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."
Career Highlights: The War Zone, Wittgenstein, Orlando
First Major Screen Credit: Caravaggio (1986)
Biography
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. ~ Rebecca Flint, All Movie Guide
Carving out an international reputation as a risk taker, she has always eschewed conventional leading lady roles. She worked
with the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and the
Royal Shakespeare Company before embarking on a career in film in the
mid-1980s. Her late film work included several film roles for director Derek Jarman, and
also the title role in Orlando, Sally
Potter's film version of the novel by Virginia
Woolf.
Swinton became notorious for a brief period in 1995 when she appeared as a live exhibit in the
Serpentine Gallery, London. She was on
display to the public for a week, asleep or apparently so, in a glass case, as a piece of performance art by Cornelia Parker. The following year, the
performance, entitled The Maybe, was repeated at a gallery in Rome. She appeared in the
music video for Orbital's "The Box".
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