Tom Hanks’s daughter, E.A. Hanks, opened up about how her mother struggled to process the Forrest Gump actor’s growing fame. E.A. — which stands for Elizabeth Anne — was the daughter of Hanks’s first wife, Susan Dillingham. The former couple also shared son Colin Hanks. Dillingham and Hanks met as theater students at Sacramento State University and were married from 1978 to 1987. In her new memoir, The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road, E.A. embarks on a six-month-long road trip from Los Angeles to Palatka, Florida, where her mother’s family is from, to learn more about her before she died from lung cancer in 2002. Part of the book discusses Dillingham adjusting to Hanks’s rise after he shot to fame in the late Eighties with roles in films like Splash (1984), The Money Pit (1986), and Big (1988).
E.A. specifically writes that her mother was a “would-be actress who never recovered from her ex-husband’s catastrophic fame. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, E.A. said that she thought the word “catastrophic” was the best way to describe how Dillingham felt about her ex-husband’s success. “She felt that his stature in the world obliterated her and any chance she had at continuing her stage career,” she said. “The uncomfortable truth, and there’s a lot of them in this book, is she didn’t really have a career, and her ex-husband becoming the Tom Hanks was more insult to injury than significant impediment.” She continued: “‘Catastrophic’ also because that brand of megawatt fame erases what actually matters in an artist and what set my dad apart in the first place: humanity and talent. But I chose that word, catastrophic, not her.” Hanks went on to re-marry Rita Wilson in 1988, and they welcomed two sons: Chet in 1990 and Truman in 1995.
Despite her mother never receiving a formal diagnosis, E.A. assumed that her mother was bipolar with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion. During a portion of her memoir, E.A. said her mother slowly started to become more neglectful, leading to a switch in the custody arrangement meaning she and Colin would only see their mother on weekends and during the summer. “As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog s*** that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke. The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over the Bible,” her book read. “One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade.”
