Star Tom Hanks still wows audiences at 65

Tom Hanks is one of American cinema's biggest stars. He has managed to stay scandal-free and has enjoyed quite a picture-book career since the 1980s. One of his most unforgettable roles was as the chocolate-loving, long-distance running Forrest Gump in the 1994 film.

Tom Hanks' breakthrough came underwater. In 1984, his friend, director Ron Howard, cast him in the romantic comedy "Splash." Hanks played an unlucky guy who falls in love with a mermaid. Though Daryl Hannah stole the show as the mermaid, Hanks proved he could swim with the big shots.

Four years after "Splash" came the next major step in the California native's career. In "Big," Hanks played a boy who finds himself in the body of a grown man. The film was a box office success and showed Hollywood that Hanks was a lucrative name.

In 1993, Hanks revealed his softer side in "Sleepless in Seattle," co-starring Meg Ryan. They played a couple who fall in love over the phone before they ever meet in person. As Sam Baldwin, a widowed architect looking for love, Hanks showed the world that he could master romantic roles as well.

Hanks' next film was a whopper. In "Philadelphia" (1993), he moved viewers to tears as an attorney battling AIDS. It was the first Hollywood film to grapple with the topic — and brought Hanks the Oscar for best actor.

When Hanks raked in two Oscars the following year for "Forrest Gump," Hollywood's top producers and directors were fighting over him and the actor could choose his roles carefully. In 1998, he teamed up with friend and director Steven Spielberg and played the lead in the World War II drama "Saving Private Ryan."

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for an actor is to carry an entire film by themselves. Hanks masters that in "Cast Away," in which he plays a man who survives an airplane crash and lands on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. The full-length film is nearly a monologue.

Spielberg also directed "Catch Me If You Can," in which Hanks plays an FBI investigator who's after a con man played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The pair were the perfect fit: DiCaprio as the charismatic check frauder and Hanks as the honest official.

Hanks' next project saw him once again stranded in a threatening environment. In "The Terminal," a comedy directed by Spielberg, Hanks plays a man who is trapped at the JFK airport in New York when he's denied entry into the US but cannot return to his own country because of a military coup.

After so much success as an actor, Hanks dabbled a bit in producing and voiceovers. But acting remains his first love. Another of his best films is "Captain Phillips" (2013), in which he plays a ship captain who is kidnapped by terrorists.

In 2014, Tom Hanks joined Spielberg in Germany to play an attorney in the Cold War drama "Bridge of Spies." The filming took place at the Babelsberg Studios in Berlin — and even Chancellor Angela Merkel stopped by for a visit. The film was released a year later. Hanks is pictured here at its 2015 premiere in Berlin.

Another of Hanks' projects also had a connection to Germany. In German director Tom Tykwer's culture-clash comedy "A Hologram for the King" (2016), Hanks plays a downtrodden salesman who gets stuck in the Middle East. The actor had partnered with Tykwer four years before for the fantasy film "Cloud Atlas."

"Greyhound" is based on events during a conflict between US military ships and German submarines in World War II. Scheduled for movie theaters in 2020, Sony sold the film to Apple after cinemas had to close during the pandemic. The lavishly produced movie starring Hanks launched on July 10, 2020, exclusively on Apple TV+. Studios wanted finished films to be shown to prevent even bigger losses.

The multi-Oscar-nominated film "News of the World" was released in US cinemas on Christmas 2020, with Netflix scooping up international distribution rights for release outside the US in February 2021. In the western drama, Hanks plays Captain Kidd, a Civil War veteran who makes a living traveling and reading the newspaper to locals. He takes orphan Johanna (played by Helena Zengel) under his wing.