Hilary Swank

Hilary Swank has two Academy Awards for Best Actress and a career that has never behaved like it. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1974, she worked through television in the early nineties, took the lead in The Next Karate Kid, and spent a season on Beverly Hills, 90210 before the part that changed everything.

Boys Don't Cry (1999) is a physical performance in a way that awards narratives tend to flatten. She plays Brandon Teena with a young man's borrowed swagger and a constant low-level vigilance, and the film works because she never lets the second thing disappear behind the first. Million Dollar Baby (2004) asked for something more literal, a fighter's body and a fighter's appetite, and she gave Clint Eastwood a character whose hunger is entirely legible without ever being explained. Both roles won her the Oscar and the Golden Globe for drama.

What she has not had is a run of great parts in between. The films around the peaks are thrillers and issue dramas that borrow her seriousness without giving it much to hold: Insomnia, The Reaping, The Core, Freedom Writers. She moved into producing partly to fix that, backing Amelia, Conviction, You're Not You and What They Had, all of which she also leads. The most interesting recent work sits at the edges: Athena in The Hunt, which lets her be funny and vicious at once, and the frontier drama The Homesman.