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A kid on the move--an Army brat or cook's son--typically either crawls into a shell or finds ways to cope with new classmates each school year. Hanks coped, adapted and later found a home in the impromptu family that is any company of actors. "To me it was the natural order of things, this willingness to go off and throw yourself into strange circumstances. I was never afraid to pack up and go off." And when he wasn't going off, he was looking up--at the stars. His obsession with the U.S. space program, which blossomed into Apollo 13 and his own HBO series From the Earth to the Moon, began here.
From the beginning he was a sweet blend of humor and earnestness. In high school in Oakland he quit track (he ran the 440 in 61 sec.) for the stage because his actor friends laughed more than the jocks. "I was attracted to acting because it was fun," says Hanks, dismissing any deeper motives. "I'd rather laugh all day long than anything."
Tom also got an eclectic religious education. His mother took the kids to Roman Catholic Mass. A stepmother brought in some Mormon proselytizers. His aunt, with whom he lived for a time, had converted to the Nazarene Church ("What did I know from fanatical?" he asks). In high school his Jewish friends inducted him into the sacred rituals of seder, bagels and lox. At the same time he joined "a great group of people" who were born-again Christians; for four years he led Bible readings. But Tom was a man with his own mission. The mission was acting.
Before he was 20, he was seen playing Yasha the footman in The Cherry Orchard in Sacramento and hired as an intern at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. Soon he was making $50 a week and, best of all, "Boom, I had a card in my wallet that said I am a professional actor." He and his first wife Samantha went to New York City for the requisite starving-actor years; they had a baby and some thin patches. "It was a year and a half of horrible scary days," he recalls.
Big Break No. 1: a leading role in Bosom Buddies, a sitcom about two young admen who dress as girls to live cheaply in a women-only building. The show had one claim to must-see TV: the comic chemistry between Scolari, all neurotic flutters, and the more bullyish Hanks. "There was no reason to hire me," Hanks says. "I was a new guy." Yet here he was, at 23, earning $9,000 an episode: "I made more money in two weeks than I'd made in my entire career." Scolari recalls that "Tom lived in a Leave It to Beaver house with Samantha and their two children." The Hankses separated in 1985.
Big break no. 2: the 1984 Splash, in which Hanks falls for a mermaid. The modestly budgeted film grossed $62 million in North America, and Hanks was suddenly the new surefire romantic-comedy guy. In three years he did seven films, mostly raffish comedies. It took Penny Marshall's Big (Break No. 3) to change that. Now he was so hot he was cast in roles that didn't suit him, like Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities or the thinks-he's-going-to-die hero of Joe versus the Volcano.
"I was manufacturing reasons to make the movies," Hanks says. "Then I realized there was a way to control my fate: by saying no to movies I didn't want to do." And saying yes to A League of Their Own: Break No. 4, the last he would need. Every film he has starred in since then has been a hit.