Hilary Swank

Hilary Swank (born July 30, 1974, Lincoln, Nebraska, U.S.) is an American actress who won two best actress Academy Awards, both for roles that were considered uncommonly difficult and courageous—a young transgender man in Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and a female professional boxer in Million Dollar Baby (2004).

Swank spent most of her early childhood in Bellingham, Washington, and, after her parents divorced in 1990, she and her mother moved to Los Angeles so that Swank could pursue her dream of becoming an actress. In the early 1990s she played guest roles on such TV shows as Harry and the Hendersons, Evening Shade, and Growing Pains, and she made her film debut as a high school student in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992).

Swank was a cast member in the short-lived TV sitcom Camp Wilder, and she starred as the title character in The Next Karate Kid (1994). Like her previous movie, it did not do well at the box office. Swank spent one season (1997–98) as a cast member of the popular TV series Beverly Hills 90210 before she was offered the role of Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry. In preparation for the part, Swank spent several weeks living as a man.

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Swank’s next few films—the historical drama The Affair of the Necklace (2001), the thriller Insomnia (2002), and the sci-fi adventure The Core (2003)—were only marginally successful, though she did win praise for her performance as American suffragist Alice Paul in the TV movie Iron Jawed Angels (2004). Lightning struck again, however, when she took on the title role in Clint Eastwood’s boxing melodrama Million Dollar Baby. She transformed herself for the part, working out and gaining some 20 pounds (9 kg) in muscle mass. Swank’s later films include the crime movie The Black Dahlia (2006), the drama Freedom Writers (2007), the romance P.S. I Love You (2007), the Amelia Earhart biopic Amelia (2009), the thriller The Resident (2011), and the western The Homesman (2014).

In 2017 Swank appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s heist comedy Logan Lucky. She was later cast in the anthology TV series Trust (2018), about the family of oil baron J. Paul Getty. Swank also played a woman who returns home to help her family manage its matriarch’s progressing dementia in the drama What They Had (2018). In 2019 she appeared in the sci-fi thriller I Am Mother, which centers on a girl who begins to have doubts about the maternal robot raising her, and the following year in The Hunt, a controversial satire in which conservatives are kidnapped and hunted for sport by wealthy liberals. Swank then played an astronaut in the Netflix series Away (2020). In the thriller Fatale (2020), she portrayed a police detective who involves a one-night stand in an investigation. Swank returned to television for Alaska Daily (2022–23), about a disgraced journalist who joins an Alaskan newspaper, where she looks into the murders of Indigenous women.