Despite a handful of terrific roles to her credit, Hilary Swank is hardly one of the supernovae in the Hollywood firmament, yet she is a member of a very exclusive club as a double winner of the Oscar for best actress.
She picked up the awards in 1999 for Boys Don’t Cry and in 2004 for Million Dollar Baby. Excluding Katharine Hepburn, who won a record four times, these triumphs put Swank among only 11 actresses to have a matching pair of best-actress statuettes (see also Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Jodie Foster, Glenda Jackson, Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor and the oldest living Oscar winner, centenarian Luise Rainer).
However, with her latest performance in Conviction (released here on January 14), Swank could conceivably find herself in the club for three-times winners, with currently no members at all.
The film is based on the true story of Betty Anne Waters, a single mother and high-school drop-out, who puts herself through law school so that she can quash the murder conviction that put her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) behind bars.
On its US release, Swank’s intense performance was instantly dubbed “Oscar bait”, and, inevitably, comparisons were made with Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich (2000), which won Julia Roberts the best-actress Oscar.
Intriguingly, if Swank is nominated, there’s a strong possibility that she will be up against Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right, in which Bening plays half of a lesbian couple whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of the (previously anonymous) biological father of their children. Swank beat Bening (American Beauty, Being Julia) on the way to both her Oscars.
And, if Bening’s co-star Julianne Moore finds herself nominated (which could well happen), she too might wonder at the coincidence: in 1999, her performance in The End of the Affair was also trumped by Swank’s.
The film is based on the true story of Betty Anne Waters, a single mother and high-school drop-out, who puts herself through law school so that she can quash the murder conviction that put her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) behind bars.
On its US release, Swank’s intense performance was instantly dubbed “Oscar bait”, and, inevitably, comparisons were made with Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich (2000), which won Julia Roberts the best-actress Oscar.
Intriguingly, if Swank is nominated, there’s a strong possibility that she will be up against Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right, in which Bening plays half of a lesbian couple whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of the (previously anonymous) biological father of their children. Swank beat Bening (American Beauty, Being Julia) on the way to both her Oscars.
And, if Bening’s co-star Julianne Moore finds herself nominated (which could well happen), she too might wonder at the coincidence: in 1999, her performance in The End of the Affair was also trumped by Swank’s.
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