Tom Hanks

Is there an actor audiences love more than Tom Hanks? In the United States they call him "America's dad", and with good reason: few performers have embodied decency, humour and ordinary humanity so often. Born Thomas Jeffrey Hanks on 9 July 1956 in Concord, California, he has won two consecutive Oscars, collected six nominations and spent more than forty years filling cinemas around the world, moving between romantic comedy, war drama and animated classics with the same ease.

From wandering child to king of comedy

His childhood was a life of constant packing. His parents divorced when he was barely four and he grew up moving from town to town with his father, while his mother, of Portuguese descent, rebuilt her life. He discovered theatre at school, trained on the Cleveland stage and in 1980 landed his first showcase: the sitcom 'Bosom Buddies', in which he dressed as a woman to live in a female only hotel.

Cinema soon came calling. The romantic comedy Splash (1984), in which he fell for a mermaid, made him a star, and Big (1988), with his unforgettable boy trapped in a grown man's body, brought his first Oscar nomination. Through those years he strung together comedies now cherished as classics, such as The Money Pit (1986), Turner & Hooch (1989) and The 'Burbs (1989), and rounded off his comedy era with much loved titles such as A League of Their Own (1992) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993), opposite Meg Ryan.

The streak that made history

Then came the leap into drama and an unrepeatable run. His AIDS stricken lawyer in Philadelphia (1993) won him the Best Actor Oscar, and a year later he did it again with Forrest Gump (1994), becoming the first actor to win back to back Oscars since Spencer Tracy in the 1930s.

The late nineties were a festival: he led Apollo 13 (1995), gave his voice for good to the cowboy Woody in Toy Story (1995), made his directing debut with That Thing You Do! (1996) and landed in Normandy under Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan (1998), earning another nomination.

He still found time to reunite with Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail (1998), move audiences in the Stephen King adaptation The Green Mile (1999) and survive on a desert island, with no company but a volleyball called Wilson, in Cast Away (2000), which brought his fifth nomination.

The great directors' favourite actor

With the new century he became the go to leading man for the very best. With Spielberg he strung together Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004), Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017). With Robert Zemeckis he pushed animation forward in Polar Express (2004), and with Ron Howard he brought Professor Robert Langdon to life in The Da Vinci Code (2006) and its sequels, Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016).

Major work kept coming: the womanising congressman of Charlie Wilson's War (2007), the ambitious Cloud Atlas (2012), the captain kidnapped by Somali pirates in Captain Phillips (2013), his Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks (2013), the hero pilot of the Hudson in Sully (2016), directed by Clint Eastwood, and the beloved TV host Mister Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), his sixth Oscar nomination.

Recent years have not slowed him down: he wrote and starred in Greyhound (2020), crossed the frontier in the western News of the World (2020), survived the apocalypse with a dog and a robot in Finch (2021), played the scheming Colonel Parker opposite Austin Butler in Elvis (2022), won hearts as the lovable grump of A Man Called Otto (2022) and stepped into the world of Wes Anderson with Asteroid City (2023) and The Phoenician Scheme (2025).

In Here (2024) he reunited with Zemeckis and with Robin Wright, his Jenny from Forrest Gump, and in June 2026 he returned as Woody alongside Tim Allen in Toy Story 5, which delivered the biggest opening in the saga's history with 312 million dollars in its first weekend.

Playtone, typewriters and other passions

Behind the camera, Hanks is also a successful producer. Through his company Playtone, named after the fictional record label in That Thing You Do!, he has driven monumental Second World War series alongside Spielberg, such as Band of Brothers, 'The Pacific' and Masters of the Air, as well as the space miniseries 'From the Earth to the Moon', a tribute to the fascination with the space race he had already shown in Apollo 13 and box office hits like Mamma Mia! (2008) and the My Big Fat Greek Wedding saga.

A confessed collector of vintage typewriters, he has carried that passion into literature, publishing the short story collection 'Uncommon Type' (2017) and the novel 'The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece' (2023). In 2016 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama, and his career has already been honoured with the AFI Life Achievement Award and the Cecil B. DeMille Golden Globe.

Rita Wilson, his safe harbour

His first marriage, to Samantha Lewes, gave him his son Colin, now an actor himself (Colin Hanks), and his daughter Elizabeth. He met the actress and producer Rita Wilson on the job: they first crossed paths on his eighties sitcom and love blossomed years later while filming the comedy 'Volunteers' (1985). They married in 1988 and have formed one of Hollywood's most solid marriages ever since and with whom he had two more sons, Chet and Truman, the latter playing the young Otto in A Man Called Otto.

In March 2020 the couple gave the world one of the most remembered moments of the pandemic when they announced from Australia, where the actor was preparing his role as Colonel Parker in Elvis, that they had both caught covid, the first major Hollywood names to do so. That scare behind them, and living with type 2 diabetes since 2013, Hanks keeps working tirelessly. As Woody's inseparable partner Buzz Lightyear would put it: to infinity and beyond.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Tom Hanks is He Knows You're Alone (1980); in all, 73 films and 2 TV shows over 46 years. They have worked as actor in 61, producer in 20, writer in 3 and director in 2. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Toy Story 3 (2010), with 305 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 22 titles. The person they have worked with most is Rita Wilson, on 11 films, among them Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!.