All About Tom Hanks’ First Wife, Susan Dillingham, Amid His Daughter’s Abuse Allegations

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Tom Hanks‘ first wife, Susan Dillingham, had a troubled life before her 2002 death, as was revealed in their daughter’s memoir.

The actress, who went by the stage name Samantha Lewes early in her career, was married to Tom from 1978 until 1985, and welcomed two children together: a son named Colin and a daughter named Elizabeth Anne.

Their 42-year-old daughter, who goes by E.A. Hanks, released a revealing memoir in April 2025, titled The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road. The book she delved into Dillingham’s mysterious upbringing and her own about a childhood filled with “confusion” and “violence,” after allegedly facing abuse at the hands of her Dillingham after her parents separated.

Who Was Susan Dillingham?

Susan Dillingham was an actress who briefly appeared alongside her ex-husband, Tom Hanks, in his sitcom, Bosom Buddies. Dillingham and Tom met in the ’70s while they were both theater students at Sacramento State University. They married in 1978, a year after welcoming their son, Colin. E.A. was born in 1982.

Dillingham and Tom separated in 1985 before finalizing their divorce two years later. In 1988, Tom married his now-wife Rita Wilson, with whom he later welcomed sons Truman and Chet.

Dillingham died in 2002, at age 49, after a battle with lung cancer, a year after she was diagnosed.

E.A. Hanks Claims Dillingham Was Abusive During Her Childhood

In her memoir, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, E.A. claims that Dillingham became abusive and neglectful after separating from the Forrest Gump actor.

In an interview with People ahead of the book’s April 8 release, E.A. said her mom got primary custody of her and older brother Colin while Tom had designated weekend and summer visits. However, she says her mother suddenly moved them from Los Angeles to Sacramento without notifying Tom. “My dad came to pick us up from school and we’re not there,” E.A said. “And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks and he has to track us down.”

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E.A. told People that she believes her mother had undiagnosed bipolar disorder and was prone to episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion. In an excerpt from her memoir, she writes that the decade after her parents’ divorce was filled with “confusion, violence, deprivation, and love.”

“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,” she writes. “The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over the Bible.”

“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,” she continued.

Tom then got primary custody of his teen children, leaving E.A. to visit her mother on weekends and in the summer, but they grew distant. “My senior year of high school, she called to say she was dying,” E.A. writes.

Dillingham Had a Troubled Upbringing

E.A.’s memoir chronicles her six-month road trip on Interstate 10, from L.A. to Palatka, Florida, where her mother’s family once lived. Her journey to uncover more about her mother’s life began after finding papers Dillingham had written about her haunting childhood.

“It wasn’t a journal with dates,” E.A. told People in an April 2 interview, “but more stream of consciousness, spurts of what would occur to her. And then I read her description of her father committing this horrible crime.”

“The crime she describes is witnessing her father rape, murder and cannibalize a little girl,” she said.

“If any part of the red journal is true,” E.A. added, “then my mother never stood a chance.” E.A. said that she never solved the mystery surrounding her grandfather, whom she only met once as a child.

“It’s entirely possible that what she was describing was an obliteration of her own girlhood,” said E.A. of her mother’s writing. “And that what she’s describing actually happened to her. That it felt like murder and being eaten up, and what she’s really describing is abuse at the hands of her father.”

E.A. did meet with her mother’s brother to attempt to find answers and said, “He described a childhood where someone very easily could have fallen through the cracks.”

Dillingham Allegedly Struggled With Her Ex’s Fame

E.A. speculated in her book that Dillingham, who also aspired to be an actress, “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. explained in an interview with Vanity Fair. “She didn’t really have a career, and her ex-husband becoming the Tom Hanks was more insult to injury than significant impediment.”

Tom Allegedly Was ‘Very Happy’ to Divorce Dillingham

Though Tom hasn’t spoken in depth about his marriage to Dillingham, his wife revealed in 2023 that their divorce was a positive experience for him.

During an appearance on the Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi podcast in June 2023, Wilson said Tom turned down the lead role in When Harry Met Sally because he couldn’t relate to the character’s sadness over his divorce.

Wilson said her husband “was going through a divorce and he was very happy to be not married,” unlike the character that was famously played by Billy Crystal. “So he could not understand that a person going through a divorce would (feel) anything other than just like, ‘I’m so happy,'” she joked.

E.A. also credits her father with giving her the courage to write her book about her challenging childhood.  “I’m equally my father’s daughter because he taught me to tell the truth and move forward,” she told People.

She also told Vanity Fair that Tom helped during several steps of the writing process. “Whether it was swapping cars with me, helping me pick out camping gear, or being the first reader,” she said. “The conversation we had once he had read a very early draft was exactly what I needed to hear, which was that I had depicted my mother accurately. This is what it was like to both love and fear her.”

Before you go, click here to see celebrities who were secretly married before they became famous.