
THE LADY’S ON A ROLL
With three new movies in the can – Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia (out in September), followed by The Reaping and Freedom Writers – and her marriage to Chad Lowe over, Hilary Swank is alternately brimming with joy and fighting tears as she faces the remake of her life. Before heading off to India, the two-time Oscar winner talks to LESLIE BENNETTS in Malibu and Manhattan about Lowe’s struggle with substance abuse, the long, slow death of the 13-year relationship that defined her adulthood, and the emotional trap she has finally escaped.
AUGUST 2006 | LESLIE BENNETTS
Photographs by PATRICK DEMARCHELIER
Styled by MICHAEL ROBERTS
She started her morning with a hard run up through the mountain trails about Malibu – Hilary Swank’s idea of a really great time. After that she came back to her beach cottage and, unable to decide whether to make blueberry pancakes or eggs with rosemary and thyme for our breakfast, made both, meticulously dropping greenmarket blueberries one by one into perfectly formed pancakes. Then she ate everything on her plate with visible delight, concentrating intently on each morsel. These days Swank is focused on living in the moment, and she’s trying to take every one for all it’s worth.
By now it’s afternoon, and Swank’s mother is on her way over to help Hilary pack up her belongings. She’s been staying at the cottage since she separated from Chad Lowe last fall, but her lease is up and she’s moving out. After that she’ll go to New York to clear out the Greenwich Village brownstone where she and her husband used to live. The 4,000-square-foot town house is on the market for $8.25 million, and when it sells, Swank will be officially homeless. But instead of finding a new place, she’s heading for India to spend a month doing community service in a remote rural area. By the time she returns to the United States, her divorce should be final.
This is a lot of change in a short period of time, but you’d never know it from the way Swank is acting. We’ve been talking for several hours, and now she’s started hopping around the living room like a little kid who has been confined for too long and needs to get rid of some excess energy. All day a beatific smile has hovered on her face, as if she’s harboring some mysterious secret that is giving her enormous pleasure.
“Can I tell you something?” she asks in a conspiratorial voice, although there is no one around to hear us except the dolphins gracefully breaching along the shoreline outside her windows.
“I’m the happiest I’ve ever been,” Swank whispers, her eyes dancing.
That might seem like an odd statement from an actress who has no place to live, no husband, and no job except as the face of the new Guerlain perfume campaign as she prepares to turn 32 in July. It’s not as if her career is stalled. Swank has made three movies in the last 10 months. But now she’s taking a break; it’s been a hard year already, and it’s only half over. January began with an official announcement that she and Lowe had separated after 8 years of marriage and more than 13 years in a stable partnership that rarely became tabloid fodder. Although Swank filed for divorce in March, they’ve kept most of the upheaval private during the last few months.
“Would I say that his substance-abuse problem caused our divorce? No. Would I say that his substance-abuse problem helped us? Absolutely not.”
But when we meet again two weeks later, she seems like a completely different person – tremulous and on the verge of tears. In the Manhattan brownstone she bought in 2002 for $3.9 million and then renovated, there are cartons stacked everywhere, clothes piled on the floor, paintings and photographs leaning against blank walls under empty hooks. She’s just hauled 10 bags of trash out of the house and another 20 bags of stuff to Goodwill. Her whole life is being dismantled before our very eyes – not to mention the tangible remnants of the relationship that has defined her entire adulthood.
“It’s a roller coaster right now,” Swank admits. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. There’s no guidebook for this; there are no CliffsNotes. I run the gamut of emotions. It’s just weird; one minute I’m frustrated, the next minute I’m angry, one minute I’m sad, the next minute I’m scared. But I know I’m doing the right thing for myself.”
We are sitting in the parlor on a brown sectional sofa strewn with brown pillows beneath bare brown walls. Above our heads, one wall is papered with an enormous scene of leafless brown tree branches. It’s a ravishing day in late spring, and Manhattan is exploding with greenery outdoors, but inside this somber autumnal room it might as well be November – an apt setting for a discussion about the long, slow death of a marriage.
“God, look at me – it’s like having chicken pox! But it’s just stress.” She points to a few blotches on her unadorned face as she strokes Karoo, the corgi-Jack Russell mutt who was a diseased stray when Swank rescued her while on location in South Africa. Her other dog, Lucky, a furry black shepherd-Labrador she adopted from a pound, lies snoring on the floor. Swank always takes her dogs on location, and this trip to India will mark the longest separation they’ve ever endured. Although she has deliberately chosen to leave behind every accustomed source of emotional support, there is a yearning look on her face as Karoo gazes up at her adoringly.
Swank knows that I’ve been wondering about the last thing she said to me in Malibu, and she wants to clarify what she meant. “When I told you I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, it’s not because I’m getting a divorce,” she explains, looking at me anxiously to make sure I understand. “It’s because I’m living in truth now. My happiness has stemmed from being brutally honest with myself, facing the truth every single day, no matter how hard it is. It’s not happiness like I got the Christmas present I wanted. It’s that I’ve grown up; I’ve become a woman. I’ve spend a lot of my life running from my feelings. I’m not running from the truth now.”
She pauses. “Not ignoring patterns,” she says with a sigh. And this time we both know exactly what she means.

For years, exposing the emotional truth in front of a camera came more easily to Swank than dealing with it in her personal life. “She is completely honest,” says Stacey Sher, a producer on Freedom Writers, one of Swank’s upcoming movies. Scheduled for a January release, the film is based on a true story about the efforts of an inspiring teacher named Erin Gruwell to educated a multi-racial group of students in a gang-ravaged California community.
While the movie was being shot last winter, the news of Swank’s separation became public. Sher and director Richard LaGravenese were particularly impressed by Swank’s dignified straightforwardness as she informed colleagues and continued to work. “That sort of determination marks all of Hilary’s great performances, ” Sher says.
Clint Eastwood, who directed Swank in Million Dollar Baby, concurs. “She absolutely inhabits her characters and approaches each one with unparalleled enthusiasm.”
“In the end, it just didn’t work, but I would never look back on this relationship as failed; I look at it as 13 1/2 years of success.”
During the next few months, Swank’s other movies will amply demonstrate her range. Coming out in September is The Black Dahlia, an adaptation of James Ellroy’s best selling crime novel about the sensational 1947 murder of a Hollywood starlet. The movie – which director Brian De Palma describes as “dark, dangerous, and chilling” – stars Scarlett Johansson, Josh Hartnett, and Aaron Eckhart along with Swank, who plays a glamorous siren with an unsavory connection to the murder victim.
“Hilary has played tomboys and prizefighters to much acclaim, but she never had a part where she could play her sexuality,” says De Palma. “The part of Madeleine is very much a deadly femme fatale. She’s extremely alluring – an erotic spider trap. We’ve never seen Hilary like this, and she will surprise everyone.”
Then comes The Reaping, a supernatural thriller that will be released in November. Swank plays a former Christian missionary who loses her faith when her family is killed in Sudan. She becomes a professor who specializes in debunking religious myths – until she investigates a small Louisiana town that appears to be suffering from the biblical plagues.
But Swank got more than she bargained for when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast during filming last fall. “This was a grueling experience, but Hilary was an incredible trouper,” says Joel Silver, a producer on The Reaping. “A lot of people on the crew lost virtually everything, and she was incredibly helpful and supportive. I won’t name names, but a lot of the people you make movies with have a tremendous amount of entitlement; they feel the world is there for them. Hilary isn’t like that; she’s a joy to work with. I would do anything for her.”
That is a common reaction among Swank’s colleagues. “She is a major talent without a shred of attitude, and that goes a long way on a movie set,” says Eastwood.
LaGravenese, who wrote as well as directed Freedom Writers, has just signed her up for another movie, PS I Love You, based on a best-seller about a young Irish window coping with the death of her husband. Before he dies, he writers her a series of letters, turning her bereavement into what LaGravenese describes as a love story.
Swank has always been determined to reach for such challenges, no matter what the odds -which were daunting indeed during her early years. With a father who spent a lot of time in bars during that period and a depressed mother who struggled for decades to save a doomed marriage, Hilary spent her childhood grappling with her parents’ problems as well as with poverty. After her father took off entirely, the family lived in a trailer part; when Hilary’s mother lost her job, they moved to Los Angeles and lived out of a car. Nothing came easily to the high-school dropout who dreamed of becoming an actress.
But then everything changed, and the difficult childhood turned into a fairy tale. The girl whose best friends threw cruel notes at her in school with messages like “You think you’re so great, but you’re not!” when she started acting went on to earn two Oscars before she turned 30. The lonely child who used to float in a lake for hours to escape the emotional desolation of her family found true love and a devoted husband – the perfect consort for a newborn star.
Or so it seemed from the outside – and for a long time Swank thought so, too. Behind the scenes, however, things were beginning to unravel. Although she wouldn’t understand why until much later, Swank had picked a partner who echoed the family dynamic she grew up with.
“My pattern is that I’ve taken care of everyone,” she says, struggling to maintain control of her voice. “I took care of my mom; I took care of my dad; I tool care of Chad. And I don’t want to carry that anymore. It’s a big habit to break, but in the end I sacrificed part of myself.”
She shakes her head as tears begin to roll down her cheeks. “You just can’t do that in life,” she says. “You have one life. It’s great to be able to have that realization, and to listen to yourself and do what’s right.”
But first you have to figure out what’s right. From the very beginning, Chad Lowe seemed right for Hilary Swank. They met at a part at the Hollywood Athletic Club a couple of months after Hilary turned 18. “He asked me to dinner, and we just hit it off,” she says. “We were together, strong, ever since. I was never one of those girls who dreamed about marriage and planned her wedding. I thought, I want to be an actress! I want to focus on my career. I’m a sponge; I want to explore and to learn. Here I am, world! But when you’re not looking, sometimes that’s when it comes to you. What makes one thing work and not another – it’s so mysterious. But if you feel like you’ve met somebody…”
She shrugs, giving me a rueful grin. “I was staying with him while I was looking for a place to live, and one day we woke up and said, ‘This works!’ We just kind of fell into it. He was my best friend. We did everything together. There were a lot of happy times; in the early part of my relationship with Chad, I was really, really happy.”
When Swank was 22, they were wed. “Marriage is something we both took really seriously,” she says. “It was devastating to Chad when his parents got divorced. On the other hand, I remember saying to my mom when I was seven years old. ‘Just get divorced! You’re unhappy. Why?’ For me it was devastating that my parents stayed together so long, because then it was my responsibility to make mom happy, and she was miserable. Instead of getting out of that situation, she was making herself unhappy. If you really do everything in your power to make something work, and it’s not working, what are you going to do? Say ‘I made a vow,’ and just live with it for the rest of your life? These are all things I’ve been asking myself, because I’m a loyal person; when I commit to something, I commit to it. I believed in my marriage; I never, ever thought I would get a divorce. That’s why I tried so hard to make it work. I went down every road possible. For me, this is something I’ve been living with for probably five years.”

From the moment Swank’s career took off like a rocket and left Lowe’s in the dust, Hollywood predicted the demise of their relationship. When she won her first Academy Award, for her breakthrough role on Boys Don’t Cry, and forgot to thank her husband in her acceptance speech, gossips seized upon the oversight as proof of marital strains. Then Swank made Million Dollar Baby and astonished the industry by winning a second Oscar. As Lowe’s acting career foundered, cynics referred to him as Mr. Hilary Swank and figured that he must envy the glory that seemed to come her way so readily.
Lowe was already stuck with being the less successful brother of a star, Rob Lowe. Chad played John Denver in the 2000 television movie Take Me Home: The John Denver Story, and his movie credits include parts in Unfaithful and Floating. At 38, he is now directing his first film, Beautiful Ohio, with William Hurt and Rita Wilson.
But Swank has consistently rejected the view that his resentment soured their relationship. “Chad is very supportive of my career,” she says. “He is, I think, genuinely happy for my success. I know there has been frustration in his career, and the frustration can be grueling. But I think that any frustration for him stemmed from the lack of opportunities in his own career; I don’t think it was ever directly caught up in my career. I would say that any frustration he had, he didn’t ever point it at me, but he definitely was going through this own things, like any person. That’s human.
So what happened? “If I had to sum it up to one particular thing, I would say that we grew apart,” Swank says, her eyes filling with tears again. “But there’s never one thing. It’s an accumulation of things that make it slowly start to drift apart.”
That drift had a cause, although Swank is too diplomatic to mention it until I do. When I bring up rumors about Lowe’s substance abuse, she replies, “Yes, Chad had substance-abuse problems. It’s an enormous obstacle to overcome, and he’s doing it. He’s living a sober life; he just had his three years two days ago. I know how difficult it is, and I’m really proud of his sobriety.”
Lowe declines to comment on their marriage or his recovery, but his ordeal clearly took its toll. “Would I say that his substance-abuse problem caused our divorce? No,” Swank says. “Would I say that his substance-abuse problems helped us? Absolutely no.”
For her, the deeper wound was the erosion of trust. “I knew something was happening, but I didn’t know what,” she says. “When I found out, it was such a shock, because I never thought he’d keep something from me. And yet, on another level, it was a confirmation of something I was feeling that was keeping us from being completely solid.”
That recognition summoned a host of disturbing parallels with her childhood. “It just feel right into my history with my father,” Swank says. “It definitely made me aware of the depths of being a child and living with that, and how that’s been a path for me. I really had to do a lot of work, to look at my past and what it made me feel like.”
Both Swank and Lowe went into therapy as well as marriage counselling, which helped Swank to reach some important conclusions. “I was tired of taking care of everyone,” she says. “I felt like I really, really, really needed to take care of myself. That’s kind of it, in a nutshell. Part of being in a relationship is sacrificing, but the hardest thing is finding the balance. You can’t sacrifice your well-being. In the end, if you are not taking care of yourself, you’re not going to be able to be there for anybody else. It becomes overwhelming, and you just start unraveling.”
She sighs. “I got married so young,” she says. “I’m not so naïve as to say that marriage should be bliss, or there shouldn’t be any hard times. I just felt like, This is what marriage is. But if there’s things happening that you didn’t know -“
So she really didn’t know? “You have instincts for areas, and then something’s revealed and your whole world turns upside down,” she says. “I didn’t know the extent of his substance-abuse problem. It’s a big surprise when you think you have an open dialogue. It hurt, mostly because he didn’t think I’d understand that he was going through something so painful in his own life and he didn’t let me in.”
But if Lowe got sober three years ago, why is Swank ending the marriage now? “When I found out, I wanted to be there,” she explains. “I knew it was the most important time of his life. That’s when he needed me most. I just wanted to make sure he was going to be O.K. I also really wanted to try and work through it. We worked really hard, the last few years, to try and build that trust back. He’s sober now, and obviously his use is not a problem in the relationship anymore. I don’t want to make it seem like that’s the sole reason; there were other factors. But that just kind of blew it open; it made me look at things a lot deeper. That’s when you realize it’s not going to work – when you’re being honest, and he’s being honest, and it’s just not working. Honesty was not bringing happiness. I’m still trying to figure out my feelings about it and understand everything I’m feeling.”
Despite all they’ve been through, much of what she’s feeling is positive. “The hardest thing is I’ve spent my whole adult life with Chad,” Swank says. “There’s so many good times; there’s so much love. We both have an enormous amount of respect for each other. I can’t speak for him, but I have never thought, Why didn’t I get out sooner? I had to make sure this was the right thing, and he needed to make sure it was the right thing for him. I definitely instigated this, but it ended up being mutual. It’s been a long time coming, but I still wouldn’t have ended it any sooner. I didn’t want to think, Did I not give it everything, explore every avenue to see if I could make it work? That takes time, to really know that. It’s been many years of mutual love and respect, so it’s been a difficult journey for both of us to come to this conclusion. I am who I am now because of every past experience I’ve had, including the 13 1/2 years I spent with Chad. In the end, it just didn’t work, but I would never look back on this relationship as failed; I look at it as 13 1/2 years of success.”
Their separation inflamed the interest of the paparazzi, who have been following Swank into the woods and jumping out from behind bushes to ambush her while she’s running. Desparate for a hot new romance, the tabloids invent ludicrous pairings. “That’s not been a fun side of this, to hear that I’m dating my agent or publicist or my lawyer or my best friend’s husband,” Swank says. “Anybody I happen to be with becomes my significant other.
But so far her thoughts remain with Lowe. “My sole focus is on this relationship, and what I’m doing with it,” she says. When I ask if she’s dating anyone, she grimaces. “No! The thought of it – of that whole world – I can’t imagine it. That is not a world I’ve even thought of entering. I can’t imagine going out right now and trying to find someone else to be with. It seems like a scary place. I’ve been with Chad since I was 18 years old.”
In retrospect, however, she’s grateful that she and Lowe never had children. “In hindsight, you realize why you didn’t do it,” she says. “Neither of us was ready. We had too many things we were working through. Because of out troubled pasts, I don’t think we wanted to have a family until it was the right time and the right decision for both of us. I really want to have a family someday, but I’m certainly not going to rush into doing it.”
Swank declines to discuss any financial settlement with Lowe, but it could be expensive for her, given the disparity in their careers. But Swank, who has made relatively few movies for an actress of her stature, has never been one to chase big paychecks. Boys Don’t Cry was a low-budget independent film – and the Screen Actors Guild canceled her health insurance the year she received her Oscar for it, because members were required to make $5,000 in order to qualify and Swank had earned only $3,000. “I had an Academy Award but no health insurance,” she says.
Finances notwithstanding, Swank says that her divorce from Lowe “is respectful. There’s no mudslinging. There’s no mud to be slung.” She is also willing to accept her share of the blame. “It takes two to make something work or not work,” she says. “I’m a person with my own faults and troubles. I make mistakes; I’m not some squeaky-clean person here.”
Right now, her goals are clear. “I really want to get to know me,” she says. “I’ve never really had that time; I went from living with my mom to living with Chad. Of course I have moments of feeling, I’m really lonely now. But I don’t want to fill that loneliness with something or someone. Living in truth finally is liberating. It makes me feel really connected to myself, really grounded. There’s a depth of happiness now, because of the honesty I have chosen to live by. I’m just not interested in any relationship, whether with a best friend of a colleague, where I would be feeling something and I can’t express it. If I can’t express the truth, I’m not interested in having the relationship.”
On an unseasonably chilly evening in Santa Monica, Judy Swank and I are watching the sun set over the Pacific as we talk about her daughter. Sinewy and lithe, Hilary was a competitive gymnast and swimmer as a child, and she retains the tensile strength of an athlete even when she’s not training to play a boxer. Her small, round mother looks more like a dumpling; the lean and restless Hilary will urge you to go for a run with her, but with Judy Swank you’d settle in for a pot of tea beside a cozy fire. “I like sitting,” she says with an impish smile.
Things are going well for Judy these days; she has a home in Marina del Rey, a job as an executive secretary to a real-estate developer, and a boyfriend she calls “a sweetheart.” But life was far more difficult when Hilary and her older brother were growing up in Bellingham, Washington, near Lake Samish. “My father wasn’t really around a lot, even when he was around,” Hilary says, “but when I was six, he just left. That was when we moved to a trailer park.”
Judy struggled to support the family, but her emotional condition was as troubled as her financial situation. “In hindsight, I had a real depression,” says Judy, who didn’t actually get divorced until many years later. “I was going through the worst time in my marriage, and I was emotionally unavailable, and Hilary was lonely. She would go out and lay in the lake. I’d see her out there, thinking and dreaming.”
Even then, Hilary knew what she wanted to do with her life. “We were watching The Miracle Worker, and she saw this young girl and said, ‘I can do that. I’d like to do that!”‘ Judy recalls. As Hilary got older, she grew increasingly insistent about becoming an actor, and when she was 15 she finally persuaded her mother to take her to Los Angeles and find her an agent. By then Hilary’s brother, who is eight years older, was on his own, and a final stroke of bad luck helped to make up Judy’s mind. “I was really torn; my marriage had fallen apart, and then I lost my job,” Judy says. “So I said, ‘O.K. – let’s go to California!”‘
For the first couple of months, Judy and Hilary lived out of the car they had borrowed from Judy’s sister. “We found a button that said. ‘Working Actress,’ and we pinned it on the visor of the Oldsmobile,” Judy says. “We would rub it for luck. I always told Hilary, ‘You can be anything you want to be.'”
A friend whose house was on the market let them bathe there at night and sleep on the floor in their sleeping bags. During the day, Judy would stand at a pay phone with rolls of quarters, calling agents and begging them to see her daughter. After countless brush-offs, one finally agreed, and Hilary’s career began with television jobs. Although those times were hard, Judy’s eyes sparkle when she talks about them. “We had nothing,” she says, “but what an adventure!”
Since Hilary’s career has exceeded their wildest dreams, and even with two Oscars in hand, she’s still working to expand her opportunities. “Academy Awards don’t really solve anything,” says Richard LaGravenese, who plans to begin shooting PS, I Love You this fall. “You still have to direct and control your career, and Hilary is much more involved in doing that now. She’s got decades and decades of great roles ahead of her, because of what she goes after.”
Swank is also trying to grow as a person by reaching out to others – a difficult exercise in trust for someone accustomed to handling her problems in private. “I think the biggest lesson for me was allowing myself to open up to friends and say, ‘I need your help.”‘ she says. “To allow them to be there for me – that has brought me a lot of relief, and a lot of joy. To know you can count on people. to break out of those habits where you say, ‘You can only rely on yourself’ – it’s been a big lesson for me, but a scary one.”
In that context, Swank’s current plan to spend a month alone in India might appear to be an odd choice, but it makes sense to her. “I’ve always wanted to go to India, and it just seemed like the perfect fit right now,” she says. “When I go to my favorite restaurant, the paparazzi sit there with their cameras up to the glass. It’s so violating, and I need to get away. I asked myself, What is it that you need right now? I need to get away. Not run away; I don’t want to run from my feelings. I’m going to India to get back in touch with what’s important in life. I just want to get out of myself, and try to be of service to other people. I’m going to volunteer; they put you in some completely rural place where you’re needed. All I know is that I’m living in a hut and I need a lot of mosquito repellent and I had to get a lot of really painful shots and it’s 115 to 120 degrees and I shouldn’t drink the water if it doesn’t have a sealed top. There’s nothing I would want to do more right now. I am so excited!”
While that might not sound like most movie stars’ idea of a good time, Swank has always been ready to go for it. “I was jumping out of planes, skydiving when I was 16,” she says. “I’m taking life for all it’s worth! You only live once.”
Her bags are already packed. “I’m back to being homeless,” Swank says. “Something I know well.”
She grins. “Back to the basics.”
A couple of weeks into her trip, Swank telephones to update me. She is staying in Palampur, in northern India, under the auspices of IDEX, a nonprofit organization that partners with grassroots groups to assist community projects. Her bed is a plank with a mat on it; her bathroom has only cold water; her toilet is a hole in the ground. “And yes, there’s lots of bugs,” she says.
In the mornings, Swank works as a teaching assistant in a one-room schoolhouse where 28 children, aged 4 to 13, sit on the floor with boards, sticks, and ink, trying to learn the English alphabet. In the afternoons, she helps out at an orphanage that houses 23 children, aged 4 to 16. “They have one woman to tend them; she’s a paraplegic who is sick right now and can’t get out of bed,” Swank says. “Someone comes in to cook them a meal at night, but other than that, they make their meals on their own. These kids have no one. It’s so rewarding to be with them, and it’s also really sad. You hug them, and when you let go, they grab your arm and put it back around them.”
She is particularly disturbed about conditions for women in India, and we talk for a few moments about the practice of aborting females and killing girl children. “I know I can’t fix it,” she says, “but this country needs a lot of help.”
The next day, she calls again, thrilled with an experience she has just had. Every evening, as she goes for a run, a little girl has watched from the side of the road. “Today she starts running along beside me, talking to me in Hindi,” Swank reports. “I have no idea what she’s saying. She points to my headphones and says, ‘Song!’ So I give her one of my headphones, and she runs with me for about a mile. The song that was playing was U2’s ‘One'”
On the line from Palampur to New York, we try to remember the lyrics:
One love, one blood, one life,
You got to do what you should.
One life with each other:
Sisters, brothers.
One life, but we’re not the same.
We get to carry each other.
“To me, that’s what it’s about,” Swank says. “It just reminds me not to take the things I have – my loved ones, my freedom – for granted. Especially my freedom.”
Original article at Vanity Fair
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