LAKE PLACID, N.Y. (AP) — The real-life New Yorker portrayed by Tom Hanks in his latest Hollywood collaboration with director Steven Spielberg is a New York City-born lawyer who’s buried in the Adirondacks.
Hanks plays James B. Donovan in “Bridge of Spies,” which was released nearly two weeks ago.
Donovan was a 1937 Fordham University graduate who became an insurance lawyer after helping prosecute Nazi war criminals at the end of World War II.
Donovan’s family vacationed in Lake Placid, where he met his future wife, Mary.
In the late 1950s, he defended a Soviet spy captured in New York. A few years later, he negotiated the exchange of the spy for captured U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers and an American student.
Donovan died in 1970. He’s buried in St. Agnes Cemetery in Lake Placid.
