Mr. nice guy does not easily wear the albatross of eminence. He may joke about it: "I'm powerful enough now to be taken seriously," he says, snapping his fingers like a born Hollywood sharpie. "Plenty of people take my phone calls!" He can also get plaintive: "Me famous?" he asks. "I can't embrace it for a moment. You guys do that." But he knows he is expected to think he's famous, and to love it: "I was working 18-hour days on That Thing You Do!," he says of the 1996 film he wrote and directed, "and I wasn't seeing my kids as much as I wanted. And I got into an elevator and this lady said, 'Oh, Tom Hanks! What's it like living at the absolute top of the heap?' And I said, 'Lady, life is just one damn thing after another, no matter where you're living.'"

On the set Hanks relaxes in a comfortable but not lavish silver Airstream trailer. (Of another star's trailer, he jokes, "John Travolta's is sorta like the Ritz Carlton. I wouldn't ever want to leave.") His real home--with his wife, actress Rita Wilson, and their two kids--is in west L.A., down the road from Spielberg's. But the star hasn't forgotten his dark roots. "Tom came from a hard place, and he remembers that," says Brian Grazer, producer of Splash and Apollo 13. The two men used to live near each other in a gated community on the Pacific. "I remember Tom sitting on the beach, holding the sand tight in his fist and saying, 'I can't believe this is my place.'"

As the kid from Concord, Calif., Tom Hanks didn't have a place. His parents separated when he was five, and he followed his chef father from job to job. "Basically he ran the kitchen in union dinner houses," Tom recalls. "Places with a net-and-nautical theme, with bamboo barstools and a dirty, disgusting kitchen." Early on, the boy learned the vagabond independence an actor needs. "I thought nothing of getting on the bus and visiting Mom four or five times a year."

A kid on the move--an Army brat or cook's son--typically either crawls into a shell or finds ways to cope with new classmates each school year. Hanks coped, adapted and later found a home in the impromptu family that is any company of actors. "To me it was the natural order of things, this willingness to go off and throw yourself into strange circumstances. I was never afraid to pack up and go off." And when he wasn't going off, he was looking up--at the stars. His obsession with the U.S. space program, which blossomed into Apollo 13 and his own HBO series From the Earth to the Moon, began here.

From the beginning he was a sweet blend of humor and earnestness. In high school in Oakland he quit track (he ran the 440 in 61 sec.) for the stage because his actor friends laughed more than the jocks. "I was attracted to acting because it was fun," says Hanks, dismissing any deeper motives. "I'd rather laugh all day long than anything."

Tom also got an eclectic religious education. His mother took the kids to Roman Catholic Mass. A stepmother brought in some Mormon proselytizers. His aunt, with whom he lived for a time, had converted to the Nazarene Church ("What did I know from fanatical?" he asks). In high school his Jewish friends inducted him into the sacred rituals of seder, bagels and lox. At the same time he joined "a great group of people" who were born-again Christians; for four years he led Bible readings. But Tom was a man with his own mission. The mission was acting.

Before he was 20, he was seen playing Yasha the footman in The Cherry Orchard in Sacramento and hired as an intern at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. Soon he was making $50 a week and, best of all, "Boom, I had a card in my wallet that said I am a professional actor." He and his first wife Samantha went to New York City for the requisite starving-actor years; they had a baby and some thin patches. "It was a year and a half of horrible scary days," he recalls.

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