One again thanks to my friend Victoria I added scan from. It looks like HBO is promoting Hilary’s new movie Mary & Martha to get an Emmy nomination.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazine Scans Mary & Martha > Magazine Scans

Thanks to my friend Victoria I added scan from Good Housekeeping May issue.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazine Scans Good Housekeeping – May 2013

On May 21 Hilary attended the press conference for her new movie Mary and Martha. I added some pictures to gallery.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots Mary and Martha Press Conference – May 21 2013

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, singer Elton John and actor Hilary Swank joined thousands of costumed revellers on Saturday at Europe’s biggest AIDS charity event, Vienna’s Life Ball.

Dressed in skimpy costumes for the ball’s 1,001 Nights theme, or simply in extravagant drag, party-goers braved unseasonally chilly temperatures of 8 degrees Celsius for the outdoor party.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, addressing the gathering in a video message, urged the world not to let up in the fight against AIDS, which has killed 30 million people since the auto-immmune disease was first recognised at the start of the 1980s.

“A generation free of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is now in sight,” he told the crowd in the gardens of Vienna’s City Hall. “But unless we intensify our response, a million children could get HIV by 2015.”

The annual ball, now in its 21st year, has grown from a small gay-community event to a society fixture, attracting celebrity guests from around the world.

Highlights included a Scheherazade-themed ballet, a fashion show by Italian designer Roberto Cavalli and a performance by singer Adam Lambert.

Those guests wearing costumes judged by the organisers’ “style police” to be exceptional could win half-price admission to the Vienna ball, for which tickets cost up to 3,000 euros.

The event raised over 2 million euros ($2.6 million) last year, much of it donated to the Clinton Health Access Initiative to reduce HIV infection among babies in Africa.

Africa accounts for more than two-thirds of the world’s cases of HIV, with 1.8 million new HIV infections and 1.2 million people dying of AIDS-related illnesses in 2011, according to the United Nations.

Source: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/

Hilary attends the ‘Life Ball 2013 – Magenta Carpet Arrivals’ at City Hall on May 25 in Vienna, Austria.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Events 2013 Life Ball > May 25 2013

“It’s a dream come true—I’m in a movie with Meryl Streep,” Hilary Swank happily informed us of being cast with arguably the greatest living actress, in “The Homesman.” Then, Hilary added, “But I don’t have one scene with Meryl! I thought, ‘Well, on the days that I’m not working, I’m going to be a fly on the wall. I’m just going to watch Meryl—but, she wasn’t even in the same location! I did all my work in New Mexico. When we wrapped there recently, they went to Georgia.”

Hilary admitted that it was “nice to have a dress on after all that time out there” in New Mexico to shoot “The Homesman,” being directed by Tommy Lee Jones who, along with Wesley Oliver and Kieran Fitzgerald, wrote the screenplay adaptation of Glendon Swarthout’s western novel of the same title, set around 1855.

“I was on the prairie for the last 60 days,” Hilary reported. “My character (Mary Bee Cuddy) is a farmer—I plow the fields and pump for water. My hands are all beat up.” The actress plays the title role, a “homesman” who must escort several women who lost their minds back to civilization. She teams up with an unlikely partner, George Briggs (Tommy Lee), a claim jumper.

Hilary leaving an office building in New York City.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Candids May 22, 2013

Actress and producer Hilary Swank will be a guest of the Life Ball on 25th May, 2013 and will present the Crystal of Hope Award donated by Swarovski to the project “The Girl Effect“ during the opening ceremony.

The Crystal of Hope Award has been established in 2005 in cooperation with Swarovski – and ever since, the presentation of an outstanding initiative in the response to HIV/AIDS has been the most emotional moment of each Life Ball opening. Ground workers who work in the front line to promote innovative ideas for AIDS research, to improve the lives of people affected or to oppose discrimination and stigmatization have been presented with the award for their special commitment.

At the Life Ball 2013, Hilary Swank will present representatives of “The Girl Effect“ – Lisa T.D. Nguyen from Cambodia, Patricia Suriel from the Dominican Republic, Sulaiman Turay from Cameroon and Sadie St. Denis from Uganda – with the award endowed with EUR 100,000 and sponsored by the company Swarovski.

The Girl Effect – against poverty & HIV in girls
The project focuses on leveraging the potential of adolescent girls to prevent them from becoming the victims of poverty and illness. If you invest in the economic potential of girls by educating them and if you prevent child marriage and teen pregnancy, problems related to HIV/AIDS can be solved and the cycle of poverty can be broken. All donations go into the “Girl Effect Fund”, which distributes the donations equally between 12 girl-focused projects each year that create the global Girl Effect.

For 2013, the Board of AIDS LIFE chose those four projects, which are linked to HIV and AIDS the most:

• One Project in Cambodia, which helps girls escape from sex slavery and provides them with therapy and education.

• A program for the support and training of 100 teenage mothers and for the reduction of sexually transmitted diseases – like AIDS – in Cameroon.

• The MARIPOSA Center for girls in the Dominican Republic, which promotes education and activity of the girls as well as prevention of HIV and AIDS.

• Workshops for girls in Uganda for the reduction of teenage pregnancy and for the health of mothers through information on HIV and AIDS.

Nadja Swarovski, member of the Executive Board, Swarovski Crystal Business: “Swarovski is delighted to help celebrate the 21st anniversary of Life Ball and to support The Girl Effect, a truly inspirational charity. We hope that the Award will enable The Girl Effect to continue its incredible work empowering girls around the world to change their lives for the better.”

Further information on www.thegirleffect.org

Source: http://www.lifeball.org/

Sometimes, it takes a familiar face to put a face on a problem… even one that is international in scope.

Two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank is no stranger to championing social causes, and she takes up another as she and two-time Oscar nominee Brenda Blethyn play the title roles in the HBO drama movie “Mary and Martha” Saturday at 8 p.m.

Written by Richard Curtis (“Love Actually,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral”) and filmed largely in South Africa, the BBC and NBC Universal co-production tells the story of two very different women who unite to crusade against malaria after both lose sons to the illness.

Mary (Swank) is an American who takes her child (Lux Haney-Jardine, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”) away from bullying classmates for an “adventure” abroad, and Martha (Blethyn) is an Englishwoman whose son (Sam Claflin, “Snow White and the Huntsman”) volunteers at an African orphanage. After both young men contract and die of malaria, their mothers meet and bond, then decide to take their message about the disease to the masses — and ultimately to a Washington, D.C., hearing.

James Woods also appears as Mary’s politically connected father in the film, directed by Phillip Noyce (“Clear and Present Danger”).

“Obviously, what’s on the page is the most important thing in the beginning,” Swank says, “but you follow it up with talent like that, in every corner, and it’s a no-brainer. It’s something you just jump at to be a part of.”

Swank has played mothers before (“Conviction,” “The Reaping”), and that aspect of “Mary and Martha” largely drove her performance.

“I don’t think there’s anything worse in the world than losing a child,” Swank says. “I don’t have children of my own, but I have a lot of them in my life… nieces and nephews, children of boyfriends. Still, it was all on the page here.”

After writing for stars from Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts to Colin Firth and Emma Thompson, Curtis says he is pleased that Swank and Blethyn embody his Mary and Martha.

“They make for a very exciting clash of cultures,” he says. “There is something about Brenda that is so profoundly British and so humane, and, likewise, there’s an extraordinary Americanness and determination and kind of wisdom about Hilary. They were on the far ends of the characters I’d written, and I was delighted about that.”

Source: http://www.newsday.com/

The TV movie remains in relative decline, which makes a weekend in which two high-profile versions with big-name stars and overt messages playing directly opposite each other especially noteworthy. It’s also instructive, in a compare-and-contrast sort of way, to consider why “Mary and Martha” — a moving return to intimate form for HBO — represents an emotionally stirring triumph, while Lifetime’s “Call Me Crazy: A Five Film” feels like an empty gimmick, an all-star marketing hook/public-service campaign in search of a movie.

After a stretch in which HBO has relied almost exclusively on attention-getting fact-based films like “Game Change” and “Phil Spector,” “Mary and Martha” harks back to when the service was content to tell great little stories — often with an agenda — that might not have been commercial enough to find a home elsewhere. And if one’s first thought is the 2005 gem “The Girl in the Cafe,” it should come as less of a surprise that “Mary” comes from that movie’s writer, Richard Curtis.

At its core a personal story about two mothers joined in grief, “Mary and Martha” is also a passionate piece of advocacy. Moreover, it reflects Curtis’ penchant for envisioning a world where good can come of ordinary people’s do-good passion, which is both uplifting and reassuring, even if it doesn’t always conform to reality.