Tom Hanks

Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is a two-time Academy Award- and Emmy-winning American film actor, director, voice-over artist, writer and film producer. Hanks worked in television and family-friendly comedies before achieving success as a dramatic actor.

Hanks was born on the northwest side of Concord, California, to Amos Mefford Hanks (14 February 1918-15 March 1998), a Southern cook of English and Welsh heritage, and Janet Merilyn Frager, a hospital worker who was also of mostly English descent. As a child, Hanks experienced a wandering, middleclass life with neither ambition nor talent much in evidence. By the time he was five, his parents had separated. They remarried several times before divorcing for good. His father later married an Asian woman with a large family. "Everybody in my family likes each other", Hanks told Rolling Stone. "But there were always about fifty people at the house. I didn't exactly feel like an outsider, but I was sort of outside of it." When his parents divorced, Hanks, his older brother Larry, and his sister went off with their father, a roving cook who rambled through various cities until settling in Oakland, California when Tom was eight. His younger brother stayed with his mother. In school, Hanks also was unremarkable. "I was a geek, a spaz", he told Rolling Stone. "I was horribly, painfully, terribly shy. At the same time, I was the guy who'd yell out funny captions during filmstrips. But I didn't get into trouble. I was always a real good kid and pretty responsible." Although he acted in a few school plays (the names of which he says that he can't remember), acting never seemed a real possibility until Hanks transferred from San Francisco Bay Area junior college Chabot College to Sacramento State University. "Acting classes looked like the best place for a guy who liked to make a lot of noise and be rather flamboyant", Hanks told New York. "I spent a lot of time going to plays. I wouldn't take dates with me. I'd just drive to a theater, buy myself a ticket, sit in the seat, and read the program, and then get into the play completely. I spent a lot of time like that, seeing Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Henrik Ibsen, and all that." It was during these acting classes that Hanks met Vincent Dowling, head of the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland. At Dowling's suggestion, Hanks became an intern at the Festival, which stretched into a three-year experience that covered everything from lighting to set design to stage management. Such a commitment required that Hanks drop out of college. But by the end of the three years, he had decided that he wanted to become an actor. Part of the bug was due to the Cleveland Critics Circle Award, which he won as best actor for his performance as Proteus in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of the few times he played a villain. Personal life Hanks has been married to actress Rita Wilson since 1988. They became involved while working on the movie Volunteers (1985), although they first worked together in an episode of Bosom Buddies. (Wilson guest starred as a romantic interest of Peter Scolari's Henry Desmond character.) They have two children together. Hanks was married previously to Lewes from 1978 to 1987. That union also produced two children (one of whom is actor/son Colin Hanks). Through his contact with Wilson, Hanks joined the Greek Orthodox Church Hanks claims to be a relative of James Hanks, one of several possible fathers of Nancy Hanks, mother of United States president Abraham Lincoln. A map of his family tree showing the purported connection can be found in the External links section. Hanks is a fan of the Cleveland Indians baseball team and English Premier League football (soccer) team Aston Villa.