“Tom Hanks’s Fame Destroyed My Mother’s Life”: Daughter’s Explosive Memoir Exposes Dark Side of Hollywood Stardom

In an era where Hollywood worships celebrity like a religion, the daughter of beloved actor Tom Hanks has delivered a devastating reminder that fame is often built on the wreckage of private lives.

E.A. Hanks — born Elizabeth Anne Hanks — has ignited headlines with her brutally candid memoir The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road, in which she lays bare the emotional carnage left in the wake of her father’s meteoric rise to superstardom.

While the world sees Tom Hanks as “America’s Dad” — a symbol of kindness, humility, and cinematic brilliance — his daughter paints a far more complicated, even tragic, picture of what that fame cost her family, particularly her late mother, Susan Dillingham.

The Woman Erased by Tom Hanks’s Fame

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E.A. Hanks does not mince words.

Her mother, a struggling actress in her own right, was not simply overshadowed by Tom Hanks’s ascent — she was obliterated by it.

“She felt that his stature in the world obliterated her and any chance she had at continuing her stage career,” E.A. told Vanity Fair.

“Catastrophic” is the word she uses — and she means it.

In the memoir, she describes her mother as a “would-be actress who never recovered from her ex-husband’s catastrophic fame.”

The insult of watching her ex-husband become the Tom Hanks — a household name, a two-time Oscar winner, the ultimate Hollywood good guy — was, in E.A.’s words, “more insult to injury than significant impediment.”

It wasn’t just professional envy — it was existential erasure.

A Mother Lost to Isolation and Mental Health Struggles

Susan Dillingham, who met Hanks while they were both theater students at Sacramento State University, married the future star in 1978.

They had two children together — E.A. and Colin Hanks — before divorcing in 1987, right as Hanks’s career began its unstoppable climb with roles in Splash (1984), Big (1988), and Turner & Hooch (1989).

As his star rose, Dillingham’s life crumbled.

Though she was never formally diagnosed, E.A. believes her mother struggled with bipolar disorder, marked by episodes of paranoia and delusion.

What followed was a slow but devastating unraveling.

“The backyard became so full of dog s*** that you couldn’t walk around it,” E.A. writes.

“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.”

It was a scene of neglect, despair, and emotional withdrawal — the decaying remnants of a life once filled with artistic ambition and dreams of the stage.

Eventually, after an incident of emotional violence turned physical, E.A. moved to Los Angeles in the middle of seventh grade, leaving behind a mother lost to illness and isolation.

The Price of Fame No One Talks About

It’s a brutal irony: while Hollywood fawns over the narrative of a self-made man who rose from humble beginnings to global superstardom, the collateral damage is often hidden from view.

Tom Hanks went on to marry actress Rita Wilson in 1988, building a picture-perfect Hollywood family, complete with two more sons, Chet and Truman.

He cemented his legacy as an icon of decency both on-screen and off.

But for E.A. Hanks, the reality was far messier — and more painful.

In The 10, her cross-country road trip serves not just as a literal journey but as a reckoning with her mother’s ghost — a woman whose identity was not just lost but obliterated in the shadow of her famous ex-husband.

Hollywood loves to sell the dream — the red carpets, the awards, the adoration.

But what E.A. Hanks exposes is the ugly underbelly of that dream: the people left behind, the women erased, the lives quietly falling apart while the world applauds.

A Warning Shot at the Cult of Celebrity

E.A.’s memoir is not a tabloid hit piece against her father — far from it.

She is measured, thoughtful, and even admiring of the humanity and talent that made Tom Hanks a star in the first place.

But she is unsparing in her critique of the culture that feeds on celebrity worship without counting its human cost.

“Catastrophic,” she reminds us, isn’t just about what happened to her mother — it’s about what happens to anyone caught in the gravitational pull of mega-fame.

It’s about a society that forgets that behind every glittering Hollywood success story is often a private story of loss, loneliness, and heartbreak.

As she puts it bluntly: “That brand of megawatt fame erases what actually matters in an artist and what set my dad apart in the first place: humanity and talent.”

Conclusion: The Cost of Being The Tom Hanks

The 10 is a sobering read — a memoir that shatters the fantasy of fame with gut-wrenching honesty.

E.A. Hanks doesn’t ask for pity. She asks for truth.

Behind every legend is a life — and sometimes, the legend devours the life entirely.

For Susan Dillingham, the mother lost in the long shadow of The Tom Hanks, the cost was everything.

And in a world addicted to celebrity fairy tales, that may be the most uncomfortable truth of all.