(born 1956) Actor/director: Gary Cooper for the 1990s. Hanks’ often childlike comedic persona in the 1980s (Big, 1988) gave way to a “man-next-door” “Americanness” in 1990s movies about baseball, romance, social change, AIDS, space and war. This is not facile—his portrait of a gay lawyer dying of AIDS in Philadelphia (Oscar, 1993) grew powerfully from this everyman association, as well as his acting skills. Meanwhile, Forrest Gump (again, best-actor Oscar, 1994), while immensely popular, evoked an unnervingly passive observation of the American century It remains intriguing to see how this major boxoffice star’s choices intertwine with changing concepts of American life itself. Most recently his focus has been manifest in the Oscar-winning Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Second World War commemorations.