PERSON: Tom Hanks

Actor

Thomas Jeffrey Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American actor and filmmaker. Known for both his comedic and dramatic roles, he is one of the most popular and recognizable film stars worldwide, and is regarded as an American cultural icon. Hanks’s films have grossed more than $4.9 billion nationally and $9.96 billion worldwide, making him the fourth-highest-grossing American actor.

Hanks made his breakthrough with leading roles in a series of comedies: Splash (1984), The Money Pit (1986), Big (1988) and A League of Their Own (1992). He won two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor, playing a gay lawyer suffering from AIDS in Philadelphia (1993) and the title character in Forrest Gump (1994). Hanks collaborated with Steven Spielberg on five films: Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004), Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017), as well as the World War II miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), The Pacific (2010) and Masters of the Air (2024). He has also frequently collaborated with directors Ron Howard, Nora Ephron and Robert Zemeckis.

Hanks’s other films include the romantic comedies Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998); the dramas Apollo 13 (1995), The Green Mile (1999), Cast Away (2000), Road to Perdition (2002) and Cloud Atlas (2012); and the biographical dramas Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), Captain Phillips (2013), Saving Mr. Banks (2013), Sully (2016), A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), News of the World (2020) and Elvis (2022). He appeared as the title character in the Robert Langdon series and voiced Sheriff Woody in the Toy Story films (1995–2019). Hanks directed the comedies That Thing You Do! (1996) and Larry Crowne (2011), and acted in both.

In 1998, Hanks launched his production company Playtone, which has an exclusive television development deal with HBO. Hanks has won seven Primetime Emmy Awards for his work as a producer of various limited series and television movies, including From the Earth to the Moon (1998), Band of Brothers (2001), John Adams (2008), The Pacific (2009), Game Change (2012) and Olive Kitteridge (2015). He made his Broadway debut in Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy (2013), earning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination. Among other honors, he has received the AFI Life Achievement Award (2002), the Kennedy Center Honor (2014), the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor (both 2016) and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award (2020).

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