Thomas Jeffrey Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American two-time Academy Award-winning film actor, Emmy-winning director, voice-over artist and movie producer. Hanks worked in television and family-friendly comedies before achieving notable success as a dramatic actor in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He is also one of only two actors in the history of film to have seven consecutive US$100 million blockbusters, the other being Tom Cruise.Hanks was born in Concord, California. His father, Amos Mefford Hanks, was a chef and a relation of President Abraham Lincoln's mother. His mother, Janet Marylyn (née Frager), was a hospital worker; the two divorced in 1960.The family's three oldest children, Sandra, (now Sandra Hanks Benoiton, a writer), Rufus (now Lawrence M. Hanks, PhD, a renowned entomology professor at the 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. Both parents remarried. The first stepmother for Sandra, Larry (Rufus), and Tom came to the marriage with five children of her own. Hanks once told Rolling Stone magazine: "Everybody in my family likes each other. But there were always about fifty 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 2 years, and Amos Hanks became a single parent, working long hours and relying on the children to fend for themselves often, an exercise in self-reliance that served the siblings well.
In school, Hanks was unpopular with students and teachers alike, telling Rolling Stone magazine: "I was a geek, a spaz. 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". Amos Hanks remarried in 1965 to the former Frances Wong, a San Francisco native of Chinese descent. Frances had three children, two of whom lived with Tom during his high school years. Tom acted in school plays, including "South Pacific", while attending Skyline High School in Oakland, California. Hanks studied theater at Chabot College, and after two years, transferred to Sacramento State University. Hanks told the New York Times: "Acting classes looked like the best place for a guy who liked to make a lot of noise and be rather flamboyant. 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 his years studying theater 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 with this under his belt, a future in acting was in the cards. Hanks won the Cleveland Critics Circle Award for best actor for his performance as Proteus in Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of the few times he played a villain.
Hanks was married to Samantha Lewes from 1978 to 1987 . The couple had two children, son Colin Hanks (now an actor in his own right) and daughter Elizabeth. In 1988 Hanks married actress Rita Wilson; raised in several different Christian denominations, Hanks converted from Roman Catholicism to Orthodox Christianity when marrying Wilson.The two first met on the set of Hanks’s television show Bosom Buddies but later developed a romantic interest while working on the film Volunteers. They have two sons, Chester (Chet) and Truman. Hanks is a fan of the Oakland Raiders football team and baseball's Cleveland Indians although he used to be a Oakland Collesium, home of the Oakland Athletics, vendor.
Hanks believes that he is related to James Hanks, possibly the father 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. If this is true, it would make Hanks a fourth cousin, four times removed, of President Lincoln.
Hanks has stated that his favorite actor is James Stewart, someone with whose talents his are often compared.[citation needed] He has said his favorite film is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In interviews he has said that he has seen it around thirteen times in theaters and owns the VHS, LaserDisc, and DVD releases of the film.
