Tom Hanks has described the loneliness of his “vagabond” childhood on the BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs.
The American actor had to pause to collect himself as he discussed the impact of hearing one of his music choices, Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra – used in 2001: A Space Odyssey – on him as a teenager, after a nomadic childhood with his chef father, Amos, living in 10 houses in five years.
He told the programme’s host, Kirsty Young: “This was the ‘wow’ moment of my life going from a kid trying to figure out what’s interesting in this life to young man yearning to be an artist.
“I started asking myself: ‘How do I find the vocabulary for what’s rattling around in my head?’. Not long after I started going to the American Conservatory theatre by myself to see plays I had no idea even existed.”
Asked by Young what those feelings in his head were, Hanks took a long pause and had to compose himself. “What have you done to me?” he asked an apologetic Young.
“No, it’s all right, because I put too much thought into this list. What it was, it was the vocabulary of loneliness,” he replied.
The Cast Away actor, 59, admitted that his first marriage at 21 to actor Samantha Lewes, which produced children Colin and Elizabeth, had been to “quell the loneliness”.