Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks (born July 9, 1956) is an American actor. Hanks worked in television and family-friendly comedies before achieving success as a dramatic actor portraying several notable roles, including Andrew Beckett in Philadelphia, the title role in Forrest Gump, Commander James A. Lovell in Apollo 13, Captain John H. Miller in Saving Private Ryan, Michael Sullivan in Road to Perdition, Sheriff Woody in Disney/Pixar's Toy Story, and Chuck Noland in Cast Away. Hanks won back-to-back Oscars for Best Actor in 1993-94. His domestic box office totals exceed $3.3 billion. He is the father of actor Colin Hanks.

Hanks was born in Concord, California. His father, Amos Mefford Hanks (born in Glenn County, California on March 4, 1924 – died in Alameda, California on January 31, 1992), was a distant relative of President Abraham Lincoln, through Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks. His mother, Portuguese-American Janet Marylyn Frager (born in Alameda County, California on January 18, 1932), was a hospital worker; the two divorced in 1960. The family's three oldest children, Sandra, (now Sandra Hanks Benoiton, a writer), Larry (now Lawrence M. Hanks, Ph.D., an entomology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Tom went with their father, while the youngest, Jim, now an actor and film maker, remained with his mother in Red Bluff, California. Afterwards, both parents remarried. The first stepmother for Sandra, Larry, and Tom came to the marriage with five children of her own. Hanks once told Rolling Stone: "Everybody in my family likes each other. But there were always about 50 people at the house. I didn't exactly feel like an outsider, but I was sort of outside it." That marriage ended in divorce after just two years.

Amos Hanks became a single parent, working long hours and relying on the children to fend for themselves often, an exercise in self-reliance that served the siblings well. In school, Hanks was unpopular with students and teachers alike, telling Rolling Stone magazine: "I was a geek, a spaz. 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." In 1965, Amos Hanks married Frances Wong, a San Francisco native of Chinese descent. Frances had three children, two of whom lived with Tom during his high school years. Tom acted in school plays, including South Pacific, while attending Skyline High School in Oakland, California.