‘Saving Private Ryan’ Star Tom Hanks Attends 80th D-Day Anniversary Event In France

Tom Hanks and filmmaker Steven Spielberg attended a special ceremony in Normandy at the American Cemetery above Omaha Beach to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

The Saving Private Ryan star appeared emotional as he watched American D-Day Veterans receive France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur, from President Emmanuel Macron.

“When I look around here today, I see boys in high school, early in college, doing the right thing,” Hanks told NBC News upon arrival at the event. 

The day marked the massive military operation in which 156,000 men, 7,000 ships and 10,000 vehicles attacked German forces in Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Spielberg and Hanks collaborated on Saving Private Ryan in 1998. The film told the story of the invasion of Normandy and won Spielberg an Academy Award for Best Director.

“If we pulled this off in the right way – and it stood the test of time – this was going to stand in, in some small way, for what those kids experienced at 6:30 in the morning on June 6, 1944,” Spielberg told NBC News in 2019.

“If we ever forget that it was a bunch of individuals that went over, and they all had names like Ernie, and Buck and Robert – that’s when we’ve done a bad job of being citizens of the world, I think,” Hanks added.