'''Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks''' (born July 9 1956) is a two-time Academy Award-winning American actor, voice-over artist and movie producer who starred in family-friendly and screwball 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 USD$3.1 billion and an international gross of $5.7 billion. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/people/?view=Actor&sort=sumgross&p=.htm He is also co-owner of Playtone, a film production company.
Hanks's 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, middleclass 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 that he can't remember), acting never seemed a real possibility until Hanks transferred from San Francisco Bay Area junior college Chabot College to Sacramento State University. "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
