• December 27, 1993

Tom Hanks

Traveling from Seattle to Philadelphia, the Actor Put Together a Dream Year and Proved He Can Do More Than Play for Laughs

No wonder Tom Hanks brought such conviction to his role as the endearingly unsuccessful baseball manager in A League of Their Own, one of this year's most rented videos: This is a man whose very career, not long ago, was one long losing streak. Following the success of Big (1988), he starred in a parade of barkers that included The 'Burbs (1989), Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) and, ultimately Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), which bombed so spectacularly that Hanks had to take a year off to regroup. But since bouncing back with League, Hanks, 37, has been having what his teammates in that film might call a career season.

Here's a '93 to reckon with: In Nora Ephron's summer smash, Sleepless in Seattle, Hanks, portraying a widower who finds love over the airwaves, secured a reputation as one of the most appealing romantic-comedy stars of his generation. And his performance in Jonathan Demme's new Philadelphia, in which he plays a gay lawyer with AIDS who sues his law firm for discrimination, prompted Short Cuts director Robert Altman to comment that the Academy "should just go ahead and write Hanks's name on the Oscar now.

Hanks's intimates offer paeans of their own. "He is the best," says his wife, actress Rita Wilson, "a person with a lot of integrity. "The couple, who met on the set of Volunteers in 1985, married in 1988 and have a son, Chester, 3. (Hanks also has two children from an earlier marriage to actress Samantha Lewes.) Ephron calls the Hanks humor "hysterical" and speculates he developed it to cope with an unhappy childhood, which was spent roaming around the West with his father, Amos, a cook, who divorced his mother, Janet Turner, a hospital worker, in 1961. "I was put in a lot of unusual circumstances," Hanks has noted, "and being funny was a way to even the playing field." Where he got his knack for rewriting his lines even Ephron can't say, but she notes, "It's one reason he's survived so many turkeys. He's always poking out in some amazing way."

Still, the real secret of his success may be that Hanks, who got his start as a cross-dresser in the early-'80s sitcom Bosom Buddies, doesn't take himself too seriously. "It's rare that you find such a talented person who doesn't have an attitude," says League director Penny Marshall. And hardly ever has an actor achieved so much glory while shunning glamor. For Philadelphia, Hanks lost 35 pounds and had his hair thinned to make himself seem sickly. Now he has finished shooting Forrest Gump, in which he plays a dim-witted Vietnam vet who gets sent to Mars. After that, he's reportedly considering a screen portrayal of the young Richard Nixon. Speaking of his own reputation in the film community, Hanks has said, "Somehow the message got out there that he'll do anything." He's hardly complaining, though. "I think," he added, "that's a marvelous message."