Tom Hanks addressed his daughter E.A. Hanks’ recent memoir where she recalled the tough moments of her childhood.
“There is a pride because she shares it with me,” the Oscar winner, 68, said in an interview with Access Hollywood while on the red carpet for his new movie The Phoenician Scheme on Thursday, May 29. “She’s very open about what the process is.”
Tom added that E.A. (real name Elizabeth Anne Hanks) has “always been” a “knockout” ever since she was little.
“If you’ve had kids you realize that you see who they are when they’re about 6 weeks old. Their personality is on display right there … their temper, the way they see the world is demonstrated in their body language and on their face,” he continued. “I’m not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal as well as the curiosity as well as I’m going to say perhaps shoot herself in the foot kind of wherewithal in order to examine this thing.”
The actor shared that he thinks E.A. “was incredibly honest about” her life struggles.
“We all come from checkered, cracked lives, all of us. Despite the fact that part of it would seem as though she worked for some international well-known firm with a copyrighted last name,” he quipped. “She knows that and she leans into absolutely everything. I think anybody who does that is a bold journalistic literate mind and I’m just thrilled I can say the same thing about my daughter.”
E.A., 43, is Tom’s sole daughter whom he welcomed with first wife, Susan Dillingham. The exes were married from 1978 to 1987 and also share son Colin Hanks. Dillingham died from lung cancer in 2002 at age 49.
In E.A.’s book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, she opened up about life with her mom following her parents’ divorce. E.A. wrote that she believed her mother suffered from bipolar disorder. (Dillingham was never diagnosed with the condition.)
Tom and Dillingham’s custody arrangement included E.A. and Colin living with their mother and visiting their father and stepmother Rita Wilson on the weekends and throughout the summer. However, the arrangement was altered when Dillingham allegedly got violent with E.A.
“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,” she continued. “My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer.”
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