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Hilary Swank: Living by the Three Only Things
What would a modern master
of the Three Only Things look like? How about Hilary Swank?
This stunning actress’s rise from a trailer park to the heights of Hollywood
began in her active and vivid imagination. Living dirt-poor outside
Bellingham, Washington, dropping out of high school and hating the hateful
bust-up of her parents’ marriage, teenage Hilary would go and sit by Lake
Samish and grow a big life dream as she gazed across the waters.
“I dreamt on that lake. Dreamt big, big dreams. I dreamt about my life,
about my future and all I wanted to do and be,” she later recalled.
She dreamed so strong her mother believed her. Judy Swank packed Hilary and
everything they could fit in the car and drove south to Hollywood. They
lived in the car, and later on an air mattress in an apartment a friend
loaned them on condition they cleared out every morning, because he was
trying to sell the place, until Hilary landed her first acting jobs.
She got a part on the TV series Beverly Hills 90210 but was then
unceremoniously dumped. She felt her precocious career was over if she could
not even hold a part on 90210, but then became a beneficiary of that
rule of coincidence that holds that every setback is an opportunity. She was
available when a chance came to play the lead role in a gritty,
reality-based, low-budget movie called Boys Don’t Cry. She got paid
just $75 a day – a total of $3,000 over the whole time of the shoot. And she
won an Academy Award.
She went on to give breathtaking performance as a female fighter in
Million Dollar Baby.
She was living her life dream, and she was also tracking her night dreams.
She dreamed she was called on to save someone’s life during what seemed like
a heart attack. The dream prompted her to take CPR. She was ready three
months later when a man collapsed in front of her in an airport, the victim
of a massive heart attack. She used the CPR technique she had learned,
revived him briefly, but was not able to save his life. She would be ready
next time.
Source: Hilary Swank told Mike Wallace about the dream that led her to learn
CPR on 60 Minutes in 2005.
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