Hilary Swank

Hilary Swank is an American actress and producer whose three-decade career has produced two Best Actress Academy Awards — 2000 for Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry and 2005 for Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby — making her one of the most-acclaimed American screen actresses of the early 21st century. She was born Hilary Ann Swank on July 30, 1974, in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her father Stephen Michael Swank was a U.S. National Guard chief master sergeant and her mother Judy Kay Clough was a homemaker. The family relocated to Bellingham, Washington, when Hilary was six, and to Los Angeles when she was 15.

Her breakthrough came at age 17 with her 1992 first feature-film appearance in Buy & Cell (1989, although her 1992 first major role came in the Disney film The Next Karate Kid opposite Pat Morita). Her 1997–1998 NBC TV soap-opera role on Beverly Hills, 90210 — across 11 episodes as Carly Reynolds — was among her early-career stepping stones. The 1998 firing from Beverly Hills, 90210 after 11 episodes preceded her 1999 lead role in Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry.

Her 1999 lead role as Brandon Teena in Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry — the biographical drama based on the 1993 Nebraska real-life rape and murder of transgender man Brandon Teena — won her the 2000 Best Actress Academy Award at age 25 (after she was paid only $3,000 for the role). The performance has been continuously cited as one of the defining American transgender-representation screen performances of the late 20th century.

Her 2004 lead role as boxer Maggie Fitzgerald in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (opposite Eastwood and Morgan Freeman) — for which she trained for six months and gained 19 pounds of muscle — won her the 2005 Best Actress Academy Award. The film won four Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor — Freeman). Her subsequent film career has produced Iron Jawed Angels (2004), Freedom Writers (2007), P.S. I Love You (2007), Conviction (2010), and the 2022 ABC TV legal drama series Alaska Daily. She married actor Chad Lowe in 1997 (divorced 2007); she married entrepreneur Philip Schneider in 2018, and the couple has twin children born in April 2023.

Her name Hilary derives from the Latin Hilarius meaning "cheerful." Hilary was a popular American girls' name through the 1970s and 1980s.