He is one of the most popular and recognizable film stars worldwide and is regarded as an American cultural icon.
He has won
two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor for starring as a gay lawyer suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia (1993) and the title character in Forrest Gump (1994).
He has also collaborated with film director Steven Spielberg on five films and voiced Sheriff Woody in the Toy Story film series.
Some of his other notable films include
Big (1988),
Sleepless in Seattle (1993),
Apollo 13 (1995),
Saving Private Ryan (1998),
Cast Away (2000),
The Da Vinci Code (2006),
Captain Phillips (2013),
Sully (2016), and
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
He is also a producer of various limited series and television movies,
such as Band of Brothers (2001),
John Adams (2008), and
Olive Kitteridge (2015),
for which he has won seven Primetime Emmy
Awards.
He has received numerous honors,
including the AFI Life Achievement Award,
the Kennedy Center Honor,
the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
the French Legion of Honor,
and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award.
He was born in Concord, California, to Janet Marylyn (Frager), a hospital worker, and Amos Mefford Hanks, an itinerant cook.
His mother’s family was entirely Portuguese, while his father was of mostly English ancestry.
He moved around a great deal after his parents’ divorce, living with a succession of stepfamilies.
He has no acting experience in college and credits the fact that he could not get cast in a college play with actually starting his career.
He went downtown and auditioned for a community theater play.
He was invited by the director of that play to go to Cleveland, and there his acting career started.
He married actress Rita Wilson in 1988, and they have two sons, Chester and Truman.
He also has two children from his previous marriage to Samantha Lewes: Colin and Elizabeth.
He has a brother named Jim Hanks, who is also an actor and filmmaker, and another brother named Larry Hanks, who is a professor.
He is a fan of the Cleveland Indians baseball team and the Aston Villa soccer team.
He is also a collector of typewriters and has over 250 of them.
He recently made headlines for his son Chet Hanks’ new tattoo of a cross on his chest, which he got as a sign of his Christian faith.
Chet Hanks is also an actor and rapper who goes by the stage name Chet Hanx.
He has been dating MMA fighter Melissa Maysing since 2022.
Tom Hanks is currently working on his next film, Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann, in which he plays Colonel Tom Parker, the manager of Elvis Presley.
The film is scheduled to be released in 2022.
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