Hilary Swank learned some hard lessons from poverty, said Amy Wallace in In Style. The 36-year-old actress had a hardscrabble upbringing, growing up in a trailer park in Bellingham, Wash. “My friends’ parents didn’t want me to play with their kids because I was the poor trailer-park girl,” she says. So she threw herself into competitive swimming and gymnastics, and into the fantasy world of books and movies. In her teens, her life took a turn for the worse when her father, a traveling salesman, abandoned the family. Swank and her mother moved to Los Angeles with just $75 in their pockets and lived out of a dilapidated Oldsmobile so that Hilary, who’d dreamed of being an actress, could go on auditions.
Today, the Oscar-winning actress makes millions for a single film, but she’s still highly conscious of where her money goes. She buys clothes at the Gap and Payless, and clips coupons. “Just because I have some money now, I wouldn’t? I still see it as a dollar in my pocket. People who have come from nothing, you’ve always had to fight for what you have, so it’s in your marrow. Nothing is going to be given to you.”
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