Tom Hanks

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 is ranked as the fourth-highest-grossing American film actor. His numerous awards include two Academy Awards, seven Emmy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards; he has also been nominated for five BAFTA Awards and a Tony Award. He received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2002, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2014, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2020. Hanks rose to fame with leading roles in 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), then the title character in Forrest Gump (1994). Hanks has 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)—and three World War II-themed 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 cemented his film stardom with lead roles in 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 franchise (1995–2019). Hanks directed and acted in the comedies That Thing You Do! (1996) and Larry Crowne (2011), and he voiced and performed motion capture for multiple characters in the animated Christmas film The Polar Express (2004). His breakthrough television role was a co-lead in the ABC sitcom Bosom Buddies (1980–1982). He has hosted Saturday Night Live ten times and launched a production company, Playtone, which has produced various limited series and television movies, including From the Earth to the Moon (1998), Band of Brothers, John Adams (2008), The Pacific, Game Change (2012), and Olive Kitteridge (2015). He made his Broadway debut in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy (2013), earning a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tom Hanks", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.