as chronicled in the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? He was on the waiting list for an Aptera 2 Series.
Hanks serves as campaign chair of the Hidden Heroes Campaign of the Elizabeth Dole Foundation. The stated mission of the campaign is to inspire a national movement to more effectively support military and veteran caregivers.
Quotations:
"If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. It's the hard that makes it great."
"From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. It's not a miracle; we just decided to go."
"Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are."
"It's just as hard... staying happily married as it is doing movies."
"And I'm not apolitical - I'm very specific in my politics. But a lot of the time it's nobody's business unless you're over at my house having dinner."
"I've made over 20 movies, and 5 of them are good."
"Movie-making is telling a story with the best technology at your disposal."
"It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope."
"My favorite traditional Christmas movie that I like to watch is All Quiet on the Western Front. It's just not December without that movie in my house."
"At the end of the day it’s got to be a good movie, it’s got to be a funny movie, and it’s got to make people think, ’Hey, I couldn’t have spent my time any better.’"
Membership
Hanks is a member of the National Space Society. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) (Actors Branch) since 2001.
He is also a member of the International Thespian Society (a group supporting theatre for high school students internationally).
National Space Society
,
United States
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
2001
International Thespian Society
Personality
Though known for his on-screen charisma and versatility, Tom admits he was a "horribly, painfully, terribly shy" kid. A supporter of NASA's manned space program, Hanks said he originally wanted to be an astronaut.
Hanks is a collector of manual typewriters and uses them almost daily. In August 2014, Hanks released Hanx Writer, an iOS app meant to emulate the experience of using a typewriter; within days the free app reached number one on the App Store.
Hanks's favorite movies are The Godfather, Elephant, Looper, Fargo, Boogie Nights, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Physical Characteristics:
Tom Hanks has revealed that he has been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. During an appearance on "Late Show With David Letterman" to promote his film "Captain Phillips," the actor said his physician told him he had moved from a prediabetic state to having the disease. In general, the actor follows a particular diet and workout regimen to help manage his type 2 diabetes.
Quotes from others about the person
Catherine Zeta-Jones: "He really is an artist. There is something so calm and minimalistic in a way in what he does, but so clear and so emotional, and funny, and all the different elements of his character are so real that sometimes I'm doing a scene and I forget I have a line because I'm watching him act and do his work so well that I'm just studying him. And then on the other side of it, he's such a great guy to hang out with. So sweet and kind, and really a generous actor as well as a person. And you can't ask for anything more when you turn up for work to have that calibre of people, both professional and personal."
Charlize Theron: "A solid crush for me has always been Tom Hanks. He can do no wrong, that’s what it is."
Interests
Politicians
Barack Obama
Writers
Favorite Book: In Cold Blood
Sport & Clubs
baseball, football
Athletes
Favorite Baseball Team: Cleveland Indians
Favorite NFL Team: Oakland Raiders
Music & Bands
Elvis Presley, Patrick Rondat and Alabama Thunderpussy
Connections
Hanks was married to American actress Samantha Lewes from 1978. They had one son, actor Colin Hanks (born 1977), and one daughter, Elizabeth Hanks (born 1982).
In 1981, Hanks met actress Rita Wilson on the set of TV comedy Bosom Buddies (1980-1982). They were reunited in 1985 on the set of Volunteers. Hanks and Samantha Lewes divorced in 1987.
Hanks married Wilson in 1988. They have two sons - Chester Marlon "Chet" Hanks, and Truman Theodore. Before marrying Wilson, Hanks converted to the Greek Orthodox Church, the religion of Wilson and her family.
2016 - For his presentation of World War II and support of World War II veterans, along with Tom Brokaw, retired NBC anchor, and Nick Mueller, President of the WWII Museum, New Orleans
2016 - For his presentation of World War II and support of World War II veterans, along with Tom Brokaw, retired NBC anchor, and Nick Mueller, President of the WWII Museum, New Orleans
1989, Big , Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
1994, Philadelphia, Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama
1995, Forrest Gump, Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama
2001, Cast Away, Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama
1989, Big , Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
1994, Philadelphia, Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama
1995, Forrest Gump, Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama
2001, Cast Away, Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama
1998, From the Earth to the Moon - Outstanding Miniseries
2002, Band of Brothers - Outstanding Miniseries
2008, John Adams - Outstanding Miniseries
2010, The Pacific- Outstanding Miniseries
2012, Game Change - Outstanding Miniseries or Movie
2015, Olive Kitteridge - Outstanding Miniseries
1998, From the Earth to the Moon - Outstanding Miniseries
2002, Band of Brothers - Outstanding Miniseries
2008, John Adams - Outstanding Miniseries
2010, The Pacific- Outstanding Miniseries
2012, Game Change - Outstanding Miniseries or Movie
1989, Big - Funniest Actor in a Motion Picture (Leading Role)
1993, A League of Their Own - Funniest Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture
1995, Forrest Gump - Funniest Actor in a Motion Picture (Leading Role)
1989, Big - Funniest Actor in a Motion Picture (Leading Role)
1993, A League of Their Own - Funniest Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture
1995, Forrest Gump - Funniest Actor in a Motion Picture (Leading Role)