Tom Hanks on ‘hardest thing’ about Toy Story in 2001
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Tom Hanks, who stars in Bridge of Spies on Channel 4 on Wednesday evening, lived with his father and after his parent’s divorce in 1960. While the Hollywood megastar has said he was never abused or neglected, he admitted to feeling “lonely” as a child in a 2021 interview, with a 2006 book about his life providing further insight.
The Californian-born actor was just five when his parents, Amos Hanks and Janet Frager, divorced.
Tom left to live with his father along with his older sister Sandra and older brother Larry while his younger brother Jim stayed with Janet.
The small family would move around a lot, with reports noting that by the time Tom was 10 he had lived in 10 different houses.
According to his biographer, David Gardner, by the age of 10, the Elvis star had gone to five schools and had three stepmothers who brought an array of their own children to add to the Hanks brood.
Gardner wrote in the 2006 book, The Tom Hanks Enigma: “At one stage, he had so many siblings and stepbrothers and stepsisters that he was known simply as ‘Number Eight’.”
The Forrest Gump star added that while his shy older brother Larry struggled with moving to new places all the time, Tom was in his comfort zone when meeting new people.
Despite his extroverted ways, Tom, now 66, was often reportedly left alone as a child, telling The Irish Times that no one had even taught him how to brush his teeth, rather he learned from seeing a video in school.
Then, in a conversation for In Depth with Graham Bensinger in 2021, Tom opened up further about what his early years had been like,
He said: “There was a degree of loneliness because I kind of like fell through the cracks and didn’t really have adults per se that were taking care of me.
“I was not abused, I always had a key to the house. I could always drink all the milk in the refrigerator whether anybody was home or not. I actually had the perfect background for the guy whose job it is to put on clothes that are not his and pretend to be somebody that he’s not.”
His somewhat isolated childhood meant Tom learned many life lessons through trial and error. Despite the fact that his father was a chef, the star still reels with memories of a particularly bad experience in the kitchen involving tomato soup.
Tom explained to Besinger that the Hanks children all made their own lunches and dinners, and one day he particularly favoured having a warm bowl of soup.
He’d placed the soup in a pot and turned the heat on high, but soon got distracted by having a fight with his sister and before he knew it, the soup had boiled over and burnt, filling the home with smoke and the stench of burnt tomatoes.
Laughing, he added: “Thank god they didn’t have smoke detectors in apartments back then, we would have set one off every third day! Trying to clean it off with steel wool before dad came home, that’s a bad pot.”
Although his childhood was not as idyllic as many would have assumed, the ever-optimistic Tom still believed he had gotten a better start than his own father.
He revealed: “He happened to witness the murder of his father in a fight, he was eight or nine. A hired hand killed his father in the barn where they were growing up. He was one of four kids and he was the only one there.”
Tom said the event left his father “broken” but furthering the situation, young Amos had to testify in court three times as a key witness to the event.
The actor claimed “the man was acquitted” but highlighted that regardless of the outcome of the case, his grandfather was dead and his father was irreversibly traumatised.
He heartbreakingly shared: “It robbed him of a carefree life, of a sense of fairness in the world. It was a black mark of injustice and unfairness that landed squarely on his young shoulders.
“I don’t know if he ever communicated any kind of great joy in his life. My dad wanted to write. He had great artistic desires but life never dealt him the cards.”
Tom would go on to marry actress Samantha Lewes in 1978 when he was just 22. The couple would have two children together, Colin and Elizabeth, before divorcing in 1987.
At the time, the Greyhound actor believed “I couldn’t be a worse father and couldn’t be a worse human being” as he thought he was robbing Colin and Elizabeth of their childhood innocence by showing them real-world pain. At what he described as a “horribly painful” time, Colin was just 10 and Elizabeth was five, the same age as Tom when his parents split.
Hanks married his current wife, Rita Wilson, in 1988, and the couple have two sons. Speaking on the BBC show Desert Island Discs in 2016, Tom spoke about his marriages.
He admitted his first marriage had been to “quell the loneliness” he felt after his childhood. But by the time he met Rita, he knew she was the one. He said: “You end up meeting that other person that you’re like, ‘She gets it’. I don’t think I’ll ever be lonely anymore, that’s how I felt when I met my wife.”
Bridge of Spies airs on September 27 on Channel 4 at 6:15pm.
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