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Role Call: Hilary Swank

Best Idealist
Freedom Writers (2007)
In the time since her second Oscar win for Best Actress in Million Dollar Baby, movie audiences have seen Hilary Swank only in a supporting role in last year's The Black Dahlia. That changes this month, when she steps back into the ring for a different kind of fight. In her new film, Swank plays Erin Gruwell, a determined young schoolteacher in Long Beach, Calif., who uses Anne Frank as a role model for her troubled inner-city students, and convinces them to start their own diaries and find their own voices of survival on the mean streets. (Release date: Jan. 5, 2007)