Forrest Gump (character) childhood friend Jennifer Curran, who eventually becomes his wife. Tom Hanks portrayed the character in the film and earned an Academy Award for his performance, while Michael Conner Humphreys portrayed Forrest as a child. In 2008, Forrest Gump was named the 20th greatest movie character of all time by "Empire" magazine. Forrest was born near the small town of Greenbow, Alabama, on June 6, 1944. His father was absent during his life, and his mother said he was "on vacation". His mother named Forrest after their ancestor Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Scotch-Irish American and a noted Confederate general in the
Forrest Gump of the 1960s. Thomas Byers, in a "Modern Fiction Studies" article, called the film "an aggressively conservative film". It has been noted that while Gump follows a very conservative lifestyle, Jenny's life is full of countercultural embrace, complete with drug usage, promiscuity, and antiwar rallies, and that their eventual marriage might be a kind of reconciliation. Jennifer Hyland Wang argued in a "Cinema Journal" article that Jenny's death to an unnamed virus "...symbolizes the death of liberal America and the death of the protests that defined a decade [1960s]." She also notes the film's screenwriter, Eric Roth, when developing the