London - The question was innocuous enough, but it opened floodgates of emotion and surely the longest dead silence in the history of Desert Island Discs.
Tom Hanks was on the Radio 4 programme not long ago to discuss, as usual, a set of eight pieces of music he would take to a desert island. All was going swimmingly between Kirsty Young, the show’s host, and the ever-genial Hanks until she probed his lonely, “vagabond” childhood.
After he mentioned how he turned in his early teens to theatre to “find the vocabulary for what’s rattling around inside my head”, Young asked him to elaborate. Hanks laughed and emitted a somewhat strangled “Ah, er”’ followed by a dead silence long enough for listeners to think there was a technical problem.
“Look what you’ve done to me,” he squeaked finally.
Hanks had clearly become tearful. “I can only apologise,” said Young quickly. “No, that’s all right,” said one of the highest-grossing stars in Hollywood history, sniffling as he collected himself. “I’ve put far too much thought into this list. What it was, was the vocabulary of loneliness.”
As Hanks became the latest to discover, Desert Island Discs reveals rather more about a guest than their taste in music. If Radio 4 listeners weren’t aware already, the two-times Oscar-winning star of Forrest Gump, Philadelphia and Saving Private Ryan had long ago been crowned “the nicest guy in Hollywood”.
And on Radio 4, he showed he is also erudite, eloquent, contemplative and perceptive.
Not to mention very candid. Listening to The Beatles’ There’s A Place, he said, reminded him of sharing a bedroom with his father and brother as a seven-year-old and imagining some space of his own. Dusty Springfield, meanwhile, “was an older woman” who “stirred my loins in ways I didn’t understand”.
Hanks’s philosophy of life is in stark contrast to the foolish, self-obsessed drivel that comes out of the mouths of so many Hollywood stars.
He learned early on that no actor is so important that he cannot be replaced, and - a little later in life - that if you find the woman of your dreams, you make sure you don’t lose her. “I’m not a cheater,” he said of his 28-year marriage to the actress Rita Wilson. “I met her and I thought, ‘I’m not going to be lonely any more.’ “
An early first marriage ended unhappily, but Hanks even found something positive there, telling Young: “Having a kid at 21 was the greatest thing that ever happened to me because I didn’t smoke pot. I didn’t do drugs, I was not a party boy, I didn’t drink too much, I went to bed at ten minutes after ten.”
However, Hanks’s life has certainly not been 59 solid years of settled contentment. He opened up about suffering intense childhood rootlessness as his father, an itinerant chef, criss-crossed the country after separating from his mother.
What Hanks didn’t discuss with Young was the son with a serious drug addiction and the wife who is recovering from a cancer scare - two sources of personal heartache to which we will return.
Tales of Hanks’ kindness and humanity are legion. He once gave a $25 cinema ticket refund to a couple who admitted - as they got chatting to him at a California petrol station - that they hadn’t much liked his 2011 comedy Larry Crowne (sadly, they were hardly alone).
Then there was the New York taxi driver who got chatting to Hanks when the actor jumped into the back of his cab two years ago. Hanks later got in touch to invite the cabbie and his wife to see his Broadway play and visit him backstage afterwards.
A Hollywood nanny recalled that, of all the many famous people who visited their house, only one ever bothered to introduce himself, not only asking her name but remembering it when he saw her again. No prizes for guessing who.
And I have learned that Radio 4 staff - who often have to put up with diva-like behaviour from far lesser celebrities - were overawed by his charm and courtesy.
The British producer Pippa Harris, who worked with Hanks when they co-produced the 2006 comedy film Starter For Ten, told me: “The stories about Tom being one of the nicest, smartest men in Hollywood are all true.”
She recalls: “He was always delightful when he came out on set - not only being charming to the cast, but making a point of searching out crew members who he knew from [the World War II drama series] Band Of Brothers - remembering their names, family details and so on.”
He supports myriad good causes - including Unicef, Sting’s Rainforest Fund and the Pearl Harbor Memorial Fund, without ramming his high-mindedness down everyone’s throats.
Last month, he was made a knight of the Legion d’Honneur - France’s highest award - for raising awareness for World War II veterans.
His hobbies are eccentric in the least self-conscious way. Forget vintage sports cars, Hanks collects old typewriters (he chose a Hermes 3000 model for his Desert Island Discs “luxury”) and has developed a software program that replicates their clicks and clacks on a computer keyboard.
Self-effacement is a tricky quality for big stars to pull off, too often sounding fake. However, Hanks is the first to admit the lunacy of the world’s obsession with celebrities and what they think, especially about politics.
“I’m not an authority on anything - except the best root beers and typewriters,” he says. Imagine George Clooney or Angelina Jolie, globe-trotting saviours of the planet, conceding so much.
Hanks, who recently revealed he has type 2 diabetes, describes himself as a “coper” in life, which is just as well.
His father, Amos, and his mother, Janet, a hospital worker, divorced when Hanks - the third of four children - was five. Both parents went through a string of short-lived marriages and love affairs, leaving Hanks and his siblings to be shuttled around between their mother’s California home and wherever their father happened to be working. In a family of 16 siblings and step-siblings, Hanks was known as Number Nine.
“I was a confused kid. I had three mothers, five schools and ten houses by the age of ten,” he says. He was unpopular at school and painfully shy.
Somewhat poignantly, given his role in the Toy Story films, he never kept any toys for long himself.
“They just kind of disappeared in a closet of whichever house we were leaving at two in the morning with my dad upset at the woman he was married to.”
Aged 23, he married his first wife, the late actress Samantha Lewes, to “quell the loneliness”. They had two children - Colin and Elizabeth, both now actors - but Hanks struggled.
Notwithstanding his remarks to Kirsty Young, he did have a drug-taking period. He admitted more than 20 years ago that he used cocaine and marijuana “surreptitiously” to cope with his unhappiness, but gave them up after he had children.
“I realised early on that I couldn’t do that. I thought I can’t be a responsible parent and do this,” he told Vanity Fair. By the time his first marriage ended after nine years with an acrimonious divorce in 1987, Hanks had already encountered the woman who would become the love of his life.
Rita Wilson, an attractive Greek-American, was his co-star in the 1985 comedy The Volunteers - although Hanks had fallen for her many years earlier when she played a cheerleader in an episode of the Seventies children’s TV show, The Brady Bunch.
They married in 1988 and are still together, admired as one of Tinseltown’s happiest couples, in spite of recent family crises.
Rita, by whom he has two more sons - Chet and Truman - announced last year she’d had a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery after a breast cancer scare.
She believes she has beaten the disease. Hanks said that all he could do at the time was “bow down before the courage of my wife”.
Then there has been heartache in the form of their son Chet’s problems with drug addiction.
Chet, 25, announced in late 2014 he had struggled with substance abuse since he was 16. The aspiring rapper admitted online that he had been smoking crack and snorting so much cocaine “I couldn’t even snort it up my nose any more because it was so clogged”. He also confessed to selling cocaine. Chet, who partly blamed the pressures of having such a famous father, insisted later in 2014 he had shaken off his drugs and alcohol addictions after going into rehab.
Within months, however, he was in trouble again when he was accused of smashing up a hotel room near Gatwick Airport, causing £1 200 (about R25 000) damage, after a wild night out in London.
His parents also face a lawsuit from a California motorist who claims Chet was under the influence of drugs or alcohol when he rear-ended his car.
The motorist is suing Chet’s parents, as partially responsible, claiming they were aware of his addiction problems and still lent him their car.
Hanks has previously praised his son’s “bravery and honesty” for coming clean about his problems, adding: “As a parent you love your kids unconditionally. You support them every step of the way.”
Inevitably, Hollywood has found it almost impossible ever to cast Hanks - who has four new films coming out this year alone - in a truly villainous role. Instead, he has carved out a spectacularly successful career as the “ordinary Joe” - decent, compassionate and good-humoured.
It’s no accident. Hanks said he chose his Oscar-winning role as Forrest Gump, the slow-witted but good-natured man, because he saw it as the sort of optimistic film that would give ordinary people ‘”ome hope for their lot and position in life”. The sort of hope he had as a small child sharing a bedroom with his father and brother.
Daily Mail