EXCLUSIVE: Tom Hanks' Pain Laid Bare — How Movie Icon's Mom 'Abandoned' Her Family and How His 'Lonely' Childhood Almost Derailed His Hollywood Dream
Tom Hanks' childhood and upbringing was nothing to write home about.
July 10 2025, Published 4:30 p.m. ET
Tom Hanks is one of the most beloved and respected actors in the world, but his journey to great heights was filled with dark times, mainly due to his mother, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
The iconic actor found himself living in a broken home following his parents' divorce, and his world was rocked even more when, at the age of 5, his mother, Janet Hanks, "abandoned the family."
An 'Unhappy' Childhood
Tom Hanks wants everyone to know he's just not a 'nice guy.'
After Janet divorced the Big star's late father, Amos, in 1960, she worked in a hospital and struggled to raise all four of their children. Drowning in stress and financial debt, Janet decided to take her youngest child, Jim, and left Tom and his older siblings, Larry and Sandra, with their dad.
"There’s no denying I had an unhappy childhood," Tom once said. "I felt lonely, abandoned, in the dark."
By the time he was ten years old, Tom revealed he had lived in "ten different homes," with "two sets of families, a bunch of stepbrothers and stepsisters."
Tom's mother, Janet, 'abandoned' him when he was just 5 years old.
Tom opened up more on his "lonely" childhood in an interview with Graham Bensinger, and confessed: "Maybe there was a degree of loneliness because really no one – I kind of like fell through the cracks and didn't have adults per se that were taking care of me."
He then asked himself: "How do I find the vocabulary for what’s rattling around in my head?... It was the vocabulary of loneliness."
In 2017, Tom released a book of short stories called Uncommon and gave readers a look at the dire conditions he and his siblings grew up in. According to the Oscar winner, since his father worked late nights as a cook and wouldn't get home until 11 pm, Tom and his brothers and sisters would simply sit in their dirty apartment.
"If you scraped the amount of burnt tomato soup off the stove, it would have been like an archeological dig!" he recalled.
Desperate To Make It
Hanks has remained humble despite massive success.
Despite the horrors of his childhood, Tom revealed he and his siblings found light amid the storm: "In some ways it was very cool, because we laughed a lot."
Before she died in 2016, Janet confessed she "felt a great deal of guilt" for leaving her family.
Although Tom was having a tough time at home, he buried himself in his school work, where he found reading, art, and high school drama courses were "a good combat for loneliness."
According to Rawley Farnsworth, Tom's drama teacher at Oakland’s Skyline High, the movie legend "wasn’t in any hurry to leave school after rehearsals. In a way, he needed a place where he could make himself comfortable."
The rest is history, as Tom went on to become one of the biggest stars in the industry.
'Years Filled With Violence'
Tom's eldest daughter, Elizabeth, also went through a traumatic childhood experience.
Tom's rough childhood appeared to be passed down to his own children, especially his daughter, Elizabeth, who lifted the veil in her memoir, where she noted she's the child of her father's first "non-famous" marriage and experienced "years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation… and love."
Tom welcomed Elizabeth with his first wife, Samantha Lewes, whom he was married to from 1978 to 1987. Together, Lewes and Tom had two children, Colin, 47, and Elizabeth, 43.
Following their divorce, Lewes was awarded primary custody, and then uprooted the family from Los Angeles to Sacramento.
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In the book, The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road, Elizabeth revealed her home life spiraled downward 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," she wrote. As her mother's health declined, Elizabeth would spend hours in bed reading the bible.
While Lewes was never formally diagnosed, Elizabeth believed her mother was bipolar and experienced periods of extreme paranoia and delusion.
