Hilary Swank Says She and Her Mother Lived out of Their Car Before Her Big Break

Hilary Swank is looking back on the humble beginnings of her career. The Oscar-winning actress, 49, recalled sleeping in her car with her mom Judy when she first came to Hollywood in a new profile with the Wall Street Journal, revealing the lengths they were willing to go to in order to make her acting dreams come true. 

Leaving her Washington high school after her sophomore year, the Ordinary Angels star drove with her mother from Bellingham, Washington, to Los Angeles for a chance at a Hollywood career. Judy, who had recently separated from Swank’s father, slept in the car alongside her daughter as the two embarked on this new life together, the actress recalled.

“I began the process of breaking into the business. In LA, my mother and I first lived in her Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme on quiet residential streets,” the Million Dollar Baby star said. “When we weren’t sleeping in the car, we stayed at the house of a new friend my age whose family had just moved out and were trying to sell their home. We slept on an air mattress.”

Judy then found a job as a secretary, allowing the mother-daughter duo to rent a bedroom from a single mother. While the living conditions were humble, Swank said she was thrilled to be chasing her career as an actress. “Starting out, I booked just OK television parts, but I didn’t care,” she recalled. “I was excited to be living my dream.” As for Swank’s mother, she was the star’s biggest support and “understood the excitement of performing.”

Swank would go on to book her first leading role in a feature film with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, released in 1992, and would go on to make a name for herself in the films The Next Karate Kid and Boys Don’t Cry, which scored the actress her first Academy Award in 2000. She would go on to win another Oscar for Million Dollar Baby in 2005.

Now, Swank told WSJ that she’s happy to continue her career while living away from the Hollywood hustle and bustle in Colorado, where she resides with her husband Philip Schneider and their 10-month-old twins, Aya and Ohm. “We have horses, dogs and a parrot,” she said of life in the country. “We’re hoping to add goats, chickens and perhaps a pig.” She noted, “Even though I’m happy we left LA, every so often, when I’m there for meetings, I’ll drive along a street in Pasadena where my mom and I parked and slept. Despite the challenges, I feel nostalgia for those days, when we had nothing.”