Tom Hanks

Theater kid to sitcom star

Tom Hanks found acting in high school and college in Sacramento, then spent summers as an intern at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, learning everything from lighting to stage management. He moved to New York and then to television, co-starring in the sitcom Bosom Buddies (1980 to 1982).

Big comedies

Ron Howard cast him in the mermaid comedy Splash (1984), a surprise hit. Big (1988), in which a 12-year-old wakes up in an adult body, earned Hanks his first Oscar nomination. His gift was making ordinary people funny and believable.

Two Oscars in a row

Hanks then moved to drama. In Philadelphia (1993), opposite Denzel Washington, he played a lawyer with AIDS fighting for his job, and won Best Actor. A year later Forrest Gump (1994) won him Best Actor again, making him only the second actor to win the award in consecutive years, after Spencer Tracy in 1937 and 1938.

A run of classics

Apollo 13 (1995) put him in a spacecraft, and the same year Toy Story made his voice famous to children as Woody, a role he returned to across the series. Cast Away (2000) saw him lose a lot of weight during a break in filming to show a man stranded on an island for years, and brought another nomination. Later highlights include Catch Me If You Can (2002), Captain Phillips (2013) and Sully (2016).

He earned his sixth acting nomination for playing the children's television host Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019).

Beyond acting

Hanks also produces and directs, with films such as That Thing You Do! (1996), and is a well known collector of manual typewriters. He wrote the short story collection Uncommon Type (2017) and the novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (2023). He received the Golden Globes' Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2020.

Where to start

For comedy, Big (1988) still works for the whole family. For drama, Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994) show the back-to-back Oscar performances, and Cast Away (2000) is almost a one-man show. Apollo 13 (1995) and Captain Phillips (2013) are tense true stories. Younger viewers know him best as Woody, so watching Toy Story next to Cast Away shows how much he can do with voice alone and with almost no dialogue at all.

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