Tragic Details About Tom Hanks' Daughter, E.A.

The following article includes mentions of addiction, child abuse, and mental health issues.

Tom Hanks lives a very public life. He's one of the most famous men on the planet, and people are always interested to know more about him. But what people never knew about Tom is the vastly different life that two of his children lived while growing up. Tom has four kids — Colin Hanks, E.A. (short for Elizabeth Anne) Hanks, Chester "Chet" Hanks, and Truman Hanks. Chet and Truman are from Tom's relationship with Rita Wilson, while Colin and E.A. are his from a prior marriage. And the upbringing Colin and E.A. had was incredibly tragic, especially in comparison to Chet and Truman's (though, Chet has also experienced some tragic circumstances).

While Colin hasn't spoken publicly about his childhood, E.A. has come forward with many of the harrowing details, much of which she faced because her mother, Susan Dillingham (aka Samantha Lewes), who struggled in many ways while Colin and E.A. were kids. Take a closer look at the tragic details about Tom Hanks' daughter, E.A. Hanks.

While the stunning Tom Hanks' current marriage to the equally stunning Rita Wilson seems to be as perfect as they come, it took him a couple of tries to find such a good fit. Tom was first married to Susan Dillingham, a woman he'd met in college. Tom and Dillingham were together for about nine years and had two children together, Colin Hanks and E.A. Hanks. "I am a kid from the First (non-famous) Marriage. My only memories of my parents in the same place at the same time are Colin's high school graduation, then my high school graduation. I have one picture of me standing between my parents. In it, my mother's best wig is slightly askew," E.A. said of her parents' relationship in her book, "The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road" (via People).

After Tom and Dillingham got divorced, Colin and E.A. split their time in the Los Angeles area between their parents' homes, but that didn't last long. When E.A. was 5 years old, Dillingham suddenly moved her children from Los Angeles to Sacramento. "My dad came to pick us up from school and we're not there. And it turns out we haven't been there for two weeks and he has to track us down," she wrote. Life for E.A. only got stranger from there.

E.A. Hanks did not have the happiest childhood. Her mother, Susan Dillingham, was abusive in many ways. At first, Dillingham's abuse was not physical, but it soon became so. "She pushed me, shook me, pulled at my hair and locked me in a closet once or twice ... she told me there were men hiding in her closet who were waiting for us to go to sleep to come out and do horrible things," E.A. wrote in her memoir, "The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road" (via Page Six). Eventually, Dillingham's abuse seeped beyond the confines of their home. "I tugged on my mom's sleeve to move her out of the way, and like a provoked snake she hissed and grabbed at my forearm. She squeezed me hard enough that I made a noise, and she got very close to my face. I remember the other woman watching us, her worried expression. It was new for Mom to be this unsettled in public," E.A. said in her book (via E! News).

Fortunately for E.A., she had someone in her corner, her brother, Tom Hanks' oldest son Colin Hanks. When Dillingham ultimately hit her daughter, E.A. detailed the altercation to Colin, and he helped resolve the situation. E.A. eventually shared what had happened to her with her father, Tom Hanks, and Dillingham lost custody, but the abuse went on for years before E.A. was safe.

As noted, E.A. Hanks had an interesting relationship with her mother, Susan Dillingham. "When a friend asks me, 'What was your mom like?' I sometimes wish for an easier answer. It's an uncomfortable truth that if she'd regularly hit me, I could say, 'She was abusive,' and everyone, as the lyrics of one of her favorite records put it, 'would know exactly what I was talking about,'" E.A. wrote in her memoir "The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road" (via E! News). But as Hanks explored in her book, things between the two were very complicated. In addition to being abusive toward Hanks, Dillingham struggled with addiction.

While Dillingham recognized she struggled with addiction and sought help, she also did so in an unhealthy way. E.A. recalled how Dillingham often hosted addiction recovery classes at their home and would allow others who were struggling with addiction to stay at their home with them. Hanks also inadvertently attended many recovery classes as a child. "When I was younger, I understood my mom was an addict, and I had a good grip on what that meant because of all the hours I spent at 12-step programs when I should have been at home with a babysitter," Hanks said in a 2025 interview with Vanity Fair.

While E.A. Hanks' mother, Susan Dillingham, struggled with addiction and clearly confronted it, E.A. believes that Dillingham also unwittingly struggled with mental illness. Since becoming an adult and reflecting on her childhood, E.A. has come to a conclusion on what she believes her mother had. "Saying that my mother was mentally ill, that she was possibly 'bipolar with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion,' makes sense of the nights sitting with her on a blanket in the driveway, my mother sobbing and convinced there were men inside the house, bugging the walls, waiting for us in our bedrooms," E.A. wrote in her book (via E! News).

While Dillingham's undiagnosed mental illness certainly created problems for her family at home, E.A. has lots of empathy for what her mother went through, too. "I can imagine her life from her perspective — her daughter always rolling her eyes, strangers edging away from her in public, relationships that fell apart as quickly as they appeared. It's a life that, yes, strikes me as sad," E.A. told Vanity Fair. The author has also noted that she believes Dillingham had some unresolved feelings toward her ex-husband, Tom Hanks, as Dillingham had also wanted to be an actor, hence her stage name, Samantha Lewes. "In the book, I wonder if she was a 'would-be actress who never recovered from her ex-husband's catastrophic fame' ... She felt that his stature in the world obliterated her and any chance she had at continuing her stage career," E.A. said.

Living with a mother who was struggling with addiction, along with possibly struggling with undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, took a toll on E.A. Hanks in many ways. For example, although the home she lived in was lovely — it had a pool in the backyard — it was far from clean or taken care of, and it only got worse with time. "As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog s*** that you couldn't walk around it, the house stank of smoke. The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not," E.A. wrote in her book, "The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road" (via People).

Some of the issues that E.A. experienced due to her upbringing impacted her well into adulthood, which she didn't realize until years later. For instance, the author shared that she didn't realize the importance of personal hygiene, as her mother never explained to her the importance of healthy daily activities, like brushing her teeth. As a result, E.A. went over a decade without going to the dentist. E.A. also noted, "There should have been more food in the house on a regular basis, that I should have had help with homework, that I needed clean clothes, and that being woken up at three in the morning to hear an impromptu lecture on why yoga was the devil's work did not happen in other houses" (via E! News).

E.A. Hanks had a turbulent childhood, and things in her life didn't become stable until she was a teenager. Because of her parents' custody agreement, after their divorce, E.A. didn't see her father Tom Hanks very much. From the time she was 5 years old, E.A. lived in Northern California, while her father was in Southern California, making it difficult to have a strong relationship with him. It wasn't until E.A. was 14 years old and had hit a breaking point with her mother's abuse that she began living full-time with Tom. "One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade. My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in LA and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer," E.A. said in her memoir of her new living arrangement, per People.

Despite their distance for most of E.A.'s childhood, she has a great relationship with Tom now, just as she does with his wife, Rita Wilson. "When I say my parents, I really mean my dad and Rita, because they've been together since before I can really remember," E.A. told People in April 2025. "Rita's not really a stepmother, she's my other mother." E.A. is also close with her two half-brothers from Tom's second marriage — they were young when E.A. moved in with Tom and Rita, and she sees them more as full siblings than half siblings.

To make life more complex for E.A. Hanks, when she was 19 years old, her mother, Susan Dillingham, died. Dillingham had been diagnosed with bone cancer, and it took her quickly. Upon her death, E.A. dealt with the clerical aftermath, but it took her some time to unpack her emotions. "When my mother died in 2002, about a year after her diagnosis, my older brother, Colin, and I were exhausted. The house went on the market and everything went into storage. I grabbed two huge plastic bins of papers, thinking maybe there would be something interesting in there, but they went straight from a storage unit to collecting dust in my own garage," E.A. said in an interview with Vanity Fair.

Years later, in 2019, when E.A. was 36 years old, she went through the bins that she had been storing in her garage and came across a diary that her mother had written. E.A., who had been wanting to go on this specific physical journey for other reasons, decided to take a road trip across Interstate 10 from California to Florida, just as she had with her mother when she was 14, to uncover more about her mother's past and sort out her own feelings and memories about her childhood. The result of this six-month journey was E.A.'s memoir, "The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road," as well as a deeper understanding of herself, her family, and her country.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, may be the victim of child abuse, or needs help with mental health, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

• The Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

• The Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.