Samantha Lewes: A Quiet Life Beyond the Spotlight

Samantha Lewes. She spent a year teaching school children in England before she ever set foot on a film set. She chose a stage name and reinvented herself from Susan Jane Dillingham into Samantha Lewes — a woman built, it seemed, for the spotlight. She shared a screen with the man who would become America’s most beloved actor. And then, quietly, she vanished from the story entirely. Not because she wasn’t there. But because the world had already decided whose story it was.

The life of Samantha Lewes is not a footnote in Tom Hanks’ biography. It’s a story of its own — one of inherited trauma, crushed ambition, a marriage that buckled under the weight of rising fame, and a death that came decades too early. Her daughter finally told that story in 2025. And it’s more complicated than anyone expected.

Quick Facts

Detail	Information
Birth Name	Susan Jane Dillingham
Stage Name	Samantha Lewes
Date of Birth	November 29, 1952
Place of Birth	San Diego, California, USA
Death	March 12, 2002 (aged 49)
Cause of Death	Bone cancer (spread to lungs and brain)
Occupation	Actress
Known For	Bosom Buddies (1981), Mr. Success (1984)
Spouse	Tom Hanks (m. 1978 – div. 1987)
Children	Colin Hanks (b. 1977), Elizabeth “E.A.” Hanks (b. 1982)
Education	California State University, Sacramento

Where She Came From

Susan Jane Dillingham was born on November 29, 1952, in San Diego, California, to John Raymond Dillingham and Harriet Hall Dillingham. Her father wasn’t a Hollywood type. He was a U.S. Marine who served across three wars — World War II, Korea, and Vietnam — accumulating 26 years of military service and earning the Purple Heart. Her mother, Harriet, taught elementary English. It was a disciplined, itinerant household shaped entirely by the rhythms of military life.

She and her brother David changed schools constantly because of their father’s postings. By the time she was ten, Susan had lived in California, Hawaii, Florida, and Virginia. Her parents separated in the early 1960s, and she was raised by her mother from that point on. After the split, Harriet relocated the family to Northern California to be closer to her own brother.

Stability was something Susan had to build for herself. She didn’t grow up with it. What she did grow up with was a hunger for something she could call her own — and somewhere along the way, that something became the stage. She spent a year as an exchange teacher in England before committing to an acting career. That’s the detail most profiles skip entirely. Before she was Samantha Lewes, she was a young woman standing at a blackboard overseas, trying to figure out who she was.

She chose a stage name when she enrolled at California State University, Sacramento to study theater. Susan Dillingham became Samantha Lewes. The name change wasn’t just professional. It was a declaration.

The Turning Point

Two hurt people found each other in a Sacramento acting class. That’s the most honest way to put it. Their daughter E.A. Hanks later reflected on the connection between her parents: her father had been traumatized by his own fractured childhood and a revolving door of stepparents, and her mother carried wounds of her own. As E.A. put it, their love was two hurt kids trying to dig out of a well together.

Tom Hanks was 21. Samantha was 25. The young couple had real financial troubles early on, sometimes surviving on very little. Their son Colin arrived in November 1977, a year before the wedding. They married in 1978 — young, in love, and very much figuring it out as they went.

In 1979, Hanks moved the family to New York City, where he began establishing himself as a comedian and actor. Samantha followed. She always followed. And that, in retrospect, would become the quiet fault line in their marriage — one person’s life was expanding while the other’s contracted around it.

The Career She Tried to Build

Samantha wasn’t just along for the ride. She had her own ambitions, her own talent, her own reasons for being in that Sacramento theater program. She got a shot at proving it.

In 1981, she appeared as a waitress in a season-one episode of Bosom Buddies, the ABC sitcom that was making her husband into somebody. The episode was called “Cahoots.” Samantha got one scene, one credit. It was something. It wasn’t enough.

In 1984, she was cast as a customer in the TV film Mr. Success — a story, almost cruelly, about a man who severs all ties with his family in the pursuit of a career. Her credit list ends there. Two productions. A handful of scenes. A career that stalled just as her husband’s took flight.

Tom’s film Splash also opened in 1984. It was a massive hit. The trajectory of his fame after that point was steep and irreversible. Samantha’s daughter would later reflect on what that moment cost her mother. E.A. said in an interview that Samantha felt his stature in the world obliterated her and any chance she had at continuing her stage career — that her ex-husband becoming the Tom Hanks was more insult to injury than significant impediment.

She never remarried. She never found another stage. She had two screen credits and a surname she’d invented for herself, and neither was enough to outrun what was coming.

Marriage, Separation, and a Life Restructured

The couple separated in 1985. Tom Hanks later accounted for the breakdown, saying he was simply too young and insecure for marriage. He was 23, he said, and his son Colin was already two years old when he married. He wasn’t ready for those responsibilities.

He also said something that carried real weight: a broken marriage meant sentencing his own kids to the same feelings he’d had at their age. He knew exactly what he was doing, even as he couldn’t stop himself from doing it.

Their divorce was finalized in 1987. Samantha received primary custody of both children. Then something shifted in her. At some point after the settlement, she relocated with the children from Los Angeles to Sacramento without telling Tom. E.A. later wrote that her father came to pick them up from school one day and they simply weren’t there — and hadn’t been for two weeks. He had to track them down.

That move said something about her state of mind. She was pulling her children close and pulling the world away at the same time.

Tom married Rita Wilson in 1988, just a year after the divorce was finalized. He was already moving forward. Samantha, in Sacramento, was standing still.

The Private Struggles

What happened in that Sacramento house is the most contested and painful part of Samantha Lewes’ story. Her daughter spent years trying to understand it — and in April 2025, she published what she found.

In E.A.’s memoir The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, she describes being hit, shaken, and at times locked in closets. She writes that Samantha let the home deteriorate — the refrigerator frequently empty or filled with spoiled food — while she spent long hours in bed reading the Bible. E.A. describes her mother’s unraveling as something that moved in stages: the screaming got worse, the food got more inconsistent, the ability to hold it together in public disappeared faster and faster.

E.A. believes her mother may have experienced undiagnosed bipolar disorder, marked by extreme paranoia and episodes of delusion. She never received a formal diagnosis. And crucially, E.A. offers something unusual in a memoir — context for her mother’s behavior, not just condemnation of it.

While going through Samantha’s personal papers after her death, E.A. found a handwritten journal — what she describes as a red journal — in which her mother had written about her own childhood. The writing described witnessing her father commit a crime of staggering violence against a young girl. E.A. could not verify the account. She also acknowledged it’s possible the writing was a distortion of Samantha’s own trauma rather than a literal memory. But she said plainly: if any part of the red journal is true, her mother never stood a chance.

When E.A. was 14, Samantha struck her in the face. That incident became the breaking point. Tom Hanks eventually gained full custody of his daughter. E.A. hadn’t told her father what was happening at home before that moment. She described herself as her mother’s protector, the keeper of secrets. Children protect the parents who hurt them. That’s the part that doesn’t make headlines.

The Illness and the End

Bone cancer doesn’t announce itself gently. Samantha’s diagnosis came through a routine checkup. By the time it was found, it had already begun spreading. When Tom Hanks learned of her condition, he reportedly arranged for her to see top cancer specialists and covered the cost of her care. Whatever their history, he didn’t abandon her when it mattered most.

E.A. wrote about a photograph taken around the time of her high school graduation — likely the year Samantha was first diagnosed. In it, Samantha stands between her two children, Colin and E.A., with Tom and Rita flanking them on either side. E.A. described the image with a single sentence: in it, her mother’s best wig is slightly askew.

There’s an entire life in that sentence.

The cancer spread to her lungs and then to her brain. Samantha Lewes died on March 12, 2002, in Sacramento, California. She was 49 years old. She had never remarried. She had spent nearly two decades in a city she hadn’t chosen, living a life that hadn’t gone the way she’d planned.

She died the same year the youngest of Tom’s children with Rita Wilson started high school. The world kept moving.

What Her Children Became

Colin Hanks built a real career. He appeared in Orange County, King Kong, and the Jumanji franchise, among many other films and television projects. He married a woman named Samantha Bryant, and they have two daughters — Charlotte and Olivia. Colin carries his mother’s name in his legal credit: Colin Lewes Hanks. He never dropped it. That choice says something.

E.A. Hanks became a writer. She published work in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Vanity Fair. She had a brief uncredited role in Forrest Gump as a child — a school bus girl on set with her father. She processed a complicated childhood, a complicated mother, and a complicated inheritance, and turned it into a book that The Washington Post described as vibrantly alive with vulnerability and courageous honesty.

Tom Hanks responded publicly when The 10 was released in April 2025. He said he wasn’t surprised that his daughter had the curiosity and the courage to examine something she was so honest about. He offered four words that carry their own kind of weight: we all come from cracked lives.

He didn’t defend Samantha. He didn’t condemn her either. He just told the truth.

The Controversies That Found Her Posthumously

It’s worth being honest about something: the allegations in E.A.’s memoir are serious. Physical violence. Neglect. Paranoid episodes. Food deprivation. These aren’t soft accusations. And Samantha Lewes cannot respond to any of them — she has been dead for more than two decades.

E.A. met with her mother’s brother while researching the book. He described Samantha’s childhood as one where someone very easily could have fallen through the cracks. That framing doesn’t excuse anything. But it does locate the behavior in something larger than one woman’s individual failures.

There’s also a factual discrepancy worth noting honestly: some sources list Samantha’s cause of death as bone cancer, others as lung cancer. The most detailed accounts suggest she was initially diagnosed with bone cancer, which then spread to her lungs and brain. This inconsistency appears across multiple sources and has never been definitively resolved in the public record.

What’s clear is this: Samantha Lewes was not a villain in her own story. She was a person who had been badly hurt, who hurt others in turn, who raised two children that both found ways to love her anyway. That is the most human thing about her.

Conclusion

Samantha Lewes never had a Wikipedia page during her lifetime. She has a partial one now — assembled from her daughter’s memories and two television credits from the early 1980s. Her legacy isn’t a filmography. It’s more complicated and more real than that.

She raised Colin Hanks, who carries her surname into every screen credit of his career. She raised E.A. Hanks, who turned childhood pain into something that moved thousands of readers. She was the first person who loved Tom Hanks into something resembling a family — before he was mature enough to hold one together.

And she was Susan Jane Dillingham before she was anyone’s anything. A girl from San Diego, the daughter of a decorated Marine and a schoolteacher, raised across four states, who traveled to England to teach, came home, walked into a theater program, fell in love, had two children, lost her marriage, lost her footing, and then lost the one thing no one can negotiate with: time.

She was 49. Her best wig was slightly askew. And the people she’d raised were standing on either side of her, holding her up.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Samantha Lewes

1. What was Samantha Lewes’ real name?

Her birth name was Susan Jane Dillingham. She adopted “Samantha Lewes” as a professional stage name when she began pursuing an acting career at Sacramento State University.

2. How did Samantha Lewes and Tom Hanks meet?

They met as fellow theater students at California State University, Sacramento in the mid-1970s. Their friendship became romantic, and their son Colin was born in 1977, a year before they married.

3. How many children did Samantha Lewes have?

Two. Colin Lewes Hanks, born November 24, 1977, and Elizabeth Anne Hanks — known publicly as E.A. Hanks — born May 17, 1982. Both have pursued careers in entertainment and writing.

4. What movies or TV shows was Samantha Lewes in?

Her screen credits were limited to two productions: a guest appearance in one episode of the ABC sitcom Bosom Buddies in 1981, and a supporting role in the TV film Mr. Success in 1984.

5. Why did Samantha Lewes and Tom Hanks divorce?

They separated in 1985 and finalized their divorce in 1987. Tom Hanks publicly attributed the breakdown to marrying too young and not being ready for the responsibilities of a family at 21.

6. What happened to Samantha after the divorce?

She received primary custody of both children and relocated from Los Angeles to Sacramento. Her mental health reportedly declined in the years that followed, a period her daughter documented extensively in her 2025 memoir.

7. Did Tom Hanks help Samantha Lewes when she was ill?

Multiple accounts indicate that when Tom Hanks learned of her cancer diagnosis, he arranged and reportedly covered the cost of her treatment by top specialists.

8. How did Samantha Lewes die?

She died on March 12, 2002, in Sacramento, California, from bone cancer that spread to her lungs and brain. She was 49 years old.

9. What did E.A. Hanks reveal in her 2025 memoir?

E.A.’s memoir The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, published April 8, 2025, describes a childhood marked by emotional and physical abuse at her mother’s hands. She also reveals the discovery of her mother’s personal journals, which contained disturbing accounts of Samantha’s own childhood trauma.

10. Did Tom Hanks respond to his daughter’s memoir?

Yes. He expressed support for E.A.’s honesty and said he wasn’t surprised by her courage in examining a difficult chapter of their shared family history.

11. Did Samantha Lewes ever remarry?

No. She remained unmarried after her divorce from Tom Hanks until her death in 2002.

12. What is the red journal referenced in E.A.’s memoir?

It refers to personal writings E.A. discovered among her mother’s belongings, in which Samantha described alleged crimes committed by her own father. E.A. was unable to verify the accounts and acknowledged the writings may have been a distorted expression of her mother’s childhood trauma.

13. Why did Samantha move the children to Sacramento without telling Tom?

Samantha never offered a public explanation. E.A.’s memoir suggests the move was connected to her deteriorating mental state following the divorce, though the full reasoning remains unknown.

14. What is Colin Hanks doing now?

Colin continues to work as an actor with an active career in film and television. He is married with two daughters and still uses the name Colin Lewes Hanks in his professional credits.

15. How old would Samantha Lewes be if she were alive today?

She would have been 72 years old as of May 2026.