Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks: The Everyman Who Engineered Trust

In 1978 a young intern at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland won the Cleveland Critics Circle Award for Best Actor. The role was Proteus in *The Two Gentlemen of Verona* — one of the very few villains he would ever be paid to play. Sixteen years later the same man became only the second actor after Spencer Tracy to win consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor, and he did it at the same two ages Tracy had, thirty-seven and thirty-eight. The villain never came back. What replaced him was harder to manufacture than menace: a face audiences decided, more or less permanently, they could believe.

Ten Houses Before Ten Years Old

Thomas Jeffrey Hanks was born on July 9, 1956, at Mount Diablo Hospital in Concord, California. His mother, Janet Marylyn, worked in a hospital; his father, Amos "Bud" Hanks, was an itinerant cook, and the itinerancy was not metaphorical. The marriage ended in 1960. Tom went with his father while his brother Jim stayed with their mother in Red Bluff, and by the age of ten he had lived in ten different houses.

That is a childhood that drills one undervalued skill: the fast read of an unfamiliar room, the quick calculation of what strangers need from you. It is a short walk from there to a profession. He performed at Skyline High School in Oakland, including a production of *South Pacific*, spent two years at Chabot College in Hayward, and transferred to California State University, Sacramento. He never took the degree. Cleveland educated him instead — the internship under Vincent Dowling, the Shakespeare, the prize.

Drag, Mermaids, and the Long Apprenticeship

His film debut was the 1980 slasher *He Knows You're Alone*. His actual entrance was on television: *Bosom Buddies*, which ran on ABC from 1980 to 1982 and required him to play an advertising man in women's clothing. It drew better notices than ratings. Ron Howard's *Splash* followed in 1984 and grossed north of sixty-nine million dollars, and for the rest of the decade Hanks was a reliable comic engine — *Bachelor Party*, *The Money Pit*, *The 'Burbs* — with occasional evidence of something more, notably *Nothing in Common* opposite Jackie Gleason in 1986.

*Big*, directed by Penny Marshall in 1988, brought his first Academy Award nomination and the recognition that his comedy was built on an unusual foundation: total credulity. Then came the slump. *The Bonfire of the Vanities* in 1990 and *Joe Versus the Volcano* the same year were disasters; *Turner & Hooch* was the period's lone commercial success. Hanks has been unusually blunt about this era, telling *Vanity Fair* that his early acting "had not been great" and only improved substantially after 1992.

The Consecutive Miracle

*A League of Their Own* in 1992 restarted him. What followed remains one of the strangest hot streaks in American film. In 1993 he played Andrew Beckett, a lawyer dying of AIDS, in Jonathan Demme's *Philadelphia*, losing thirty-five pounds for it, and won the Oscar. In 1994 he played Forrest Gump for Robert Zemeckis — a film that took thirteen nominations and six awards including Best Picture, grossed $678 million worldwide, and won him the Oscar again.

He did not coast on it. *Apollo 13* in 1995 put him in Jim Lovell's flight suit for Ron Howard. *Saving Private Ryan* in 1998 earned a third nomination under Steven Spielberg. *Cast Away* in 2000 asked him to hold the screen alone. *Road to Perdition* in 2002 made him a hitman, and Spielberg's *Catch Me If You Can* the same year made him the pursuer rather than the pursued. Later he specialized in a peculiar sub-genre: the competent American under pressure — James B. Donovan in *Bridge of Spies*, Captain Richard Phillips in *Captain Phillips*, Chesley Sullenberger in Clint Eastwood's *Sully*. In 2019 he played Fred Rogers, to whom he is in fact a sixth cousin, and took a sixth nomination.

Playtone, or the Second Career

In 1996 Hanks directed *That Thing You Do!* and founded Playtone with Gary Goetzman, naming it after the fictional record label in his own film. The company became the more consequential half of his working life. *From the Earth to the Moon* in 1998 ran twelve parts on a $68 million budget, with Hanks co-writing and co-directing. *Band of Brothers* followed in 2001, then *John Adams*, *The Pacific*, *Game Change*, *Olive Kitteridge* and *Masters of the Air*. He has seven Primetime Emmys as a producer against twelve nominations — a record that dwarfs his acting hardware.

Typewriters, Rockets, and the Page

He collects manual typewriters and uses them nearly every day; in 2014 he released Hanx Writer, an iOS app that emulated one, and it reached number one on the App Store within days. He wanted to be an astronaut, sits on the National Space Society's board of governors, and won the Space Foundation's Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award in 2006. He has published a story collection, *Uncommon Type* (2017), and a novel, *The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece* (2023). An asteroid, 12818 Tomhanks, carries his name.

Why Tom Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the word is rarely used about him, and he has not invited it. What the record supports is something narrower and more interesting than intellect: a craft gift for legibility. Roger Ebert located it precisely, writing that "the central triumph of Tom Hanks as a movie actor is that, most of the time, we believe he thinks a lot like us," and calling it "the James Stewart quality." That is a technical achievement, not a temperamental accident. It requires an actor to subtract — to refuse the interesting choice, the vocal flourish, the visible technique — so that nothing stands between the audience and the character's reasoning. Very few performers can do less on camera and register more.

The counter-case is real. His directing is thin: *Larry Crowne* (2011) drew 35 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. His prose has been dismissed — *Slate*'s Katy Waldman called his *New Yorker* story "mediocre" and wrapped in "too-clever lit mag-ese." He himself judged his pre-1992 work poor. And the very quality Ebert praised is a limitation with a name: an actor whose instrument is ordinariness cannot easily play the extraordinary, and Hanks has almost never been cast as anyone genuinely strange or genuinely bad since Cleveland. His most defensible claim to unusual intelligence may lie elsewhere entirely — in the producing, where he built an institution that has made better history television than almost anyone.

The Long Trust

By 2020 he ranked as the fourth-highest-grossing American film actor, with films totalling more than $9.9 billion worldwide. He holds the AFI Life Achievement Award — taken in 2002 at forty-five, the youngest ever — the Kennedy Center Honors, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Cecil B. DeMille Award and the Legion of Honour. But the durable achievement is not the shelf. It is that for three decades an enormous, fractious audience has agreed to extend one actor an unearned benefit of the doubt, and he has spent it carefully.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Actor — 1995
• Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role — 1995
• Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture — 1996
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy — 1989
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama — 2001
• Worked as film actor, film director and film producer