Behind every national treasure is a real gem.
And Tom Hanks would be the first to say that wife Rita Wilson is the star of this operation, an enduring love affair that started more than 35 years ago and continues to warm cold, jaded hearts in Hollywood and beyond.
“I’m a lucky man,” Hanks told E! News in 2016. “She could’ve done better.”
Well-played, sir.
Ahead of their 36th wedding anniversary a year ago, Hanks told E! that the key to their success was “finding each other.”
Meaning, if there’s a real secret to their success, they’re not giving it away. “Always letting the press know that there is a secret, and we bottled it,” Hanks joked to Fox News Digital at Clive Davis‘ pre-Grammy Gala in 2013 about their enviable number of years together. But, the two-time Oscar winner added, “We’ll sell it to you individually, for $17 billion.”
In case you’re a little short this month, we’ll do our best to fill you in.
“I view my wife as my lover, and we have a bond that goes beyond words like wife or girlfriend or mother,” Hanks explained to Oprah Winfrey in 2001. “For example, I was able to construct a number of things in Philadelphia because of my relationship with Rita. The way my character felt about his lover is the way I feel about mine. The same was true when I played Forrest Gump, who loved Jenny. Without my connection with Rita, I don’t know how I would’ve been able to connect with what Forrest was going through.”
So it turns out life with Hanks is like a box of chocolates: Sweet.
“Sometimes we’re just sitting on the couch talking or something like that…I don’t even have to ask for them,” Wilson, 68, told People in 2016. “He always gives me back and foot rubs. He’s just cool.”
When Hanks, who’s turning 69 on July 9, was honored with the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award for career achievement in 2020, he got misty-eyed.
“A man is blessed with a family sitting down front like that,” he said, “a wife who is fantastic in every way, who has taught me what love is…five kids who are braver and stronger and wiser than their old man, and a loving group of people who have put up with me being away months and months at a time…Otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here if they didn’t have to put up with that. I can’t tell you how much your love means to me.”
Two months later, the couple’s respective COVID-19 diagnoses in Australia, where Hanks was filming Elvis, basically heralded the onset of the pandemic in Hollywood and beyond.
But Hanks’ speech also came 31 years after the Big star capped off his humorous yet thoughtful best actor in a motion picture, musical or comedy, acceptance on that same stage by giddily announcing, “I married a Greek babe…She was born right here in California, right here in Hollywood, but her folks are great, she’s marvelous, Rita Wilson—thank you, babe, for marrying me. You made my year already.”
They went on to have sons Chet Hanks, 34, and Truman Hanks, 29, collaborate creatively, walk miles of red carpets and support each other through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, through clean shaves and bushy white beards, all the while becoming a walking study of how to make it work in Hollywood.
Hanks claims he first thought Wilson was adorable in 1972 when his 16-year-old self spied her in her first-ever TV role, playing a cheerleader on The Brady Bunch. But they first laid eyes on each other in person in 1981 when Wilson appeared on an episode of Bosom Buddies, Hanks’ short-lived sitcom about two advertising creatives who moonlight as women because the only affordable apartment they can find is in a ladies-only building.
The actor was already a young husband and father at the time, married since 1978 to his college sweetheart Samantha Lewes. Son Colin Hanks was born in 1977 and daughter Elizabeth Anne “E.A.” Hanks would arrive in 1982.
But fate brought Wilson and Hanks back together a few years later on the set of the 1985 comedy Volunteers. Hanks was fresh from his big-screen breakout role in Splash, which launched him toward becoming a leading rom-com star of the 1980s and 1990s.
“When we first looked at each other there was definitely a kind of like, ‘Hey, this is the place!’ I felt that, anyway,” he told Entertainment Tonight in 2015. “I think the end result is that we got married for all the right reasons.”
Moral of the story: Not even Hanks had it all figured out at 29.
“I had kids very young, my son Colin was born when I was 21 and my daughter Elizabeth was born four and a half years later. By then I thought I was rolling along with the natural order of things,” Hanks reflected on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2016. He figured he married young because he himself grew up with an unstable home life, step-siblings in and out of his orbit as his parents remarried, and he took pains to keep himself busy to avoid being lonely.
“I do not have deep roots,” he told GQ in 1988.
As a young father of two, “I didn’t smoke pot. I didn’t go into drugs, I was not a party boy. I didn’t drink too much,” he said on Desert Island Discs. “I went to bed at 10 minutes after 10 p.m….The rules were in place and I’m not a cheater. I like to play by the rules. But later on, you’re 27, 28, you’ve learned what to say ‘yes’ to—and you end up meeting that other person, man, woman—that ‘Oh, she gets it!'”
He and Wilson were a couple by the end of 1986; his divorce from Lewes was finalized in early 1987. Then Hanks and Wilson wed on April 30, 1988.
It occurred to him at the time, “I don’t think I’m ever going to be lonely anymore.”
Wilson recalled to Piers Morgan in 2012, “I’ll never forget, we were standing on the corner of 57th and 5th in New York, or 58th and 5th. We were holding hands, and we were waiting for the traffic light to change. And he looked at me and he said, ‘You know, I just want you to know, that you never have to change anything about who you are in order to be with me.’
“Literally, a wave of—if love is a feeling, or a cellular thing that happens to your body, it went through me, and that’s pretty much who he is, and how he’s been,” she said.
But Hanks has admitted that it probably wouldn’t have worked out if they got together any earlier.
“The success of our relationship was a matter of timing, maturity, and our willingness to have an intimate connection,” he told Winfrey in 2001. “When I married Rita, I thought, ‘This is going to require some change on my part.’ I won’t deny that providence was part of us finding each other, but our relationship isn’t magic—the way it’s shown in movies. In real life, our connection is as concrete as me sitting here. Not that marriage doesn’t come close to being hell in a handbasket sometimes. But we both know that no matter what, we’ll be with each other—and we’ll get through it.”
“We deal with what has to be dealt with, but there is something natural to the foundation of our marriage,” Hanks said. “I am now at the point where I can’t imagine it any other way.”
They’ve also been best friends “from the very beginning,” he added. “We laugh just as much now at two in the morning as we always have. And we fight less and less.”
Fast-forward to 2013 and he quipped to Ellen DeGeneres, “I’m not one to suck up to the audience, but the only thing we argue about is who loves each other more.”
Let’s just say, it’s impossible to pick a side in this fight.
When Hanks was named Best Actor for Philadelphia at the 1994 Oscars, the first thing he did was turn to Wilson for a big kiss.
“Here’s what I know,” he began his speech. “I could not be standing here without that undying love that was just sung about [by Neil Young], and I have that in a lover that is so close to fine we should all be able to be able to experience such heaven right here on earth.”
In 1995 he was back at it for Forrest Gump, giving Wilson double kisses and telling the audience that, among the reasons he was standing there, “the woman I share my life with has taught me and demonstrates for me every day just what love is.”
Asked about that speech’s swoon factor, he told Winfrey, “Maybe that sentiment is possible to fake, but for me it’s really true. What makes me different from others is that I verbalize this stuff. A lot of people would flee from what they think is award-show cheesiness, and I don’t. I often joke that my speeches are very personal moments that play themselves out in front of billions of people.”
And public declarations of love aside, Hanks and Wilson still have to tend to the brass tacks of being married behind the scenes.
As they navigate their fourth decade together, they still make sure to do the little things, such as go on dates, whether it’s to the Oscars or a local museum; take vacations (cycling and boating with Winfrey, Bruce Springsteen and the Obamas, anyone?); and FaceTime when work inevitably keeps them apart. (Hanks said on The Bill Simmons Podcast that one of his favorite-ever movies to make was A League of Their Own because he was able to bring his whole family on location that summer.)
But whenever they can, they hit the road together. When Wilson went on tour with her band in 2016, she had to get a bigger bed for her tour bus because her husband was went along for the ride.
“We have so much fun,” Wilson told E! News at the Inferno premiere in October 2016. “Being on location is one of the greatest things. We’ve gone all over the world. We’ve taken our family. We’ve gotten to live in cities that you normally wouldn’t get to live in and become a normal person and going to the market and finding your favorite coffee store and shop. Just pretending that you’re a local and that’s really great. You don’t feel rushed.”
So it is sometimes difficult to maintain a certain level of normality while also being the faces of all that’s still right in the world.
Asked what they had planned for her birthday the next day, Wilson told E!,” Oh, we’re not talking about that, those are private plans.”
“Ix-nay on the an-plays,” Hanks interjected. “Gotta maintain the temple sometimes, you know? Nobody’s allowed inside the holy of holies, if you know what I mean.” In 2017 Hanks similarly described plans for their 29th anniversary as “top-secret plans that are going to set the world on fire.”
These two aren’t immune from the specter of split rumors—Hanks and Wilson won a rare public apology from the National Enquirer in 2016 when the tabloid erroneously reported that they were going to divorce—and sometimes a Hanks kid makes headlines.
But aside from interview-friendly anecdotes, illustrated in recent years by occasional Instagram posts featuring their adult kids, they stay fairly private (Hanks sharing graphic images from his bursitis procedure notwithstanding).
Wilson did step outside her comfort zone, however, to share in 2015 that she had undergone a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction after being diagnosed with breast cancer.
The Now and Then actress admitted to the New York Times that revealing so much about her personal life wasn’t easy, but she felt it was important to share her story in case it could help other women.
“I’m in public because of the nature of what I do,” she said, “but I don’t feel it necessary to let the world know what I’m thinking, where I’m eating. I’ve always liked being on the periphery of things.”
While Wilson underwent treatment, she and Hanks hunkered down at home in Malibu, catching up on Oscar screeners.
“Who knew it would make you even closer?” she marveled. “You never know how your spouse is going to react in a situation like this. I was so amazed, so blown away by the care my husband gave me. It was such a normal, intimate time.”
Reflecting on his wife’s battle, Hanks told The Mirror in 2016, “All I can do is bow down before the courage of my wife.”
Another hallmark of their relationship is how supportive Hanks is of Wilson in all of her endeavors, be it her acting, music or philanthropy.
“My wife and my daughter have yet to allow themselves to be defined by only the man in their lives,” Hanks told Emma Watson, his co-star in The Circle, when she interviewed him for Esquire in 2016. “The women I have worked with and those I seek inspiration from have had different perspectives on all there is to have an opinion on in this world, and I have always learned from listening to them. My support of those women and those in my family has been the same as it has for any man or any of my sons.”
And at the end of the day, he and Wilson just like each other and really like being married to each other.
“People say, ‘Jeez, it must be hard to stay married in show business,'” Hanks told The Mirror. “I think it’s hard to stay married anywhere, but if you marry the right person, it might work out. We give each other a natural sense of support for whatever the other wants to pursue. Our marriage doesn’t require vast work. We have been married 28 years and dig each other a lot.”
At her induction into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2019, where her husband spoke admiringly of her talent, Wilson told Us Weekly, “It’s like anything. We got married, we committed to each other, we love each other and we work hard at our relationship.”
“Not only do we love each other,” she added, “we really like each other, and we like being together, and we support each other and we keep the communication channels open. That’s always important.”
Check out Hanks and Wilson’s four-decade love affair in photos:
A Night to Remember
The duo was all smiles as they arrived on the red carpet of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, in which Rita Wilson served as an executive producer.
Love Story
Tom Hanks made sure he was on the red carpet to support his wife’s film My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, in which she also served as executive producer.
All Smiles!
What a cheerleader! The Forrest Gump star held his wifeclose following her performance at 54 Below in New York City.
Mamma Mia!
Tom accompanied Rita on the red carpet of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, in which she served as an executive producer.
Two Peas in a Pod
The couple looked fabulous as they attended the Hollywood Unites for the 5th Biennial Stand Up To Cancer event in Los Angeles, Calif.
In a 2013 interview with Piers Morgan, Tom said, “When I met Rita, I thought ‘Oh, this is what it’s supposed to be like when you are married to someone. It’s supposed to be this carefree and easy.'”
A Walk to Remember
The couple shared a look of love as Rita accepted her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Of course the biggest day of their lives, it’s safe to say Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks were each other’s biggest fans they night they married in 1988.
(Originally published April 30, 2018, at 5 a.m. PT)
