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Tom Hanks Quietly Turns 60

By Victoria Miller
Published on: 05:57 PST, Jul 9, 2016

Tom Hanks turned 60-years-old on July 9, but he planned how he was going to celebrate the milestone birthday a long time ago. Hanks told E! News that his summertime birthday has always meant that family and friends were scattered with vacations and other activities.

“I grew up having my birthdays in the summertime where everybody is dispersed,” Hanks explained. “The day will go by with a little bit of a nod and maybe a delightful can of beer.”

One thing Tom made crystal clear was that he did not want any kind of a surprise party to ring in the big 6-0.

“If there is I’m gonna kill somebody!” Hanks said.

Tom Hanks has talked about aging in recent interviews, telling Radio Times last year that while he knows he is on his final course –”the back nine” as he calls it—he’s far from ready to call it a day.

“I’m on the back nine,” he says. “And I want to play more than another nine. But I’ve never had a problem with getting older in movies. I accept it. I don’t view it as an obstacle to get over, everybody knows how old I am, they’ve been watching my movies forever.”

While Hanks admitted that parenthood at a young age kept him from drinking and partying too much, one thing he didn’t always keep an eye on was his diet. A Type 2 diabetes diagnosis three years ago was a major wake-up call for the two-time Oscar winner.

“I’m part of the lazy American generation that has blindly kept dancing through the party and now finds ourselves with a malady,” Hanks said. “I was heavy. You’ve seen me in movies, you know what I looked like. I was a total idiot. I thought I could avoid it by removing the buns from my cheeseburgers. Well, it takes a little bit more than that.”

Hanks even hints at his medical malady on social media pages. On his Twitter bio, Tom writes, “I’m that actor in some of the movies you liked and some you didn’t. Sometimes I’m in pretty good shape, other times I’m not. Hey, you gotta live, you know?”

He has definitely lived. Tom Hanks has had a storied movie career, but his breakthrough role was actually on YTV—and in an unlikely role, to boot. Hanks kicked off his career on the ABC’s sitcom Bosom Buddies, playing an up-and-coming advertising exec who dressed in drag in order to get cheap rent in an all-female apartment building. It wasn’t until a decade later that he kicked his career into high gear and took on other types of roles that featured him as more of a leader.

Tom Hanks won two consecutive best actor Oscars for the movies Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994). Hanks revealed that the pressure was on to make a sequel to Forrest Gump, an idea that he squashed fairly quickly.

“We could have made five Forrest Gump movies,” Hanks told the Times. “The studio was saying, ‘Are you insane? Do you have some intense desire not to make money?’ Because they wanted us to develop the second Forrest Gump movie two days after the first one came out.”

But before his acting career took off, Tom Hanks had a transient childhood. Tom recently talked about his nomadic childhood in an interview on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4, according to The Guardian. Hanks revealed that his parents divorced when he was 5-years-old and that his father moved him and his siblings to five different cities within five years. The Hanks kids lived in 10 different homes during that short time. Today, Tom Hanks is married to Rita Wilson and they have two sons together. (Tom also has two other children from a previous marriage.)

In the video below, Tom Hanks says he feels more like 18-years-old than 60, and he reveals that yoga has helped to keep the aches and pains away.

Watch the clip to see Tom Hanks talking about his life and turning 60.

[Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images]

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