The last time your Empire correspondent sat across a table from Hilary Swank she'd just completed work on, ahem, The Next Karate Kid, and was contemplating the problems of a career path laid expectantly before her.

"Unfortunately there's not a lot of good feisty roles for girls," the then-teenager explained. "And when there is they always go to Juliette Lewis."

What a difference ten years makes. Swank practically re-defined "feisty roles for girls" in her Oscar-winning performance as cross-dressing runaway Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon in 1999's Boys Don't Cry. Lewis, meanwhile, went off and formed a rock and roll band.

However, there's been little Oscar-enticing material since. As beaten housewife Valerie Barksdale in 2000's psychic drama The Gift she got little attention; 2001's The Affair of the Necklace squeezed out just the one Oscar nod - for costume design; her role as Detective Ellie Burr in 2002's Insomnia was largely overlooked despite a stellar cast that included Al Pacino and Robin Williams; while a turn in 2003's hokey disaster movie The Core was always more about green screen than Oscar dreams.

Not that Swank's sore: "The bottom line is, I'm living my dream," she says, looking tanned and toned - and with her long brown hair, decidedly feminine - in a Beverly Hills hotel room. "There are a lot of talented actresses who can't even get an agent. I just feel really lucky and honoured and thankful."

Swank may be administering thanks from the podium once again - this time possibly even to her husband, Chad Lowe, if she remembers - at 2005's Oscars, due to an outstanding performance in Clint Eastwood's latest walk on the dark side, Million Dollar Baby. The twenty nine-year-old plays Maggie Fitzgerald, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks working waitress looking to Clint's Frankie Dunn and Morgan Freeman's Eddie 'Scrap-Iron' Dupris to help her train as a prize-winning boxer.

The role's grittier than a British road on snow day, and nods from the Golden Globes spell potential Oscar success. Not that another statue for the mantelpiece was something she was initially aiming for.

"Going for the Oscar is always a secondary consideration," she says. "I really don't believe in trying to work on the outcome of things because in worrying about the outcome you're robbing yourself of the experience. And for me, making this movie was the best experience I've ever had."

The road from Karate Kid to Oscar winner hasn't always been littered with great experiences. Like many before her - and, no doubt, many that will follow - Hollywood has brought its fair share of ups and downs.

"The business is really really hard," she admits. "The constant dance you have to do so that people don't see you in one way. It's supposed to be the most creative business in the world and sometimes it just doesn't feel that way at all."

Though Swank's been lucky enough to garner a resume overflowing with particularly atypical female roles. Which was certainly no accident.

"I was so intent on being taken seriously," she says of her choices. "I simply wasn't interested in the roles where it was just the girl sidekick who did nothing, who was just a trophy on some man's arm. It was boring and I had no interest, so I actively searched out roles that weren't like that."

Post-Million Dollar Baby, Swank's been in full-on search mode and is currently "in negotiation" for a couple of decent follow-ups, but with nothing signed is remaining tight-lipped on the specifics. She can promise one thing, however: "They're not romantic comed