Thomas Jeffrey Hanks was born on the 9th of July 1956 in Concord, California, a suburb of San Francisco, into a family that moved so frequently that by the time he turned ten, he had lived in ten different houses. His mother, Janet Marylyn, worked in a hospital, and his father, Amos Bud Hanks, was an itinerant cook, leaving the three oldest children, including Tom, to follow their father while the youngest, Jim, stayed with their mother. This instability shaped a shy, self-described geek who was unpopular with both students and teachers, yet found his voice by yelling out funny captions during filmstrips in school. He was a Bible-toting evangelical for several years, but his true escape came through the theater, where he discovered that acting classes were the best place for a guy who liked to make noise and be flamboyant. He spent his time driving to theaters alone, buying tickets, and sitting in the seat to read the program before getting completely lost in plays by Brecht, Tennessee Williams, and Ibsen. His early life was a patchwork of religious backgrounds, Catholic and Mormon, and a distant family connection to Abraham Lincoln and Fred Rogers, the very man he would later portray on screen.
From Bosom Buddies to Big Breaks
In 1979, Hanks moved to New York City, making his film debut in the low-budget slasher He Knows You're Alone before landing a starring role in the television movie Mazes and Monsters. The following year, he secured a lead role as Kip Wilson on the ABC television pilot Bosom Buddies, where he and Peter Scolari played advertising men forced to dress as women to live in an all-female hotel. Although the ratings were never strong, television critics gave the program high marks, and co-producer Ian Praiser noted that he knew Hanks would be a movie star in two years. Hanks moved to Los Angeles and made a guest appearance on Happy Days, where he met writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel who were writing the film Splash. They suggested director Ron Howard consider Hanks for the film, and although Howard initially considered him for the role of the main character's brother, Hanks landed the lead role in Splash, which became a surprise box office hit grossing more than US$69 million. He followed this with Bachelor Party and a run of comedies, but it was the 1988 film Big that established him as a major Hollywood talent, earning his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.The Consecutive Oscar Streak
Hanks climbed back to the top of the industry in 1993 with two films that would define his career and change the public perception of him forever. First came Sleepless in Seattle, a romantic comedy co-starring Meg Ryan that critics called charming and ensured his place among the premier romantic-comedy stars of his generation. Then came Philadelphia, where he played a gay lawyer with AIDS who sued his firm for discrimination. Hanks lost weight and thinned his hair to appear sickly for the role, delivering a deeply felt performance that earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. During his acceptance speech, he revealed that two people close to him, his high school drama teacher Rawley Farnsworth and his former classmate John Gilkerson, were gay. He followed this with Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump, playing a man with an IQ of 75 who found himself involved in major events in American history. The film grossed a worldwide total of $678 million, and Hanks won his second consecutive Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming only the second actor to accomplish this feat after Spencer Tracy. He and Tracy were also the same age at the time they received their awards, 37 and 38 years old respectively.