Name: Katherine Matilda Swinton
Date of birth: November 5th, 1960.
Place of birth: London, England.

An English actress known for both arthouse and mainstream films.
The iconoclastic gifts of the visually striking and enigmatic actress Tilda Swinton, have been appreciated by a more international audience of late. Born into a patrician Scottish military family, she was educated in an English boarding school that also housed the late Lady Diana Spencer. Tilda subsequently studied at Cambridge University, and graduated in 1983 with a degree in Social and Political Science/English Literature. She switched to theatre, however, and became a student of the Royal Shakespeare Company. A decided rebel when it came to the arts, she left abruptly after a year as her approach shifted dramatically. With a taste for the unique and bizarre, she found some genuinely interesting gender-bending roles come her way, such as the composer Mozart in Pushkin’s “Mozart and Salieri,” and as a working class woman impersonating her dead husband during World War II, in Karges’ “Man to Man.” Tilda would commit the latter role to film in 1991. In 1985 the pale-skinned, carrot-topped actress began a professional association with director/mentor Derek Jarman. This quirky alliance would produce such stark turns in Caravaggio (1986), Aria (1987), The Last of England (1988), The Garden (1990/I) Edward II (1991), and Wittgenstein (1993), while feeding this voracity for playing the unique and unusual. Tilda provided a voice in his final film, an inventive documentary entitled Blue (1993/I), which used only a blue screen and interweaving vocal soundtrack to drive home its themes of dying and death. Jarman succumbed to complications from AIDS shortly after its completion. His untimely demise left a devastating void in Tilda’s life for quite some time. Ironically, her most notable film role may come from a non-Jarman film. For the title role in the Sally Potter-directed stunner Orlando (1992), her nobleman character actually lives for 400 years while changing sex from man to woman. Over the years she has preferred to sacrifice celebrity for art, opening herself to experimental projects with new and untried directors and mediums. Consistently off-centered roles in Female Perversions (1996), Conceiving Ada (1997), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), and Possible Worlds (2000) have only added to her mystique. Hollywood too has picked up on this notoriety, but not nearly as well. With the exception of the thriller The Deep End (2001), which earned her a number of critic’s awards, such mainstream U.S. pictures as The Beach (2000) with Leonardo DiCaprio, Vanilla Sky (2001) starring Tom Cruise and the Keanu Reeves horror epic Constantine (2005) have tended to undermine her seemingly boundless abilities.

Next would come a brief cameo in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. Swinton had met Jarmusch backstage at a gig by The Darkness (she’s a bit of a rocker on the sly, also enjoying the oeuvre of Marilyn Manson) and he later wrote to her, offering this part. The movie would see Bill Murray as an over-the-hill Don Juan, lost in stagnation, who hears he’s being sought by a 19-year-old son he didn’t know he had. Thus he’s persuaded to seek out any former girlfriends who might be the mother, Jessica Lange and Sharon Stone being two, and Tilda another. His encounter with her would be the film’s most furious sequence as she’s straggly haired and vengeful trailer-trash, backed by mullet-haired bikers with bad teeth.

2005 would end with Swinton’s highest-profile role to date, and quite possibly the highest-profile role she’d ever play. This was as Jadis, the White Witch of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the first episode in a new franchise hoping to emulate the success of The Lord Of The Rings (both were written by fusty old university professors, both filmed in New Zealand, what could go wrong?). The part was originally offered to Michelle Pfeiffer, but family responsibilities had her turn it down. Swinton, meanwhile, one of the few mothers brave enough to admit they actually enjoy time away from their brood, took the opportunity and made the film her own. Her tactic, she said, was to concentrate on the thing children understand least and hate most – not violence or shouting but coldness. She would make herself the epitome of Narnia’s eternal winter. Mr Fox and Mr Beaver, played respectively by Swinton’s former co-stars Rupert Everett and Ray Winstone, had better beware.

2006 would see Tilda immediately return to indieland with the Sundance Lab project Stephanie Daley. Written and directed by Hilary Brougher, this would see her as a pregnant forensic scientist investigating 16-year-old Amber Tamblyn, said to have concealed her own pregnancy and murdered the child. Clearly Swinton would need to leave Jadis well behind.

Swinton’s final release of 2007 would be the biggest, Michael Clayton. Here Tom Wilkinson would play a bipolar lawyer who, when defending a giant corporation against multi-billion dollar claims, loses it completely and threatens to blow the whistle on the guilty company. Fixer George Clooney is called in to sort it out, but his conscience begins to undermine his professionalism, much to the chagrin of Swinton, the company’s top legal executive, a woman so gripped by ambition she even considers murder to protect her position. Swinton said she was interested in the character’s struggle for total control, deliberately adding unhealthy pounds to her skinny frame so she could show herself to be losing her fight for fitness. The film would be a big hit and win Oscar nominations for Swinton, Clooney and Wilkinson. Of the three, Swinton would prove to be the awards season winner, picking up both a BAFTA and an Oscar. In a rare move into the mainstream consciousness, she’d also be a patron of the Edinburgh Film Festival, and pop up in the tabloids in stories revealing that, though she was still devoted to her family and in a mutually loving relationship with John Byrne, she was also “travelling the world” with another man, also a painter.

2008 would bring yet more fascination with Julia, the first English language film by Erick Zonca, director of The Dreamlife Of Angels. Long and fraught, the film would see Swinton as a blowsy, frustrated and deeply troubled woman, a hard drinker and tough talker, who’s persuaded by an acquaintance to help snatch the son she’s not allowed to see. Swinton winds up performing the kidnap herself and breaks for Mexico, on the one hand trying to extract ransom money from the boy’s industrialist grandfather, on the other attempting to avoid the attentions of Mexican slimeballs. It was an emotionally gruelling and desperately challenging lead role – how could she turn it down?

Following Julia would come the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, another excuse to shout at George Clooney. Here John Malkovich would play a drunken CIA agent who writes immensely compromising memoirs after he’s sacked, memoirs he promptly loses. Clooney’s an agent sent to sort out the mess, soon believing the diaries have fallen into the hands of some unscrupulous denizens of a gym, including Brad Pitt, with Swinton appearing as Malkovich’s wife. Next would come the delayed second installment in the Narnia Chronicles, Prince Caspian, where the Pevensie children return to the fantasy world to discover they’ve been away for hundreds of years. Now they must help heir to the throne Caspian to snatch power from evil king Miraz, and foil a plot to raise Swinton’s Jadis from her icy grave. Following this, she’d reunite with Brad Pitt for David Fincher’s The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, based on an intriguing and hugely amusing short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald where a fellow is born as an old man and gradually grows younger.

Though she’s now balancing Hollywood work with indie efforts, we can expect nothing from the mercurial Tilda Swinton. She’s said she’d like to recreate The Maybe in Moscow, thereby risking a fraught reaction if people think she’s being disrespectful to Lenin’s corpse. Inspired by partner John Byrne, she could easily stretch her artistic wings and come up with something new. Her increasing experience and now-bulging contact book might see her attempt to emulate Derek Jarman and pull together her own team of like-minded artists and performers. Maybe, in a truly punky and wanton act of hypocrisy, she might even return to the RSC. That would make people think – and that’s what Tilda Swinton, who defied her illustrious family by becoming illustrious in her own inimitable way, is all about.

Credits: Dominic Willis @ Tiscali

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