Samantha Lewes came back into public conversation in 2025 — not because of anything she did, but because of what her daughter finally chose to say. The memoir The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, written by Elizabeth Anne Hanks and published in April 2025, cracked open a chapter of Lewes’ life that had never been examined publicly. It was complicated, painful, and entirely human. Lewes — born Susan Jane Dillingham, died March 12, 2002 — spent most of her adult life in the shadow of her famous ex-husband. Her own story was quieter, messier, and more interesting than the footnote she was often reduced to.
Quick Bio
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Real Name | Susan Jane Dillingham |
| Stage Name | Samantha Lewes |
| Born | November 29, 1952, San Diego, California |
| Died | March 12, 2002, Sacramento, California |
| Age at Death | 49 |
| Cause of Death | Bone cancer (spread to lungs and brain) |
| Education | California State University, Sacramento |
| Married | January 24, 1978 (to Tom Hanks) |
| Divorced | March 19, 1987 |
| Children | Colin Hanks (b. 1977), Elizabeth Anne Hanks (b. 1982) |
| Acting Credits | Bosom Buddies (1981), Mr. Success (1984) |
| Estimated Net Worth | $1 million–$15 million (unverified; widely disputed) |
| Burial | East Lawn Memorial Park, Sacramento |
A Name That Was Never Really Hers
Samantha Lewes Susan Jane Dillingham chose the name Samantha Lewes for her acting career. It was a professional decision — clean, memorable, marketable. But it also meant that the woman most people would come to know was always slightly obscured behind a persona, even in her own story.
Her father, John Raymond Dillingham, was a US Marine Corps veteran who earned the Purple Heart across 26 years of service — spanning World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. Her mother, Harriet Hall Dillingham taught elementary school English and spent a year as an exchange teacher in England. These were not Hollywood parents. These were people shaped by duty and education.
Her parents separated in 1962, when Susan was about ten. Her mother raised her and her siblings alone after that, moving the family through California, Hawaii, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina before eventually settling in Northern California to be near family. That kind of childhood — constant relocation, a fractured home, no stable geography — plants certain things in a person.
Sacramento, Acting School, and the Young Man She Would Marry
Susan Dillingham enrolled at California State University, Sacramento, drawn toward the performing arts. That is where she met Tom Hanks, a young man several years her junior with obvious charisma and zero industry connections.
They fell in together the way young people do — shared ambition, shared classes, shared poverty. By early 1977, before they were married, she was pregnant with their first child. Colin Lewes Hanks was born on November 24, 1977, in Sacramento.
The couple was barely getting by. Tom Hanks would later describe those years with candor — young, financially stretched, not ready for what adult life actually demanded. They married on January 24, 1978, with Colin already a few months old.
The Acting Career She Had, and the One She Didn’t
As Samantha Lewes, she made two notable screen appearances. The first came in 1981, when she appeared in an episode of Bosom Buddies — the ABC sitcom that featured Tom Hanks as a lead. The episode was titled “Cahoots.” The second came in 1984 with the TV film Mr. Success, directed by Jack Shea, in which she played a customer.
Some sources also reference guest appearances on Family Ties and St. Elsewhere, though these are less consistently documented.
Her screen credits, viewed plainly, were minimal. She had the training and the theater background to pursue more. But acting careers rarely develop on schedule, and by the mid-1980s her marriage was deteriorating, her children were young, and Tom Hanks was becoming famous while she was managing the household in the background.
She stopped pursuing acting and never returned to it.
What the Marriage Actually Looked Like
On the surface, theirs was a story of young love — college sweethearts, early struggles, two kids, and a career that eventually rewarded one of them enormously. Below the surface, it was considerably more complicated.
Tom Hanks has spoken honestly about his state of mind during those years. He told the Daily Express that he was “too young and insecure for marriage,” adding that he was 23 when they married and Colin was already two years old. He characterized himself as unready for those responsibilities.
The couple separated in 1985. The divorce was finalized on March 19, 1987. Tom Hanks married Rita Wilson on April 30, 1988 — thirteen months later. Some accounts suggest his developing feelings for Wilson contributed to the end of the first marriage, though he has not confirmed this explicitly.
Lewes retained primary custody of both children.
Net Worth: What the Record Actually Supports
This is where honesty matters most. The figure of $15 million appears repeatedly across websites discussing Samantha Lewes’ net worth. Treat that number with caution.
No financial filing, court record, or verified estate document has been cited to support it. The figure seems to have originated in a small number of entertainment biography websites and then circulated without scrutiny.
What can be reasonably constructed from the documented record:
Her acting career generated modest income at best. Two credited screen roles across four years, with no lead billing, would not have built substantial independent wealth. She did not produce, direct, or hold any reported business interests after her acting years ended.
Post-divorce, she lived in Sacramento — not a city associated with lavish entertainment industry lifestyles. Her new manager and financial support came partly from a divorce settlement with Tom Hanks, whose career was ascending rapidly through the mid-to-late 1980s. Splash came out in 1984. Big released in 1988. By the time their divorce settled, he was one of Hollywood’s most bankable actors.
A realistic reading: her net worth at any point likely reflected alimony and settlement income more than independent earnings. The $1 million to $3 million range is more defensible than $15 million. The higher figure appears to be speculation, not calculation.
After the Divorce: Sacramento, Silence, and Struggle
Lewes took the children north to Sacramento. The move happened without Tom Hanks’ prior knowledge. Elizabeth Anne Hanks writes in her 2025 memoir that her father arrived at their school to pick them up one day and found they simply weren’t there. They had been gone for two weeks. He had to track them down.
What followed, by Elizabeth’s account, was a childhood that started orderly and eroded into something far more difficult. The house in Sacramento began well — a white house with columns, a pool in the backyard, a girl’s bedroom decorated with pictures of horses. Then things shifted.
Elizabeth describes refrigerators stocked with expired food. A mother who retreated increasingly to her bedroom. A backyard that became unusable. A home that filled with cigarette smoke. She writes that her mother’s behavior escalated into what she characterizes as emotional and physical violence — pushing, shaking, hair-pulling, and on at least one or two occasions, being locked in a closet.
Elizabeth also recounts her mother telling her there were men hiding in the closet waiting to harm them while they slept. She frames her mother’s condition as consistent with bipolar disorder with episodes of extreme paranoia — though she acknowledges Samantha was never formally diagnosed.
The Public Samantha vs. The Private One
Publicly, Samantha Lewes was invisible by the 1990s. She gave no interviews. She appeared in no films. She maintained no profile. She was, to the extent the world thought of her at all, simply “Tom Hanks’ ex-wife” — a footnote to a much larger story.
In private, she was a woman apparently fighting herself as much as her circumstances. Elizabeth’s memoir is the only detailed account of what that life looked like from inside the house. It is not a condemnation. Elizabeth is careful to portray her mother’s complexity — someone capable of love and beauty, and also capable of harming the people she loved.
Tom Hanks, speaking to Access Hollywood after the memoir’s release, was measured and supportive. He did not contradict his daughter. He said simply: “We all come from checkered, cracked lives, all of us.”
That statement carries a great deal of weight, coming from a man who spent decades being cast as the moral center of American cinema.
The Custody Shift Nobody Talked About
Elizabeth Hanks moved out of her mother’s house and into her father’s Los Angeles home at around age 12 or 14 — accounts vary slightly. She was living full-time with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson by the time she was in her early teens.
She describes the decision with unusual emotional complexity. Moving in with her father meant safety. It also meant leaving her mother. And despite everything she has documented about that household, she writes that being away from her mother was harder than being away from her father — who was, by then, one of the most famous people in the world.
That detail says something true about how children love their parents. Logic and safety do not override attachment.
Colin, her older brother, apparently navigated a different version of the same household and emerged with a different emotional ledger.
Tom Hanks, the Diagnosis, and What He Did
When Samantha Lewes was diagnosed with bone cancer in the early 2000s — discovered during a routine checkup — the cancer had already spread beyond a manageable point. By the time she was examined, it had reached her lungs and, doctors believed, her brain.
Tom Hanks, despite being divorced from her for fifteen years, responded. He arranged for her to see top specialists. The specialists found nothing curative left to offer. The cancer had too much ground by then.
She died on March 12, 2002, in Sacramento, California. She was 49 years old. Elizabeth was 19.
Whatever the marriage had been, whatever the custody years had looked like, Tom Hanks’ response to her diagnosis speaks to something that endures beyond legal dissolution. He hired the best help available. That is a fact.
Her Children: The Most Visible Part of Her Legacy
Colin Hanks, born November 24, 1977, became a working actor whose career includes Orange County (2002), King Kong (2005), the Jumanji series, Fargo (TV, 2014), and The Offer (2022). He is married to Samantha Bryant and has two daughters, Charlotte and Olivia.
Elizabeth Anne Hanks, born May 17, 1982 in Burbank, became a writer and journalist — contributing to Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post before publishing her memoir in April 2025. She had a small non-speaking role in Forrest Gump (1994) as a schoolgirl on the bus. Her memoir received generally positive reviews, with The Washington Post calling it “vibrantly alive with vulnerability and courageous honesty.”
Samantha Lewes raised two people who became publicly accomplished. That is not nothing.
Do You Know About Linwood Simon
The Net Worth Question: Final Honest Assessment
Samantha Lewes’ net worth at the time of her death in 2002 was never publicly disclosed through any primary document. The range most credible sources acknowledge is between $1 million and $15 million — a span wide enough to be nearly meaningless.
The factors that would have shaped her financial standing:
- Divorce settlement from Tom Hanks: By 1987, Hanks was a rising major star. Any settlement would have reflected his earning trajectory, though specifics have never been published.
- Alimony and child support: Lewes raised two children in Sacramento largely on post-divorce support. The terms are private.
- Acting income: Minimal. Two credited roles, both in the early 1980s, do not generate lasting royalty income.
- No documented business interests or investments.
A defensible estimate, grounded in what is actually known: somewhere between $1 million and $3 million, built almost entirely from divorce settlement and support income rather than independent professional achievement. The $15 million figure is almost certainly inflated — possibly derived from confusion with her children’s net worths or speculative extrapolation from Tom Hanks’ wealth.
She was not wealthy by entertainment industry standards. She lived quietly, in a mid-sized city, out of the public eye, and died at 49 without ever re-entering the professional world she had briefly touched.
Final Words
Samantha Lewes was a real person — not a tabloid character, not a cautionary tale, not merely a contrast to show how much better Tom Hanks’ second marriage worked out. She was a woman from a military family who grew up moving constantly, found her way to a university stage, fell in love with a man who became one of the most recognized actors in history, raised two children largely alone, battled something inside herself that nobody fully diagnosed, and died before she was fifty.
Her daughter’s memoir in 2025 gave her back some of her complexity. It described someone difficult and loving and frightened and capable — all at the same time. That portrait, complicated as it is, is fairer to who she actually was than any clean summary could be.
She is buried at East Lawn Memorial Park in Sacramento, California. The city where she spent the majority of her adult life and the city where she died.
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