Oscar winner Hilary Swank to star in film about malaria by Four Weddings writer Richard Curtis He has cast Hilary Swank, who won the Best Actress Academy Award on two occasions, and Brenda Blethyn, the twice Oscar-nominated star of Secrets & Lies. The film is to be called Martha and Mary. "It is about malaria, so not an especially funny topic, but there are some jokes in it," Curtis tells me at an event in his beloved Notting Hill. Curtis, who wrote the screenplay for Bridget Jones's Diary and the scripts for the sitcoms Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley, has long campaigned for the eradication of malaria through his work for Comic Relief. The disease kills more than 750,000 people around the world each year. "Malaria can and should be wiped out," he said last year. The world did almost get rid of malaria in the 1960s, but a bit stayed in Africa and now it's killing all over again. The last film for which Curtis wrote the screenplay was War Horse, while the most recent picture he directed was The Boat That Rocked in 2009.