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).

[8] 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 hosted Saturday Night Live ten times[9] 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).

[17] His father had English ancestry,[18] and through his line, Hanks is a distant cousin of President Abraham Lincoln[19][20][21][22][23] and children's host Fred Rogers (whom many years later he would portray in a film role).

His internship stretched into a three-year experience that covered most aspects of theater production, including lighting, set design, and stage management, prompting Hanks to drop out of college.

[43] Early that year, he was cast as the lead, Callimaco, in the Riverside Shakespeare Company's production of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Mandrake, directed by Daniel Southern.

The broad success of the fantasy comedy Big (1988) established Hanks as a major Hollywood talent, both as a box office draw and within the industry as an actor.

[57] Richard Schickel of TIME called his performance "charming", and most critics agreed that Hanks' portrayal ensured him a place among the premier romantic-comedy stars of his generation.

[15][59] During his acceptance speech, he revealed that two people with whom he was close, his high school drama teacher Rawley Farnsworth and his former classmate John Gilkerson, were gay.

[60] Hanks followed Philadelphia with Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (1994), playing the title character, a man with an IQ of 75 who happens to find himself involved with some of the major events in recent American history.

[15] Critics generally applauded the film and the performances of the entire cast, which included Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Ed Harris and Kathleen Quinlan.

The 12-part series chronicled the space program from its inception, through the familiar flights of Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell, to the personal feelings surrounding the reality of Moon landings.

For Saving Private Ryan (1998), he worked with Steven Spielberg to make a film about a search through war-torn France after D-Day to bring home a soldier.

[79][80] In August 2007, Hanks, along with co-producers Wilson and Gary Goetzman and writer and star Nia Vardalos, initiated a legal action against the production company Gold Circle Films for their share of profits from the movie.

[88] He produced the animated children's movie The Ant Bully and Starter for Ten, a comedy about working-class students attempting to win on University Challenge.

[109] That same year, Hanks made his Broadway debut, starring in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy, for which he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.

Slate magazine's Katy Waldman found his first published short story "mediocre", writing that "Hanks' shopworn ideas about technology might have yet sung if they hadn't been wrapped in too-clever lit mag-ese".

[122][123] Hanks portrayed Fred Rogers in Marielle Heller's biographical film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), for which he was nominated for his first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

But the soulfulness and sorrow, the innate compassion that ripple through his characterization make this an enormously pleasurable performance to watch, with new depths of both kindness and regret that keep revealing themselves.

The 90 minute interview was hailed as a momentous achievement in podcasting, a "rare show that gives you a perfect conclusion",[137] "surprisingly funny and empathetic",[137] and an event Paul Scheer called "thrilling".

[145] In 2023, Hanks appeared in Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, starring alongside Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright and Bryan Cranston.

HBO confirmed in January 2013 that it was developing a third World War II miniseries based on the book Masters of the Air by Donald L. Miller with Hanks and Spielberg, to follow Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

[151] Hanks is attached to star in an adaptation of the 2011 non fiction book In the Garden of Beasts from director Joe Wright about American diplomat William Dodd's time in Nazi Germany.

In the process in the final minutes of the program, in which the guest chooses his/her favorite of the eight discs (pieces of music) just played, a book, and a luxury item, he chose Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra by the Vienna Philharmonic, A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester, and a Hermes 3000 typewriter and paper, respectively.

The actors who can do that—Buster Keaton, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, and Tom Hanks, occupy a special category...

[242] In November 2019, shortly before the release of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a drama film in which Hanks portrays Fred Rogers, he learned through Ancestry.com that he and Rogers were sixth cousins, both descendants of Johannes Meffert (1732–1795), who was born in Schöneck, Hesse, Germany (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) and emigrated to the United States in the 18th century, settling in Kentucky and changing his last name to Mefford.

[215][1][245] Hanks, along with Wilson and their children, were conferred honorary citizenship for their role in bringing global attention and appealing for aid after a devastating wildfire that ripped through the seaside village of Mati, near Athens, in July 2018, which killed more than 100 people.

[246][245] Greece's Interior Minister Takis Theodorikakos said Hanks "showed real interest in the people who suffered from the fire in Mati and promoted this issue in the global media".

[246][247] Hanks has donated to many Democratic politicians, and during the 2008 United States presidential election uploaded a video to his MySpace account endorsing Barack Obama.

[263] Hanks provided the voice-over for the premiere of the show Passport to the Universe at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.