Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American
actor,
producer,
writer and
director. Hanks worked in television and family-friendly comedies before achieving success as a dramatic actor in several notable roles, including Andrew Beckett in
Philadelphia, the title role in
Forrest Gump, Commander
James A. Lovell in
Apollo 13, Captain John H. Miller in
Saving Private Ryan,
Sheriff Woody in
Pixar's
Toy Story, and Chuck Noland in
Cast Away. Hanks won consecutive
Best Actor Academy Awards, in 1993 for
Philadelphia and in 1994 for
Forrest Gump. U.S. domestic box office totals for his films exceed
$3.3 billion.
[People Index from Box Office Mojo] He is the father of actor
Colin Hanks.
Early life
Hanks was born in
Concord,
California. His father, Amos Mefford Hanks (born in
Glenn County, California on March 9, 1924 – died in
Alameda, California on January 31, 1992), was a distant relative of President
Abraham Lincoln, through Lincoln's mother,
Nancy Hanks.
[Fenster, Bob. They Did What!? The Funny, Weird, Wonderful, and Stupid Things Famous People Have Done, Andrews Publishing, 2002. Page 55.] His mother,
Portuguese-American Janet Marylyn Frager (born in
Alameda County, California on January 18, 1932), was a hospital worker; the two divorced in 1960. The family's three oldest children, Sandra, (now Sandra Hanks Benoiton, a
writer), Larry (now Lawrence M. Hanks,
Ph.D., an
entomology professor at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
[Lawrence M. Hanks, Associate Professor - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] and Tom went with their father, while the youngest,
Jim, now an actor and film maker, remained with his mother in
Red Bluff, California. Afterwards, both parents remarried. The first stepmother for Sandra, Larry, and Tom came to the marriage with five children of her own. Hanks once told
Rolling Stone: "Everybody in my family likes each other. But there were always about 50 people at the house. I didn't exactly feel like an outsider, but I was sort of outside it." That marriage ended in divorce after just two years.
