HILARY SWANK COVER STORY
LONE STAR
She’s the two-time Oscar winner who is still an outsider in Hollywood. A natural survivor who won’t be beaten into a corner by life’s setbacks. Pierre de Villiers finds out where Hilary Swank gets her fighting spirit
When Hilary Swank was in high school she was once told off for chewing gum. It might seem like the smallest of incidents but, for an actress who has never taken no for an answer, the memory is enough to set her off. “I just didn’t understand some of the rules and I wanted the teachers to explain,” Swank remembers. “I would say: ‘It’s not affecting my work. I just feel like you’re trying to whip me and put me into this box.’”
Since her school days many others have tried to tame Hilary Swank and put her in a box. All have failed. Showing remarkable resilience, Swank, who turns 33 this year, has overcome professional setbacks and personal heartache to emerge as one the finest actresses working today, with two Oscars on the mantelpiece to prove it.
Moreover, she has conquered the film industry the hard way, scrapping to get to the top of the Hollywood Hills without a ride from well connected friends or family. Because of the nature of her ascent Swank has, to some extent, remained an outsider in Tinseltown. It’s a feeling she’s well accustomed to.
“What drew me to being an actor is that I felt like such an outsider as a kid,” explains the actress, who was born and raised in Bellingham, Washington. “The only place I really felt like I belonged was when I read a book or when I watched a movie. I went somewhere else and I felt like I belonged. I realised how much I loved stories and thought I wanted to be part of telling stories.”
From the trailer park near Lake Samish where Swank was living with her family, Hollywood must have seemed a million miles away. Fortunately, she had the full backing of her mother, Judy. “I can’t say that I ever felt hopeless about my future,” Swank points out. “I had this whole idea of what I wanted to do and I had my mom, who always believed in me.”
Such was the confidence Judy Swank had in her daughter she decided to take an almighty gamble. Shortly after divorcing her husband she packed her bags and, with 15-year-old Hilary in tow, headed for Los Angeles in 1990. With $75 between them the pair initially had to live in their banged-up car until there was enough money for an apartment. While trying to get her career off the ground, Hilary enrolled in South Pasadena High School and Santa Monica City College, feeling completely out of place wherever she studied. “I didn’t feel like I fitted in,” she recalls. “I felt like
I didn’t belong in any way. I felt like I wasn’t understood. I didn’t even feel like the teachers wanted me there.”
Exasperated, Swank quit school to devote her time entirely to acting. “I’m not proud to say that I’m a high school drop-out,” she explains. “I don’t like that that’s something that happened, but it did happen. I think that school and an education are really, really important.”
The upside of leaving school was that Swank could concentrate fully on her career as an actress. Her commitment soon started to pay off. After bit parts in a string of TV shows including Evening Shade and Growing Pains, Swank landed a major movie role, playing Mr Miyagi’s latest apprentice in The Next Karate Kid in 1994, her training in gymnastics coming in handy. When the actress won a role in Beverly Hills 90210 three years later it seemed she might be on her way to greater things. Surprisingly, though, Swank was written out of the series after just 16 episodes.
It would turn out to be a blessing in disguise. With more free time on her hands the actress went for and landed the complex role of transexual Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry. Cutting her hair short and dropping to just 7% body fat, Swank put in an extraordinary performance that won her a Best Actress Oscar in 2000.
Becoming famous overnight came with its own set of problems. “I was an unknown, and I was playing a boy so there was a lot to break out of, especially breaking out of that stereotype,” she says. “What I tried to do was find great movies and to continue to be me.”
Despite keeping busy over the next few years it wasn’t until 2004 that Swank found, in Million Dollar Baby, another film to showcase not only her acting skills but also her ability to undergo great physical change. To play boxer Maggie Fitzgerald the actress beefed up by eating 200g of protein a day. The Academy rewarded Swank with her second Oscar in 2005, something that, for once, made the actress feel like less of an outsider.
“Feeling like an outsider, which most people do, you sit there and feel like at any moment they’re going to go: ‘You! What are you doing here? There’s the door!’” she says with a giggle. “And when I heard people say my name on the radio talking about Million Dollar Baby and saying: ‘It stars Hilary Swank, Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman.’ I was usually like: ‘What? Did they just say my name?’ It’s a really, really surreal thing.”
With her career in rude health, Swank decided to unleash a double whammy on audiences with two releases this spring. First, there’s Freedom Writers – the real life story of inspirational teacher Erin Gruwell – followed by thriller The Reaping, in which she plays a former missionary investigating a small town hit by Biblical plagues.
As the actress started work on these movies, it seemed that she was flying high. Privately, though, her world was falling apart. Just before filming started on Freedom Writers in 2006, Swank separated from husband Chad Lowe, whom she married in 1997. The fact that she was about to play a woman who went through a divorce because her husband couldn’t share her passion for her profession (teaching troubled students, in the case of the movie) meant that comparisons were inevitable. “I think that women have a really difficult time of having a dream and wanting to follow that dream and not being supported in that,” Swank points out. “It kills you, because this person who is supposed to be sharing your life, – supposedly more than anyone – and is supposed to understand you, is trying to cap you down when you already have enough of that out there in the world.”
Despite the trauma of divorce proceedings, the star remains optimistic about relationships. She is even happy to discuss her plans to have children one day. “As a very young girl I always thought that I wanted kids. I think that having kids is a little bit different than a marriage. You choose to bring kids into the world and you have to live for them in every way.”
Although Swank is clearly bouncing back after the break-up the actress knows that, as a Hollywood star, the odds are against her when it comes to finding the right balance between private and personal life.
It’s a challenge she is tackling like any other obstacle in her life – with grit, determination and a positive attitude that’s so infectious it makes you believe just about anything is possible. “Being single has been a big change but I’m actually in a new relationship now,” she enthuses. “I’m optimistic about finding the right balance in my life to the point that most people tag me as naïve.”
The metamorphosis of Hilary Swank
| At the Screen Actors Guild Awards, March 2000 Still sporting the boyish physique of Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry, Hilary grabs the pinkest dress she can find. She won her first Academy Award for the role. |  |
| Winning an Oscar for Million Dollar Baby, February 2005 Hilary’s toned boxer’s body is proof of just how hard she worked for her statuette. |  |
| Getting papped in NYC, March 2005 With long hair and more womanly curves, Hilary wears a simple sweater and jeans for a walk in New York. |  |
| In Paris, February 2007 Hilary is bang on trend for spring in a ’60s-style mini dress with pockets and a monochrome pattern, leaving the fashion police free to pursue Britney. |  |
Photos: Rex Features / Getty / Camerapress / Corbis Outline
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