Hilary Swank ‘has the craft’ to back up Oscars

When an actress wins an Academy Award, it catapults her to a new universe. When she wins two, she gets into the VIP room in that new universe. Hilary Swank has two Oscars, for her work in “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby,” which means that in the distaff hierarchy of movie stardom she ranks somewhere between Katharine Hepburn (four Oscars) and Helen Hunt (one). Swank has as many Oscars as Meryl Streep.

After winning for the second time in 2005, she said of herself, “I’m just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream.” That girl’s career remains in high gear. She will appear in theaters on Friday as aviatrix Amelia Earhart in “Amelia,” frequently graces the covers of major magazines, and will be honored soon at the Hollywood Film Festival.

She clearly has transcended the trailer park description and then some, yet traces of that persona are present in her two most notable roles. In “Boys Don’t Cry,” she played Brandon Teena, a transgendered person who was eventually raped and murdered. It was a brave and nuanced performance that required her to step into unfamiliar territory. In “Million Dollar Baby” she was Maggie, a down-on-her-luck waitress with an eye on boxing success.

Yet in those two roles, she played someone with whom she could connect, given her own humble upbringing in Bellingham, Wash., and later Los Angeles. She herself was an outsider with little in the way of resources, longing for a better life.

She has played many other parts, of course, generally to favorable reviews. But Swank, now 35, hasn’t drawn the same level of raves for her other work that she received for the two that provided her with gold statuettes.

“I think she’s very talented,” said Arthur Mendoza, a longtime Los Angeles-based acting teacher who has worked with Salma Hayek and Benicio Del Toro, among many others. “Like so many young actors in her category, she can do something like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and turn around and do the boxing movie, but in between I feel like talented actors are sort of at the mercy of the quality of material, or the quality of the director. They really don’t have the skill to survive a bad script that could use their enhancement. I feel like talent is like Swiss cheese: there are solid parts, and there are the holes.

Video   ‘Amelia’ Hilary Swank stars as legendary American pilot Amelia Earhart, who disappeared while attempting to fly around the world in 1937.

“You can watch a horrible movie with Anthony Hopkins and he’ll be amazing. That’s because he’s trained. You can watch a cable TV show with Glenn Close and she’ll knock it through the (expletive) roof and take everyone else with her.

“So with what she has, she’s done a great job. But there’s a lot of talent there. I’m interested in seeing how she can take that talent and cultivate it in the future.”

Obviously an actor’s worth is not based solely on Oscars or other awards. Swank has appeared other high-profile roles to considerable acclaim, including a splendid supporting turn in “Insomnia” with Al Pacino and Robin Williams in 2002, and the TV movie “Iron Jawed Angels” in 2004, about the women’s suffrage movement.

Writer-director Richard LaGravenese, an Oscar nominee himself for writing “The Fisher King,” has directed Swank twice, on “Freedom Writers” and “P.S. I Love You.” He said that no matter how she gets to the acting places she needs to get to, she always arrives.

“She has the craft to back it up,” LaGravenese said. “After working with her twice, she’s the girl who nails it on the first or second take. Then if you want to play and explore a little, she’ll jump off and explore, because she already has the tools required to gain an understanding of the character, and the confidence to then go off and explore.

“I don’t know how much is training and how much is instinct. I don’t know that it’s formal training, but I don’t think that characterization matters. It’s a combination of talent and training and instinct. People come in all combinations, and there are great actors and actresses who arrive there in different ways. There isn’t just one way to do it.”

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