Best Known As: The quirky star of Orlando and Michael Clayton
Name at birth: Katherine Matilda Swinton
Tilda Swinton won an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her role as a jittery and ambitious corporate attorney in the 2007 film Michael Clayton. Redheaded and sinewy, even gaunt, Swinton had already made her reputation with two decades' worth of dynamic and eccentric performances in offbeat films, gaining special notice in the androgynous title role of Orlando (1992, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf). The daugher of a Scottish nobleman, Swinton earned a degree in English literature from Cambridge University (1983) and spent a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company before turning to film acting. Her other films include Friendship's Death (1987), Female Perversions (1996), Love Is the Devil (1998), Vanilla Sky (2001, with Tom Cruise) and Thumbsucker (2005). She was one of three actors nominated for Oscars in Michael Clayton, along with George Clooney and Tom Wilkinson.
Swinton has twin children (Honor and Xavier, born 1997) with her longtime companion, the painter and writer John Byrne... She was a classmate of Princess Diana at West Heath Girls' School in England... According to a 2003 story in The Guardian, "Her father, Major-General Sir John Swinton -- Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire, former head of the Queen's Household Division, Order of the British Empire and all that -- can trace his lineage back 35 generations, to the 9th century."
Known throughout Britain for her idiosyncratic performances and long-time association with the late filmmaker Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton is nothing if not one of the more unique actresses to come along during the second half of the 20th century. Born in London on November 5, 1961, Swinton attended Cambridge University, where she received a degree in social and political sciences. While at Cambridge, she became involved in acting, performing in a number of stage productions. Following graduation, Swinton began her professional theater career, working for Edinburgh's renowned Traverse Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In 1985, Swinton began her long collaboration with Derek Jarman, both as a friend and fellow artist. She made her screen debut in his Caravaggio (1986) and appeared in every one of the director's films until his death from AIDS in 1994. It was for her role as the spurned queen in Jarman's anachronistic, controversial Edward II (1992) that Swinton earned her first dose of recognition, becoming a familiar face to arthouse audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and earning a Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival for her work in the film. The acclaim and recognition Swinton garnered was amplified the same year with her title role in Sally Potter's adaptation of Orlando, Virginia Woolf's classic tale of an Elizabethan courtier who experiences drastic changes in both gender and lifestyle over the course of 400 years.
Following appearances in Jarman's Blue (1993) and in his acclaimed biopic, Wittgenstein (1994), Swinton earned some of her strongest notices to date for her lead in Female Perversions (1996), in which she played a successful lawyer trying to cope with her own insecurities and self-destructive tendencies. She then portrayed another brilliant, troubled woman in Conceiving Ada (1997), a science fiction piece that cast her as the real-life daughter of Lord Byron, a woman who was widely held to be the inventor of the first computer.
Never one to choose films for their simplicity or mainstream appeal, Swinton subsequently appeared in Love Is the Devil (1998), John Maybury's controversial account of the life and times of artist Francis Bacon. She then portrayed a battered wife in The War Zone (1999), Tim Roth's hellish portrait of extreme family dysfunction. Following on a slightly lighter note with Trainspotting director Danny Boyle's The Beach in 2000, Swinton would later take the lead in The Deep End (2001). Noted for her delicately textured performance as an isolated and protective mother who makes a desperate bid to protect her son after assuming he has committed murder, many critics noted Swinton's performance as a key element to the film's success. The next year, the talented actress took on multiple roles in a complex tale of cyborg fantasy and speculative science fiction, Teknolust, and appeared in a small role in Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze.
In 2003, Swinton delivered strong performances opposite Michael Caine in the thriller The Statement and Ewan McGregor in the erotic drama Young Adam. She went on to star in the ensemble comedy Thumbsucker and appeared with Keanu Reeves in the supernatural thriller Constantine. In 2005, she would play the White Witch in the much-anticipated live-action adaptation of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.
For her work in 2007's legal thriller Michael Clayton, Swinton earned her first Oscar. That organization was one of many to recognize her portrayal of a cold, controlling corporate achiever as one of the best of the year. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, Rovi
Swinton worked with the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, starring in Mann ist Mann by Manfred Karge,[10] and the Royal Shakespeare Company, before embarking on a career in film in the mid-1980s. She appeared as Julia in the 1986 television mini-series Zastrozzi: A Romance based on the Gothic novel by Percy Bysshe Shelley.[citation needed] Her early film work included several film roles for director Derek Jarman, notably War Requiem (1989) playing a nurse opposite Laurence Olivier as an old soldier. In 1991, Swinton won the Volpi Cup Best Actress award for her role in the postmodern film Edward II.
Swinton also played the title role in Orlando, Sally Potter's film version of the novel by Virginia Woolf. The part allowed Swinton to explore matters of gender presentation onscreen which reflected her life-long interest in androgynous style. Swinton later reflected on the role in an interview accompanied by a striking photoshoot. “People talk about androgyny in all sorts of dull ways,” said Swinton, noting that the recent rerelease of Orlando had her thinking again about its pliancy. She referred to 1920s French artist and playful gender-bender Claude Cahun: “Cahun looked at the limitlessness of an androgynous gesture, which I’ve always been interested in.”[11]
In 1995, with producer and friend Joanna Scanlan, Swinton developed a performance/installation live art piece in the Serpentine Gallery, London, where she was on display to the public for a week, asleep or apparently so, in a glass case, as a piece of performance art. The piece is sometimes credited to Cornelia Parker, whom Swinton invited to collaborate for the installation in London. The following year, the performance, entitled The Maybe, was repeated at the Museo Barracco in Rome. She also appeared in the music video for Orbital's "The Box". She has collaborated with the fashion designers Viktor & Rolf. She was the focus of their 'One Woman Show' 2003, in which they made all the models look like copies of Swinton, and she read a poem (of her own) that included the line, "There is only one you. Only one".[12]
Mainstream films
Recent years have seen Swinton move towards more mainstream projects, including the leading role in the American film The Deep End (2001), in which she plays the mother of a gay son she suspects of killing his boyfriend. For this performance she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. She appeared as a supporting character in the films The Beach (2000), featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Vanilla Sky (2001) with Tom Cruise and, as the archangel Gabriel in Constantine (2005) with Keanu Reeves. Swinton has also appeared in the British films The Statement (2003) and Young Adam (2003), and sat on the jury of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.
Swinton next appeared in the 2008 Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading. Swinton said of the film, in which she plays opposite George Clooney, "I don’t know if it will make anybody else laugh, but it really made us laugh while making it."[16]
She had a starring role as the irresponsible eponymous character in Erick Zonca's Julia, which premiered at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival and later saw a limited U.S. release in May 2009. Several critics praised her performance and some claimed it should have won her an Academy Award.[17][18][19]
She stars in the new film adaptation of the novel We Need to Talk about Kevin, released in October 2011. She portrays the mother of the title character, a teenage boy who commits a high school massacre.[20]
She has joined the cast of Jim Jarmusch's untitled vampire film which will shoot in early 2012.[21]
Swinton has collaborated with artist Patrick Wolf on his 2009 album The Bachelor, contributing four spoken word pieces.[25]
Swinton appeared at the 2009 Academy Awards, helping to present the 2009 Best Supporting Actress Awards.
In 2009, Swinton and Mark Cousins embarked on a project where they mounted a 33.5-tonne portable cinema on a large truck, hauling it manually through the Scottish Highlands, creating a travelling independent film festival. The project was featured prominently in a documentary called Cinema is Everywhere. The festival was repeated again in 2011.[26][27][28]
Personal life
Swinton lives in Nairn, overlooking the Moray Firth in the Highland region of Scotland, with her partner Sandro Kopp, a German/New Zealander painter, and her twin children: a son, Xavier and a daughter, Honor. Rumours from a few years ago that Swinton, Kopp and Swinton’s former partner, John Byrne, were all cohabiting, were false.[29]
^ Dewar, Peter Beauclerk, Burke's Landed Gentry of Great Britain – The Kingdom in Scotland, 19th edition, vol.1, Wilmington, Delaware, 2001, p.1317. ISBN 0-9711966-0-5
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