CELEBRITY
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50 PLUS MAGAZINE
TOM HANKS
AN ACTOR FOR ALL SEASONS ... A consummate professional who has played goodies, baddies and romantic leads in equal measure. He’s now 64 and with as much experience behind the camera as in front of it and if you mention his name to most people, they will have an opinion about his best role. And whether that’s as a businessman who falls in love with a mermaid, a widower whose son is determined to find him a wife or a plane crash survivor marooned on a desert island, Hanks never disappoints. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he had no acting experience in college. He was born in California and grew up in a fractured family, moving around a great deal after his parents’ divorce and making his home with a succession of step-families. He auditioned for a community theatre play and kickstarted his acting career in Cleveland. After a one-shot guest appearance on popular TV series Happy Days in 1974, he impressed fellow actor 16
Ron Howard so much that when Howard – by then a producer - was casting the film Splash in 1983, he asked Hanks to read for the role of the main character’s wisecracking brother. This role eventually went to John Candy. Hanks, however, was offered the lead role instead and this unlikely tale of romance between a mermaid and a human subsequently became a box-office smash. It wasn’t all plain-sailing after this, however, as he had several flops before enjoying moderate success with comedy Dragnet in 1987. It was fantasy-comedy Big in 1988, though, which really established him as a major Hollywood talent, earning him his first Academy Award nomination as Best Actor and a Golden Globe. Hanks has never been afraid to challenge himself or to play flawed characters. The
1992 film A League of Their Own saw him as a washed-up baseball legend managing women’s baseball team. Always self-effacing, he has been the major critic of his own performances. In an interview with magazine Vanity Fair, he observed that his work “has become less pretentiously fake and over the top.” The more “modern era” of his work began first with Sleepless in Seattle in 1993 and then moved on with Philadelphia the same year - two very different roles. In the latter, Hanks played against type in one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to acknowledge HIV/AIDS, homosexuality and homophobia. For this moving performance, he won the Academy award for Best Actor.
