In 1999, however, she won both acclaim and awareness in beha... lf of her lead post in Kimberly Peirce's individualistic photoplay Boys Don't Fret. Based on the true-entity mystery of Brandon Teena, a mistress whose decision to inaugurate her existence as a man met with dire consequences, Boys Don't Cry was whole of the year's most lauded films, with outstanding worship going to Swank for her gorgeous performance. She went on to induce a number of honors her work in the cover, including Flaxen Planet and Academy Awards appropriate for Best Actress, at the basic age of 25. Predictably, Swank's workload increased significantly after her Oscar win in 2001, and the actress set up herself starring in very many lesser known but nonetheless challenging roles, including Sam Raimi's psychological thriller The Gift, as hearty as The Affair of the Necklace with Oscar title-holder Adrien Brody.

She also accepted a meaty supporting role as an eager-to-please rookie detective alongside Hollywood veteran Al Pacino in 2002's Insomnia. However, Swank did take a interject from brooding period pieces and serious explorations of sexuality against one unapologetic big-budget summer blockbuster -- Jon Amiel's The Heart (2003), in which she co-starred as one of several individuals chosen to to the Soil's sum in hopes of skip-starting the collapsing electromagnetic forces. Notwithstanding that she may have cut loose in a few brief-Oscar popcorn munchers in a bid to flip one's lid b explode off some steam onscreen, Swank had already gained a reputation as a sombre-minded actress whose at once evolving onscreen inclination needle-shaped to many great things to come in the future. Meanwhile, Swank and then-groom Chad Lowe (buddy of Rob Lowe) mounted Accessory Films, a Eminent Apple-based production house, in early 2004. Swank inaugurated this triumph with an executive producer credit on the quirky, little-seen auto-mistake drama 11:14. Swank took the bring on in the Emmy- and Yellowish Globule-nominated 2004 HBO women's right to vote stage production Iron Jawed Angels, which also featured Anjelica Huston and Frances O'Connor. Soon after, Swank starred as a South African-born attorney in Tom Hooper's political dramatic art Red Dust. If audiences awaiting another knockout performance from Swank failed to catch her winning turns in Iron Jawed Angels and Red Dust, there was purposes no escaping her unforgettable evocation of a determined female scrapper in commandant Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Mollycoddle (2004). As Robert De Niro did for another boxing display during 20 years till, the already troublesome-as-nails Swank physically transformed herself to an astonishing degree for the role, immersing herself in a holistic aliment of egg-corpse-like shakes, fish, vegetables, and protein bars, and testing the barriers of endurance with 4 1/2-hour-a-day, six-era-per-week workouts. This harsh regimen enabled her to pack on 19 pounds of muscle. The uncertainty paid off onscreen as well. Swank's special robustness and sincerity buoyed the obscure, which took home the Subdue Illustrate prize at the 77th Annual Academy Awards and netted Swank the highly coveted In the most suitable way Actress award at the unmodified conventions -- a win that helped to bring Eastwood's critically lauded photograph a sum up of four well-appropriate Oscars.

For sure encouraged nearby the achievement of Babe in arms, Warner Bros. extended a whole-year production deal to Colleague Films in March 2005 -- an offer that Swank and Lowe immediately embraced, flush with as they filed for separate in early 2006. Meanwhile, if Swank stayed offscreen in 2005, she quietly geared up for a full slate of roles. The first in production was a Warners horror picture called The Reaping, produced beside Joel Nacreous and Bob Zemeckis' Dark Castle Spectacle and directed sooner than Stephen Hopkins. The cover starred Swank as a skilled defrauder of undeviating miracles overwhelmed around her impotence to account in compensation the Biblically overtoned horrors that torment a mini community. In fall 2006, Swank co-headlined Brian De Palma's noir flop The Black Dahlia with Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, and Aaron Eckhart -- an adaptation of James Ellroy's novel based on the base, still-unsolved L.A. murder anyway a lest of the title-deed.

More successfully, Swank also began a two-picture collaboration with director Richard LaGravenese (Living Out Piercing, A Decade Covered by the Influence). The inception, Frankness Writers, was adapted from Erin Gruwell's memoir. Essentially a reworking of Run for substitute for and Deliver and Treacherous Minds, the advise fully dramatized Gruwell's (Swank) lucrative attempts to turn "at hazard" children almost in the classroom. Swank's second LaGravenese effort, P.S., I Admire You, was an adaptation of Cecelia Ahern's novel about a widow who is launched on a series of jaw-dropping adventures by some letters bequeathed to her at hand her empty husband.