“I remember walking through the hospitals for the first time, meeting mutilated service members who were missing their legs, just like Lieutenant Dan.” The words belong to Gary Sinise, the actor who played the embittered Vietnam veteran in Robert Zemeckis’s 1994 film Forrest Gump. To prepare for the role, Sinise had toured military wards, absorbing the physical and psychological toll of war. After the film’s release, he discovered that the character had become something unexpected: a source of hope for real veterans. They did not want to discuss their injuries, he later recalled, but the film, and specifically the arc of Lieutenant Dan, who moves from despair to prosthetic-assisted renewal. That realisation set Sinise on a path that would define his off-screen life, channelling the fictional officer’s resilience into a foundation that builds adapted homes and provides mental-health support for wounded service members and their families.

Tom Hanks, who turned 70 on 9 July, inhabited the title role in that same film, a performance that earned him a second consecutive Academy Award for best actor and cemented his reputation as Hollywood’s most trusted everyman. The son of a California cook, shuttled between parents after a divorce at age four, Hanks spent a peripatetic childhood that, by his own account, taught him to observe human behaviour and disappear into characters. After a string of 1980s comedies—Splash, Big, The Money Pit—he pivoted to drama with Philadelphia (1993), playing a lawyer fired after an AIDS diagnosis, and then to Forrest Gump, the guileless Alabaman who drifts through the defining traumas of postwar America. The back-to-back Oscars placed him in a rarefied club alongside Spencer Tracy, and the films that followed—Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away, The Green Mile—consolidated a persona built on decency, perseverance, and an almost preternatural likability.

That persona has travelled far beyond the Anglophone world. In India, Aamir Khan starred in a 2022 Hindi-language remake, Laal Singh Chaddha, transplanting Gump’s journey into the subcontinent’s modern history. Critics, meanwhile, continue to debate the summit of Hanks’s filmography. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, his highest-rated film is not a live-action drama but Toy Story 2 (1999), where his voice work as the cowboy Woody holds a perfect 100% score; among his physical performances, Big (1988) leads with 98%. The range—from a child trapped in an adult’s body to a toy grappling with abandonment—underscores a versatility that has made Hanks a fixture in global box-office rankings and a two-time Oscar winner whose presence alone can anchor a blockbuster.

Off-screen, the actor has managed a parallel narrative of stability rare in the industry. He has been married to actress and producer Rita Wilson for 38 years; the couple share a rule never to go to bed angry, and Wilson has spoken of the daily ritual of talking in the bathroom as a cornerstone of their connection. Hanks lives with type 2 diabetes, diagnosed after years of elevated blood sugar, and adheres to a careful diet. He holds Greek citizenship, owns a villa on Antiparos, and has collected more than 250 typewriters, a hobby that spawned a mobile app. In 2022 he launched a coffee brand, Hanks Coffee For Our Troops, whose profits go to veteran-support organisations—a gesture that, viewed alongside Sinise’s foundation, suggests the long shadow of a single film can shape lives in ways no box-office tally captures.

On his 70th birthday, Hanks remains active, with a role as Abraham Lincoln—a distant cousin, genealogists note—in the forthcoming adaptation of Lincoln in the Bardo. The image that lingers, however, is not of a star marking a milestone in a whitewashed Greek villa, but of a typewriter ribbon advancing one character at a time, and of a fictional lieutenant who, decades after the credits rolled, is still helping real soldiers walk again.