TOM HANKS, THE JOURNEY FROM BOSSOM BUDDIES TO PHILADELPIA UNTILL TOY STORY 3

Thomas Jeffrey "Tom" Hanks is an American actor, producer, writer and director. Tom Hanks was born on July 9, 1956 in Concord, California. His father, Amos Mefford Hanks (born in Glenn County, California, on March 9, 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' career track is the stuff of showbiz legend. After two seasons on the silly sitcom Bosom Buddies (in drag, no less), the affable actor came to prominence in the 1984 romantic comedy Splash. Then a string of big-screen flops (Turner & Hooch, The Money Pit, the embarrassing Bonfire of the Vanities, to name just a few) tarnished his reputation. Aside from his Oscar-nominated turn as an overgrown kid in 1988's Big, as well as an underrated performance in the stand-up comedy drama Punchline that same year, he seemed washed up by the early '90s. But by mid-decade, he finally scored a slew of commercial and critical hits, earning two successive Oscars (as a gay lawyer dying of AIDS in 1993's Philadelphia and as a mentally challenged man in 1994's Forrest Gump), along with the respect of his peers, the public's love and a hefty per-project pay raise. Dubbed a latter-day James Stewart because of his everyman likability, the actor was careful to avoid typecasting. Although he played plenty of heroes, they were usually complicated and flawed (yet he never played any outright villains, either). He also branched out into writing, producing and directing (the 1996 feature That Thing You Do! and a number of TV projects, including the Emmy-winning 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers).

Tom Hanks on film Angles and Demons (2008)

The quintessential nice guy counted several A-list directors among his friends/fans and he collaborated multiple times with Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal) and Ron Howard (Splash, Apollo 13, The Da Vinci Code).

On 2010, Tom Hanks got the role on Toy Story 3 along with Tim Allen, Joan Cusack and directed by Lee Unkrich.

Toy Story 3 is an American computer-animated 3D film and IMAX 3D film, produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It is the third installment in the Toy Story series and is scheduled for release in theaters on June 18, 2010 in the United States, June 24, 2010 in Australia and July 23, 2010 in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Estelle Harris, John Ratzenberger, Wallace Shawn, Jeff Pidgeon, Jodi Benson, R. Lee Ermey, John Morris, and Laurie Metcalf all reprise their roles from the previous films. Jim Varney, who played Slinky Dog in the first two movies, and Joe Ranft, who played Lenny and Wheezy, have both died since the second film was released.

For his personal life, Tom Hanks also distinguished himself from other megastars by staying in the spotlight and out of the tabloids, with a stable off-screen life with his actress wife, Rita Wilson (married on 30 April 1988-present) with 2 children (Chester, or "Chet" (who has a small part as a student who asks Dr. Jones a question at the end of the college chase in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), and Truman).

Before married to Rita Wilson, Tom Hank got married to Samantha Lewes on 24 January 1978 and divorced on 19 March 1987, with 2 children (son Colin Hanks (also an actor) and daughter Elizabeth Ann).