Tom Hanks is widely regarded as Hollywood’s “America’s dad”—the embodiment of warmth, stability, and integrity. His long marriage to Rita Wilson and well-adjusted children have helped cement his reputation as a trustworthy, wholesome figure.

Yet there’s one part of his life that Hanks almost never discusses: his first marriage to Samantha Lewes (born Susan Dillingham). The reason for his silence isn’t nostalgia, embarrassment, or bitterness—it’s much deeper and more painful.

Tom Hanks met Susan Dillingham in the 1970s while both were struggling theater students at California State University, Sacramento. Young, hopeful, and not yet touched by fame, they bonded over shared ambition and outsider status.

Their relationship moved quickly—Colin, their son, was born in 1977, followed by marriage in 1978 and daughter Elizabeth in 1982. For a time, they were a modest but intact family, scraping by while Hanks chased acting jobs and Samantha kept the household afloat.

Everything changed when Hanks’s career took off in the early 1980s. Fame brought long absences, new pressures, and emotional challenges neither partner was prepared to handle. By 1985, their marriage was strained. By 1987, it was over. While the split looked like a typical Hollywood divorce on paper, the reality was far more complex and damaging.

Elizabeth Hanks’s memoir offers insight into the aftermath. She doesn’t cast her parents as villains or heroes, but as “two hurt kids trying to dig out of a well together.” After the divorce, Elizabeth and Colin lived primarily with their mother.

Hanks was present, but only in limited windows—weekends, summers, holidays. Outwardly, the arrangement seemed stable, but inside, Elizabeth describes a childhood marked by confusion, deprivation, and moments of violence and fear.

One of the most telling incidents occurred when Hanks went to pick up his children from school in Los Angeles, only to discover they hadn’t been there for weeks. Samantha had moved them to Sacramento without telling him.

That moment, Elizabeth writes, encapsulates why Hanks avoids the topic: it’s the story of a father realizing he’s lost control over his children’s safety and stability.

Elizabeth’s descriptions of life with her mother are honest but not sensationalized. She remembers a once-beautiful home decaying, a backyard growing wild, and chaos creeping in.

Most painful was Samantha’s declining mental health. Elizabeth portrays her mother as loving but unstable, unable to consistently protect or nurture her children. Hanks, meanwhile, was powerless to affect what happened in his ex-wife’s home, and he worried constantly about his children’s well-being.

Samantha Lewes died in 2002 at age 49 after battling bone cancer. By then, Hanks had rebuilt his life with Rita Wilson, but the guilt and pain of the past lingered. Elizabeth’s memoir suggests Hanks was present and supportive when possible, deeply affected by what his children endured.

The real reason Tom Hanks doesn’t talk about his first marriage is that there is no way to do so without exposing pain—his own, his children’s, and that of someone who cannot respond. Silence is not avoidance, but restraint and respect. Hanks’s second marriage is not a redemption arc, but the result of growth and hard-earned wisdom. Some stories, Elizabeth concludes, don’t belong to the public—they belong to the survivors.