Happy Birthday Tom Hanks: Some stellar performances by the actor

1993 film 'Philadelphia' was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to acknowledge HIV/AIDS, homosexuality, and homophobia. In the movie, Tom Hanks played a gay lawyer,Andrew Beckett who is an HIV patient. The legal drama also features Denzel Washington and Antonio Banderas, and Hanks bagged an Academy Award for Best Actor at the 66th Academy Awards. 
 

Steven Spielberg 'Catch Me If You Can' had Tom Hanks collabrating for the first time with Leonardo Di Caprio. The film was a huge hit at the box office and collected over $352 million. The movie follows a story of a teenage played by Caprio who worked as a doctor, a lawyer, and as a co-pilot, at the age of  17 and duped people. Frank Abagnale, Jr. became the most successful bank robber in the history of the US. FBI Agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) makes it his prime mission to capture the young man and bring him to justice, but Frank is always one step ahead of him.

The space docudrama, directed by Ron Howard, stars Tom Hanks as 'Apollo 13' commander Jim Lovell. The movie narrates the story of astronauts Lovell, Haise and Swigert of the Apollo 13 moon mission, who get stranded after their spacecraft gets damaged. 

'A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood' is an American drama film inspired by the 1998 article 'Can You Say ... Hero?' by Tom Junod. It depicts story of a journalist for Esquire who is assigned to profile beloved television icon Fred Rogers played by Tom Hanks. 

'Captain Phillips' is the true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama. It was the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in two hundred years.

In 'Splash' a fantasy romantic comedy directed by Ron Howard, Tom played a young boy called Allen who is rescued from drowning by a mermaid. Years later, he returns to the same location, and manages to fall into the sea, and is rescued by the mermaid again.

The American comedy-drama film was based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Winston Groom. The story depicts several decades in the life of Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks), a slow-witted but kind-hearted man from Alabama who witnesses and unwittingly influences several defining historical events in the 20th century in the US. The film was directed by Robert Zemeck.