Tom Hanks (born July 9, 1956, Concord, California, U.S.) is an American actor whose cheerful everyman persona made him a natural for starring roles in many popular films. In the 1990s he expanded his comedic repertoire and began portraying lead characters in dramas.
After a nomadic childhood, Hanks majored in drama at California State University and performed in summer stock in Cleveland, Ohio, playing a variety of classical roles. In the late 1970s he moved to New York City, where he had a small part in a horror film in 1980.
Hanks gained notice for his comic abilities as a costar of the television series Bosom Buddies (1980–82). His work in the hit film Splash (1984) earned him leads in other comedies, including Bachelor Party (1984), Volunteers (1985), and The Money Pit (1986). He successfully mixed comedy with drama in Nothing in Common (1986) and Punchline (1988), and his portrayal of a boy in an adult body in Big (1988) earned him an Academy Award nomination and launched him on the path to becoming one of the era’s most popular stars.
After starring opposite actress Meg Ryan in the romantic comedy Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), Hanks reteamed with her in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998), both directed by Nora Ephron. He portrayed the drunken manager of a women’s baseball team in the comedy A League of Their Own (1992) and delivered an Oscar-winning performance as a gay lawyer with AIDS in Philadelphia (1993). Another Academy Award, for the phenomenally popular Forrest Gump (1994), made him the first actor to win back-to-back best actor Oscars since Spencer Tracy.
Hanks earned further Oscar nominations for lead actor for his dramatic performances in Saving Private Ryan (1998), which was directed by Steven Spielberg, and Cast Away (2000). Additional serious roles during this time came in Apollo 13 (1995), The Green Mile (1999), and Road to Perdition (2002). In the blockbuster Toy Story series (1995, 1999, 2010, and 2019), Hanks provided the voice of the animated cowboy Woody.
In 2002 Hanks starred with Leonardo DiCaprio in Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, and he portrayed Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology, in the 2006 film adaptation of Dan Brown’s hugely popular The Da Vinci Code; he reprised the role of Langdon in Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016). In Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), Hanks appeared as the real-life senator Charlie Wilson, who assisted the Afghan resistance to the Soviets in the 1980s, and he later portrayed a father killed in the September 11 attacks in the drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011). For the mystical epic Cloud Atlas (2012), which wove together multiple narratives, he took on six roles, ranging from a 19th-century surgeon to a postapocalyptic tribesman.
