Actors - Tom Hanks

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	Actors - Tom Hanks

Thomas Jeffrey Hanks (born July 9 1956) is a two-time Academy Award-winning English-American actor who starred in family friendly comedies, before achieving notable success as a dramatic actor. He is one of the highest grossing actors of all time, with a combined gross of over $3.1 billion.

Biography

Early life

Hanks was born in Concord, California to Amos Mefford Hanks, a Southern cook of English and Welsh heritage, and Janet Merilyn Frager, a hospital worker who was also of mostly English descent. As a child, Hanks experienced a wandering, middle-class life with neither ambition nor talent much in evidence. By the time he was five, his parents had separated. They remarried several times before divorcing for good. His father later married an Asian woman with a large family. "Everybody in my family likes each other," Hanks told Rolling Stone. "But there were always about fifty people at the house. I didn't exactly feel like an outsider, but I was sort of outside of it." When his parents divorced, Hanks, his older brother Larry, and his sister went off with their father, a roving cook who rambled through various cities until settling in Oakland, California when Tom was eight. His younger brother stayed with his mother.

In school, Hanks also was unremarkable. "I was a geek, a spaz," he told Rolling Stone. "I was horribly, painfully, terribly shy. At the same time, I was the guy who'd yell out funny captions during filmstrips. But I didn't get into trouble. I was always a real good kid and pretty responsible." Although he acted in a few school plays, the names of which he says he can't remember, acting never seemed a real possibility until Hanks transferred from San Francisco Bay area junior college Chabot College to California State University at Sacremento, California. "Acting classes looked like the best place for a guy who liked to make a lot of noise and be rather flamboyant," Hanks told New York. "I spent a lot of time going to plays. I wouldn't take dates with me. I'd just drive to a theater, buy myself a ticket, sit in the seat and read the program, and then get into the play completely. I spent a lot of time like that, seeing Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Henrik Ibsen and all that."

It was during these acting classes that Hanks met Vincent Dowling, head of the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland. At Dowling's suggestion, Hanks became an intern at the Festival, which stretched into a three-year experience that covered everything from lighting to set design to stage management. Such a commitment required that Hanks drop out of college. But by the end of the three years he had decided he wanted to become an actor. Part of the bug was due to the Cleveland Critics Circle Award, which he won as best actor for his performance as Proteus in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of the few times he played a villain.

Early roles

In 1978 he moved to New York, where he married actress-producer Samantha Lewes. Seven years and a son and daughter later they were divorced, but Hanks still sees his children regularly. While in New York, Hanks acted for the Riverside Shakespeare Company. In addition, he made his film debut in a low-budget slasher movie and got a small part in a television movie entitled Mazes & Monsters. He continued to audition and finally landed a role on an ABC television pilot called Bosom Buddies.

"It was flukesville," Hanks told Newsweek. Hanks flew to Los Angeles, California where he was teamed with Peter Scolari as a pair of young ad men forced to dress as women so they could live in an inexpensive all-female hotel. The series ran for two seasons, and although the ratings were never strong, television critics gave the program high marks. "The first day I saw him on the set," the show's coproducer, Ian Praiser, told Rolling Stone, "I thought, `Too bad he won't be in television for long.' I knew he'd be a movie star in two years." But if Praiser knew it, he wasn't able to convince Hanks. "The television show had come out of nowhere," Hanks's best friend, Tom Lizzio, told Rolling Stone. "Then out of nowhere it got canceled. He figured he'd be back to pulling ropes and hanging lights in a theater."

But it was Bosom Buddies that drew director Ron Howard to contact Hanks. Howard was working on Splash
, a romantic comedy about a mermaid who falls in love with a human. At first, Howard considered Hanks for the role of the main character's wisecracking brother, a role which eventually went to John Candy. Hanks instead got the lead and a career boost from Splash, which went on to become a box-office blockbuster, grossing more than $100 million.

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Actors - Tom Hanks

Biography

Early life

Early roles

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