Tom Hanks

Born: 9th July 1956
Where: Concord, California

The two-times Oscar winner and Aston Villa supporter is a key figure in the Hollywood elite as an actor, producer and sometime director.

He won Academy Awards for best actor in Forrest Gump and Philadelphia and was also nominated for Big, Cast Away and Saving Private Ryan.

Outside acting he also produced Cast Away and My Big Fat Greek Wedding - the biggest independent movie of 2002.

Entertainment Weekly once rated him as the only actor actually worth a $20m wage bill and he was ranked 17th in Empire magazine's 1997 top 100 movie stars of all time.

Hanks developed an interest in acting, after receiving encouragement from a gay drama teacher at Skyline High School in Oakland, California.

(The actor cited him in his 1994 Academy Award acceptance speech, a tribute on which the film In & Out was based.)

He dropped out of college, and after a brief and unsuccessful stint in New York, Hanks had a guest appearance on Happy Days which led to an introduction to Ron Howard.

When Howard set about casting the male lead in Splash, the director hired him for the role of a charming salesman who falls in love with a mermaid.

Hanks met his second wife, actress Rita Wilson on the set of Volunteers. They married in 1988, and have two children together.

1988 proved to be a turning point for Hanks as he played a teenager trapped in the body of a 35-year-old man in Big, which earned him an Oscar nomination.

After a string of unsuccessful films including Turner & Hooch and Punchline, Hanks starred as a baseball coach in A League of Their Own.

Philadelphia in 1993 solidified his standing as a leading dramatic actor, and earned him the first of his Oscars.

Next came Forrest Gump, a box office success, which picked up six Academy Awards, including Hanks' second as Best Actor.

After Ron Howard's Apollo 13, he provided the vocals for toy cowboy Woody, from Toy Story, the computer-generated animated fable of friendship.

For the next couple of years, Hanks sharpened his screenwriting, producing and directing skills, writing and directing That Thing You Do!.

After nearly two years away from the big screen, he returned in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, which earned him his fourth Academy Award nomination as Best Actor.

He went on to receive the Distinguished Public Service Award, the US Navy's highest civilian honour, on Veterans Day 1999 for his work in the movie.

Cast Away, in which he gained then lost 50lbs for the role, saw Hanks alone and trapped on a deserted island, but brought him yet another Best Actor Oscar nomination.

In 2001, Hanks and Steven Spielberg joined forces to executive produce the WWII mini series Band of Brothers (he fractured his shoulder location hunting in Germany).

The following year he starred in Sam Mendes' Road to Perdition as Michael Sullivan, a mob assassin forced to question his calling when his son's life is threatened.

Switching styles, he went on to play the cop on the trail of Leonardo DiCaprio's conman in Spielberg's enjoyable Catch Me If You Can.

As well as being a staunch supporter of the Cleveland Indians baseball team he also - bizarrely - supports Premiership side Aston Villa.

In 2004, he took over the Alec Guinness role in a tepid remake of the Ealing classic The Ladykillers and then played an immigrant in Spielberg's romantic comedy The Terminal.

Recent work includes a variety of computer generated roles in the Robert Zemeckis Christmas story The Polar Express.