Hanks met his wife Rita Wilson on the set of 1985's Volunteers, a dopey comedy about a gambler who enlists in the Peace Corps to avoid paying his debts. His wife an occasional8 actress. They have two children: Chester and Truman. He named his youngest son Truman Theodore after two former presidents.
What about his own kids? Are they star-struck by having Tom Freaklin' Hanks drive them to school? Naaah, "My work doesn't make much of a blip at the house," he says, "There's always a hubbub of, activity because we're going somewhere, but they don't say. 'Hey dad, you're on TV! '", His son Colin, now in his twenties, has tried acting, with Dad's cautious encouragement. "All my kids can look and see what I do for a living and see that it's really fun. It produces a vast amount of joy. It's hard work if you can get it, but it's great work too."
That's as much home talk as you'll get out of Hanks, whose personal life is a gated community. He is knowing but, for all his affability9, not telling. Even his closest colleagues speak of him as if he were a planet yet to be colonized. Spielberg, "Tom is a bit of mystery." Says Ryan, his co-star in three films "I know about him, but I don't know him. None of us really knows him."
Perhaps this sense of his own unknown is what attracted him to the role of Captain Miller, who for much of Private Ryan is an enigma to his men, and to Dino, a Martin Scorsese film in which Hanks would play Dean Martin:"Nobody gets to know me," Martin once told a producer. Maybe Hanks want it that way too.
Hanks has earned the Luxury of taking his $20 million a picture and hiding. But this is the tabloid era: excellence is not enough. He must be an ideal guy in the real life; offstage he must be "Tom Hanks". First he is a wonderful daddy. In between raising his kids, he does pictures. The other thing is that he completely, unerringly loves his wife.
He seems exasperated by questions about the effect of his broken family had on him. "You know by the time you're 42 years old, the concept of the broken family, I've gotten over that," he says, with a sigh. "I've been married ten years and I have got four kids and I can tell you right now my kids have moved around as much as I did and we're a nice stable family. Nothing really intimidates me on the personal front. If anything I feel very lucky it is that I have as much security as I do now."
