NEWSRita Wilson Is Like 'My Other Mother,' Tom Hanks' Daughter E.A. Gushes About Her Mixed Family
Tom Hanks' daughter E.A. Hanks gushed over Rita Wilson, calling her 'my other mother.'
Tom Hanks’ daughter E.A. opened up about her relationship with her stepmother, Rita Wilson.
E.A. Hanks said Rita Wilson is 'not really a stepmother' to her.
"When I say my parents, I really mean my dad and Rita, because they've been together since before I can really remember. They've been together since I was 4 or 5," E.A. told People, noting Rita’s “not really a stepmother” but “my other mother.”
E.A. went on to share similar sentiments about her siblings.
"And my younger brothers, I don't think I've ever really referred to them as my half brothers, which I guess they technically are," she shared. "Because Chester was five when I moved to Los Angeles and Truman had just been born ... So neither of them remember a time when I didn't live with them. I think we're all kind of in that era of trying to get our own thing going and individuate and all of that, but we're a posse."
E.A. Hanks said Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have been together since 'before she can remember.'
Tom met Rita on the set of the hit show Bosom Buddies in 1981 while he was still married to E.A.’s mother, Susan Dillingham. Once he divorced Susan in 1985, he began dating Rita in 1986.
E.A., whose memoir entitled The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road is out on April 8, follows her six-month road trip on Interstate 10, from L.A. to Palatka, Fla., where she journeyed to learn more about her mother’s family and her complicated past.
In a conversation with Vanity Fair, E.A. addressed why she took the road trip, stating, “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.”
- Rita Wilson Sets the Record Straight on Viral Video of Herself & Husband Tom Hanks 'Scolding' a Man at the Cannes Film Festival
- Debbie Reynolds Handled Her Husband and Elizabeth Taylor's Affair 'With Grace,' Says Her Son: 'My Mother Was a Classy Person'
- Beverly D'Angelo Admits Coparenting Twins With Ex Al Pacino Lead to 'a Deeper Kind of Intimacy'
Want OK! each day? Sign up here!
Tom Hanks started dating Rita Wilson after divorcing Susan Dillingham.
“Years later, around 2017, I had my fill of writing recaps for the web and movie scripts that were never going to be made, so I was hungry,” she continued. “For years, I was pitching this story about the 10 as a series of political landscapes: the Land of Immigration, the Land of Rising Water. The idea was that the landscapes covered by the 10 (the Southwest, Texas, and the Deep South) are where all these cataclysmic issues are coming to a head. That’s true, but it wasn’t enough to sell the story. You’ll be shocked to hear no one took the bait. It just so happened that in the midst of all this, I was moving again and decided to go through those two plastic bins.”
E.A. Hanks' new book releases on April 8.
E.A. shared she found a journal of her mother’s in which she “describes witnessing her father — whom she never, ever spoke about — commit a horrible crime.” “The moment I read it,” she added, “I knew I had stumbled onto what was missing from my pitch, and the thing I had learned from writing all those scripts: You have to have skin in the game. You need personal stakes. Once I had that missing puzzle piece, I was on my way. Literally.”
