Tom Hanks

TOM Hanks was wearing a dress. Slingbacks too, and a gauche perm of the type usually restricted to a Rotarians dinner dance. Shocked? I wasn’t, because this was 1980 and the actor was toiling in a minor cross-dressing sitcom. It was TV for TV’s.

Since then he has swapped tailors and moved into movies. His last two films have grossed half a billion dollars, and he is firmly established at number one in the Hollywood hierarchy, now the biggest name in the world.

And possibly beyond it, if the success of Apollo 13 continues. The film is about a star vehicle, but never becomes one, thanks in part to Hanks generous portrayal of Jim Lovell, astronaut, former understudy to Neil Armstrong on the first moon landing and commander of the ill-fated third attempted lunar mission.It was Lovell who uttered the words “Houston, we have a problem”, back in April 1970. That problem was a burst oxygen tank, propelling him and fellow crewmen Fred Haise and Jack Swigert toward the moon, with little credible chance of safe return, and the eyes of the world watching the outcome. No need to ask Hanks why he wanted the part, but did he have any doubts he could convince an audience ? “I was very concerned that anybody could buy me as an astronaut.”, concedes the actor. “In meeting him and finding out that he was such an easy going guy I determined that I was the perfect man to play Jim Lovell.

The film is a team game, crossing between Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon as Haise and Swigert, and Ed Harris and Gary Sinise at ground control, trying to steer them home. The balance on screen was matched by a stability off it. “Making movies is usually much more diffuse and defracted, humdrum and yet very complicated”, says Hanks, who found this a far more rational. relaxing process. He enjoyed the preparation, the icelandic temperatures and the weightless filming achived by flying in NASA’s KC-135, better known as the vomit comet. But most of all, he enjoyed playing the part.

“Jim is a very easy going guy, full of humour, and he has his priorities in the right place. I think what made him an astronaut, and therefore worthy of such elevated status, is that he had the desire to do what he did. He is a self-professed space junkie – he loved every minute he was up there, but in order to have that opportunity he had to also be a rocket scientist, engineer and Phd. That takes years and years of application, and what Jim shares with all astronauts is the willingness to do that training.”

Lovell is only the second non-fictional role Hanks has played. This raised some difficulties, as he explains: “In the circumstance where we are making it up from start to finish I have no doubt that I can [convince], but in the realities of playing someone who is still alive I was concerned that I just do not look enough like him, and the countenance that I have brought from my other films might not jive with the concept. I was delighted to find out my fears were just those of a neurotic actor.”

For all its excellence as a thriller and human interest story, Apollo 13 does lend itself to a political reading. The space race came at a time of profound unrest, and at its height ‘consumed the equivalent of fifty cents for every American, every week. Attention was fixed toward the skies, and therefore away from the realities on Earth, served up like a placebo the size of a continent.

Hanks was just a teenager at the time, and offers an opinion culled from then and now. “There was one review which said Vietnam is not alluded to in our movie because it does not have to be.” he argues, gesturing the point and coming to life.”Here in America you knew exactly what was going on, and you knew that the space program, purely from an inspirational view, was the direct antithesis of what the country was stuck in. We cannot change the fact that it happened in 1970 at the height of the Vietnam war, nor are we trying to present it as though the space program happened solely as a distraction from what we were going through.

“History says, and it is very easy to chronicle the fact, that here at this great time for the history of mankind when we as a species were able to develop the technology and the wherewithal to do something as fantastic as fly a man to the moon, it came in the midst of as complicated an insane a struggle as Vietnam. Just because one thing is going on doesn’t mean you still cannot be inspired by other aspects of what is happening at the time….likewise just because Vietnam was such a hellhole for us all as Americans it does not mean that the single antidote that was offered up was the Space Program.”

f we are talking heroics, then it is on to the inevitable Forrest Gump.

Hanks’ portrayal of the idiot savant rebuilt the American dream and united unexpected parties in praise. Gump’s lack of intellectual clutter lured the right-wing, whilst New Democrats approved of his simple virtues.

(The same has happened with Apollo 13: its first screening was at the White House and it quickly appealed to both Gingrich’s futurism and Clinton’s sense of community). Ten years ago (in Splash) Tom Hanks was seducing a mermaid; now he’s done it to the whole country.That films avowal of the simple, honest life does not appear to have been the actors actual experience. His parents divorced when he was five, after which he was itinerant because of his fathers job, and two subsequent failed marriages.

After settling in Oakland, Hanks jr. went to University in California and got married to actress-producer Samantha Lewes, with who he had two children. The couple also split, and he is now happily married to actress Rita Wilson.So Gump may not be him, but for many he is Gump. For example, One of Forrest’s maxims had it that ‘Life was just a box of chocolates’, and the actor is continually sent confectionery by his more bizarre fans.

He is stumped as to why there should be such a response (“Forrest Gump is a phenomenon I cannot explain”), and succumbs to accepting that, “I will be Forrest Gump. When I die they will show clips of Forrest sitting on that park bench, and that’s fine. I have no fears whatsoever of being associated too closely with any of the roles that I play.”Next year, Tom Hanks will be forty.

This personal milestone may be preceded by another, more public one: a record breaking third consecutive Oscar for Best Actor. He looks at his feet – a recurring habit, and not what one would expect from a man who gets $12 million a movie – and utters downward, “You’ve seen the movie – I just do no think it’s a Best Actor kind of movie in the first place. I’m very proud and think I did a great job, but it just does not warrant it and If I should be nominated I’d be shocked, absolutely shocked. “And if I should win,” he ventures, looking up and releasing a final full-face grin, “there would be suicide jumpers from the buildings in Hollywood. They be screaming ‘not again…not again…Blam. And then they’d hit the ground.”

Peter Hill