Tom Hanks has, we’d reckon, played more real people in movies than most; he’s a go-to Hollywood guy for all sorts of real-world types of a certain age and bearing, from Sully Sullenberger, to Mr. Rogers, to Walt Disney and beyond. And today, Hanks outlived yet another one of his cinematic alter-egos, as NBC News reports that astronaut Jim Lovell, the man Hanks played in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, has died at the age of 97—prompting Hanks to pen a lovely little tribute to Lovell’s memory.
Hanks posted his memorial to his Instagram, in that very Hanksian typewriter font he prefers for such personal missives. It really is a nice little note, so we might as well reprint it verbatim here:
There are people who dare, who dream, and who lead others to the place we would not go on our own. Jim Lovell, who for a long while had gone farther into space and for longer than any other person of our planet, was that kind of guy. His many voyages around Earth and on to so-very-close to the moon were not made for riches or celebrity, but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive—and who better than Jim Lovell to make those voyages. On this night of a full Moon, he passes on—to the heavens, to the cosmos, to the stars. God speed you, on this next voyage, Jim Lovell.
(Is it weird that it makes us happy that Tom Hanks is as addicted to emdashes as we are?)
Born in 1928, Lovell flew on four NASA missions: Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8, and the infamous Apollo 13. (He is also, as Hanks slightly cheekily notes, the only human being to have flown to the moon twice without ever having set foot upon it.) After leaving NASA, Lovell co-wrote a book, Lost Moon, upon which Howard’s Apollo 13 was based; Lovell appears in a cameo in the film. A small crater on the moon was named in his honor in 1970.
