Tom Hanks’s daughter, E.A. Hanks, revealed her father once had to locate her after her mother took her out of school.
E.A. — which stands for Elizabeth Anne — was the daughter of the Forrest Gump actor’s first wife Susan Dillingham. She is the younger sister of actor Colin Hanks, 47.
Dillingham and Hanks were married from 1978 to 1987, with Dillingham receiving primary custody of both of their children. However, one day, E.A.’s mother spontaneously decided to move her and her older brother Colin from Sacramento, California, to Los Angeles without informing Tom.
“My dad came to pick us up from school and we’re not there,” she said. “And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks and he has to track us down.”
Hanks went on to re-marry Rita Wilson in 1988, and they welcomed two sons: Chet in 1990 and Truman in 1995.
The Cast Away actor has previously opened up about the differences between his two sets of children in a 2019 interview with The New York Times. “My son [Colin] was born when I was very young. As well as my daughter [Elizabeth],” he said.
“We have this gestalt understanding because [Colin and Elizabeth] remember when their dad was just a guy trying to, you know, make the rent. My other kids, they were born after I had established a beachhead in every way. And so their lives were just different.”
He explained that after being a parent as long as he has, the best thing a mother or father can say to their children is, “I love you, there’s nothing you can do wrong, you cannot hurt my feelings, I hope you will forgive me on occasion, and what do you need me to do?”
“You offer up that to them,” Hanks continued. “‘I will do anything I can possibly do in order to keep you safe.’ That’s it. Offer that up and then just love them.”
Despite her mother never receiving a formal diagnosis, E.A. assumed that her mother was bipolar with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion.
Her upcoming memoir, titled The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road, mostly revolves around her mother as E.A. took a six-month-long road trip from L.A. to Palatka, Florida, where her mother’s family is from, to learn more about her before she died from lung cancer in 2002.
In an excerpt from the book shared with People, E.A. said her mother slowly started to become more neglectful, leading to a switch in the custody arrangement where she would only see her mother on weekends and during the summer.
“As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog s*** that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke. The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over the Bible,” the excerpt read.
“One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade.”
The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road is released on April 8.
