She Next Thrill in Highflying "Amelia" -John Campisi Film

She Next Thrill in Highflying "Amelia" -John Campisi Film

NEW YORK — If you're planning a long-distance rendezvous, don't tell Hilary Swank. She might show up and fly you there herself, as she did recently with her wary boyfriend, film agent John Campisi.
"He had a business meeting in Las Vegas, and I went and picked him up. I canceled his flight and I flew to Vegas, with my instructor. He was big-eyed. He's sitting in the back, white-knuckled," Swank says with a giggle.
MORE: Amelia Earhart still fires imaginations
It's a gambit that might make aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart proud. After all, it's thanks to Earhart, whom Swank plays in the biopic Amelia, opening Friday, that the two-time Oscar winner went airborne in the first place.
"You can't play Amelia Earhart and not learn how to fly. That's just wrong in every way," says Swank, who plans to earn her pilot's license after she's done promoting the film.
Flying, she says, "is something I take very seriously. I'm not a big sweater, but when I land, my back is drenched. It takes a lot of concentration. It's really exhilarating."
For her, so is acting. On the screen, she has played a boxer and a transgendered teen in roles in 2004's Million Dollar Baby and 1999's Boys Don't Cry that netted her best-actress Oscars. In person, Swank, 35, is elegant and composed, preferring English breakfast tea with honey and scones — or Italian red wine — to anything more rowdy, she insists. Still, there's a skydiving, plane-flying daredevil lurking within the refined actress clad in a flowered Reem Acra frock and open-toe stilettos.
After winning for the second time in 2005, she said of herself, “I’m just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream.” That girl’s career remains in high gear. She will appear in theaters on Friday as aviatrix Amelia Earhart in “Amelia,” frequently graces the covers of major magazines, and will be honored soon at the Hollywood Film Festival.
Freckle-faced, prairie-voiced and fiercely independent, Hilary Swank's depiction of aviator Amelia Earhart in Mira Nair's biographical film Amelia is of a high order. It ranks with recent real-life portrayals of Ray Charles by Jamie Foxx and Truman Capote by Philip Seymour Hoffman and could be similarly awards-bound.