Before Fame, Fortune, and Two Academy Awards, Hilary Swank and Her Mother Slept in a Car As She Chased Stardom

Long before the fame, the fortune, and the two Academy Awards, actress Hilary Swank slept in a car with her mom as she sought stardom, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Eager to start her acting career, Swank said that she stopped going to high school at the end of her sophomore year and after “my mother had recently separated from my father,” she said. Mother and daughter drove to Los Angeles from Bellingham, Washington, hoping Swank’s dreams of acting would come true.

“In L.A., my mother and I first lived in her Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme on quiet residential streets,” Swank 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.”

She continued “After about a month [of living in L.A.], Mom found secretarial work and we rented a bedroom from a single mother in Burbank. Starting out, I booked just okay television parts, but I didn’t care. I was excited to be living my dream.”

Swank had her first breakout role in ABC’s short-lived 1990s sitcom Camp Wilder, USA Today reports; she would go on to win two Best Actress Oscars, for 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry and 2004’s Million Dollar Baby. She has also found success not just professionally but personally—Swank and her husband, entrepreneur Philip Schneider, are parents to twins Aya and Ohm, and explained the meaning of their unique names last week. The family of four live back and forth between Colorado and Swank’s hometown of Bellingham, Washington.

“Even though I’m happy we left L.A., 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,” she said. “Despite the challenges, I feel nostalgia for those days, when we had nothing.”