Big break no. 2: the 1984 Splash, in which Hanks falls for a mermaid. The modestly budgeted film grossed $62 million in North America, and Hanks was suddenly the new surefire romantic-comedy guy. In three years he did seven films, mostly raffish comedies. It took Penny Marshall's Big (Break No. 3) to change that. Now he was so hot he was cast in roles that didn't suit him, like Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities or the thinks-he's-going-to-die hero of Joe versus the Volcano.

"I was manufacturing reasons to make the movies," Hanks says. "Then I realized there was a way to control my fate: by saying no to movies I didn't want to do." And saying yes to A League of Their Own: Break No. 4, the last he would need. Every film he has starred in since then has been a hit.

You've Got Mail, an easy comedy with a disturbing subtext--it is less about saving Meg Ryan than showing how the large overwhelm the small with clout and charm--looks to continue the streak. But there is always the past to give him perspective. "It's a checkered career. They can't all be gems, man," he says, and winces. "People rent your bad stuff!" He would seem to have one guaranteed hit in his future: a sequel to the computer-animated delight Toy Story, for which Hanks gave voice to Sheriff Woody. He still gets a charge when kids ask him to "do" Woody. "It's just my own voice," he says with incredulous joy.

What about his own kids? Are they starstruck by having Tom Freakin' Hanks drive them to school? Naaah. "My work doesn't make much of a blip at the house," he says. "There's always a hubbub of activity because we're going somewhere, but they don't say, 'Hey, Dad, you're on TV!'" His son Colin, now 21, has tried acting, with Dad's cautious encouragement. "All my kids can look and see what I do for a living and see that it's really fun. It produces a vast amount of joy. It's hard work if you can get it, but it's great work too."

That's as much home talk as you'll get out of Hanks, whose personal life is a gated community. He is knowing but, for all his affability, not telling. Even his closest colleagues speak of him as if he were a planet yet to be colonized. Spielberg: "Tom is a bit of a mystery." Says Ryan, his co-star in three films: "I know him, but I don't know him. None of us really knows him." Perhaps this sense of his own unknown is what attracted him to the role of Captain Miller, who for much of Private Ryan is an enigma to his men, and to Dino, a Martin Scorsese film in which Hanks would play Dean Martin to Travolta's Sinatra. "Nobody gets to know me," Martin once told a producer. Does Hanks want it that way too?

We stare at a star as the young Tom watched the sky, seeking not the answer to mysteries but mystery itself. An artist of Hanks' resourcefulness must be working out some primal ache, mustn't he? Maybe not. He could be just Joe Actor, a sphinx with no secret. What's at the center of this perplexingly lovely man? A black hole? A barbecue pit? Or the all-American heart?

Give Tom Hanks the privacy he so fervently seeks, and let him try to relax in the hammock of his achievements. Because we know--don't we, America?--that one secret nags at him. Hanks has to be thinking: If only I'd had some fabulous character flaw, I could've been really big.
--WITH REPORTING BY JEFFREY RESSNER/LOS ANGELES

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