Swinton, Tilda

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Swinton, Tilda

Actress

B orn Katherine Matilda Swinton, November 5,1960, in London, England; daughter of John (amilitary officer) and Judith Balfour (maiden name, Killen) Swinton; children: twins Xavier and Honor (with John Byrne, a writer and artist). Education: New Hall College, Cambridge University, B.A., 1983.

Addresses: Agent—Endeavor, 9601 Wilshire Blvd., 3rd Fl., Beverly Hills, CA 90210. Home—Nairn, Scotland.

Career

A ctress in films, including:Caravaggio, 1986; Aria, 1987; The Last of England, 1988; War Requiem, 1989; Edward II, 1991; Orlando, 1992; Wittgenstein, 1993; Female Perversions, 1996; Conceiving Ada, 1997; Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, 1998; The War Zone, 1999; The Beach, 2000; The Deep End, 2001; Vanilla Sky, 2001; Adaptation, 2002; The Statement, 2003; Young Adam, 2003; Thumbsucker, 2005 (also executive producer); Constantine, 2005; The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 2005; Stephanie Daley, 2006 (also executive producer); Julia, 2007; Michael Clayton, 2007; The Man from London, 2007; Synecdoche, 2007; Come Like Shadows (also known as Dunsinane), 2008; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 2008. Stage appearances include: Mother Courage, Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican Theatre, London, 1984; Measure for Measure, Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican The-atre, London, 1984; Man to Man (solo show), Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and Royal Court The-atre, London, c. 1987; Mozart and Salieri, Vienna, Berlin, and London, c. 1989. Television appearances include: Zastrozzi: A Romance (miniseries), Channel 4, 1986; Your Cheatin’ Heart, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1990.

Awards: Best actress award, Venice Film Festival, for Edward II, 1991; Academy Award for best supporting actress, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for Michael Clayton, 2008.

Sidelights

W ith ethereal looks and a steely intensity onscreen, Tilda Swinton has been called “themost unique British actress of the past 20 years” by the London newspaper the Observer. Known by her flaming red hair and alabaster complexion, the Scot has proven to be a versatile, chameleon-like performer with a particular talent for vaguely androgy-nous characters thanks to her breakout performance in the 1992 period film Orlando. Swinton’s career has swung from arty British films of the late 1980s to the Hollywood tale of corporate evil, Michael Clayton, for which Swinton won her first Academy Award.

Born Katherine Matilda Swinton in November of 1960, Swinton is the only daughter of a Scottish military officer who reached the rank of major general in the Queen’s Household Guards. Her parents were living in London at the time of her birth but the family seat was a castle in Scotland called Kimmerghame located on land that had been in the family for more than 30 generations. The Swinton lineage is traceable back to C. E. 886, when an ancestor of hers is on record as having sworn allegiance to Alfred the Great. In interviews, Swinton has downplayed this, and remains resolutely leftist in her political orientation. “All families are old,” she told Suzie Mackenzie in the Guardian. “It’s just that mine have lived in the same place a long time and happened to write things down.”

Like her three brothers, Swinton was sent to boarding school at a young age. She was ten when she entered the West Heath School near London, where she was in the same class as a young Diana Spencer, the future Princess of Wales. West Heath was an elite school, but not considered the best place for a young women to prepare for a college degree; instead the well-heeled young women were expected to marry well and produce another generation of what Swinton has sometimes referred to as the “owning classes,” according to the Guardian’s Mackenzie. She defied expectations, however, by earning top marks, and even became the only member of her class to win four A-levels, the subject-based certificates that serve as college-entrance exams in the British educational system.

Entering New Hall, a women’s college at Cambridge University, Swinton originally intended to study literature with the goal of becoming a writer, but became involved in the theater scene and switched her course of study to social and political sciences. After graduating in 1983, she won a place in the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company of London, but soon realized that even in this artistic atmosphere she was expected to conform to certain conventions. In 1986, she made her film debut in Caravaggio, an early work from a stage-set designer-turned-filmmaker, Derek Jarman, about the Italian Renaissance painter of the same name. Openly gay, Jarman introduced some of the first positive gay imagery in the history of British filmmaking, and Swinton’s debut as a woman in late sixteenth-century Italy who becomes enmeshed in a romantic triangle is the best-known film of Jarman’s career.

Swinton made her next eight films with Jarman before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1994. These credits include 1987’s Aria and War Re-quiem, a 1989 work that was the last screen appearance of Laurence Olivier. For her role as Isabella of France in the writer-director’s 1991 adaptation of the late sixteenth-century drama Edward II, she picked up the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival. She described Jarman as “the first person I ever met that lived as an artist,” she told New York Times writer Lynn Hirschberg. “He was a person who found a way to make movies without any studio. Through him, I saw that I could live in a pre-industrial way.”

Swinton first gained serious attention in the mainstream media for her title role in Orlando in 1992. Writing in the Guardian, Mackenzie called it “easily her best. Based on Virginia Woolf’s novel, it is about a boy who becomes a man who becomes a woman. Spanning 400 years, it is a filmed essay about escape . Girls don’t inherit, so when Orlando becomes a woman she is told she may as well be dead. To all presiding purposes, she does not exist.” The lavish period film from filmmaker Sally Potter was nominated for two Academy Awards in the costume and design categories.

In 1995 Swinton was the subject of bemused press reports for her participation in a conceptual art project at London’s Serpentine Gallery. For seven days in a row she climbed into a glass box and slept—or appeared to sleep—for eight hours a day. When another Guardian journalist asked why she did it, she cited “idleness,” as the reason. “I’m very tired at the moment, I’ve been working hard . And I am fascinated that people in this country tend to be much more attentive to people when they’re asleep or stricken or dying or dead.” She noted further that there was also the idea that, “lying down in public [is] an aggressive act,” she told the same interviewer, Simon Hattenstone. “You walk through London and see people lying down in doorways and you see people get so angry.”

In the late 1990s Swinton appeared in some roles that other female thespians might have avoided altogether. She played a bisexual attorney in Female Perversions, a clueless mother in an incest-themed drama, The War Zone, and a bar hostess in the portrayal of real-life artistic debauchery in Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon. The last work dealt with the period in Irish painter Francis Bacon’s life when he took a man who had burgled his London house as his lover; a future James Bond, Daniel Craig, played the petty thief. In a more conventional role, Swinton appeared in 1997’s Conceiving Ada as Ada Lovelace, the mathematically gifted daughter of the poet Lord Byron who was involved in the development of what is usually termed the world’s first computer, called the “Difference Engine,” in the early 1840s.

Swinton began appearing in American-made fare early the next decade. She had been urged to try her luck in Hollywood by her agent, and recalled that she acquiesced only against her better judgment. “I remember saying there was really no point,” she told Entertainment Weekly’s Karen Valby. “What was there being made that could ever accommodate me?” To her surprise, Swinton was offered a juicy role as an unbalanced leader of a commune in The Beach, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as the tourist who seeks out the Thai beach compound. She earned a Golden Globe nomination for The Deep End in 2001, in which she was cast as Margaret, the wife of a Navy officer at sea. Her character struggles to cover up the death of her gay teenage son’s menacing lover at their water-front Lake Tahoe home, then finds herself involved in a blackmail plot. “As we see Margaret first, we think her weak,” wrote Mackenzie in the Guardian. “But she is, under duress, steel. What was remarkable in Swinton’s performance was her avoidance of climaxes of emotion. She insists on the ordinariness of her action, as she goes about, with a ceremonial informality, covering up for her child.”

Next, Swinton had a small role in Vanilla Sky, and appeared in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation with Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. In 2003, she starred in Young Adam, a tale of murder and sexual intrigue set in 1950s Scotland. Thumbsucker, released in 2005, was an unconventional film about a teenager who still retains the infantile habit. Most studios turned it down; Swinton signed on as the title character’s mother and the movie’s executive producer. Keanu Reeves had a role in it, as he did in a subsequent project for Swinton, Constantine. This 2005 big-budget movie was based on the graphic novel series “Hellblazer” and featured Swinton as the angel Gabriel, who in biblical lore served as God’s messenger.

Swinton’s pale skin made her an ideal choice for the part of the villainous White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, also released in 2005. Still determined to up-end convention whenever possible, Swinton had to convince the film’s producers that it was perfectly acceptable for a bad witch to have light-colored hair. In 2006, she played a pregnant forensic psychologist given the task of analyzing the motives of a teenager accused of hiding her pregnancy and killing the newborn in Stephanie Daley. A year later she took on the title role in Julia as a con artist and child kidnapper.

Another release from 2007 which earned Swinton terrific reviews was as an unbalanced lawyer in Michael Clayton. The title character is played by George Clooney and is a corporate “fixer” hired to clean up potentially embarrassing situations. Swin-ton was cast as Karen Crowder, the corporate counsel for a major agribusiness corporation. “A Lady Macbeth in pumps and discreet pearls, Karen has pledged her troth to her corporate masters,” declared New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis. “She’s a cliché—brittle, sexless, friendless, cheerless and all the rest—but what makes her work is her unnerving banality, visible in the blank canvas of a face that looks untouched by gentleness or empathy. This is a pitiful creature, as unloved by her writer-director creator as by the genius actress who plays her.” Swinton won her first Oscar for the role in early 2008.

At the BAFTA Awards, Swinton was accompanied by a 30year-old German-born artist named Sandro Kopp, who worked on the Narnia film with Swinton. Kopp was also with her at the Academy Awards later that winter, which prompted a minor flurry of tabloid gossip. When she and Kopp arrived at the house that Swinton shares with John Byrne, the father of her son-and-daughter twins born in 1998, she was confronted by a phalanx of journalists and photographers. “What is true is that John and I live here with our children and Sandro is sometimes here with us and we travel the world together,” the perennially unflappable Swinton told the press, according to the Sunday Times. “We are all a family. What you must also know is that we are all very happy. Sandro is visiting now. As you can see, we are all putting our luggage into the house together.”

Swinton’s apparent aversion to more conventional roles, both on film and in real life, was well-documented before the reports of the “love triangle” appeared in the tabloids, but a 2001 interview she gave to a journalist for the Edinburgh-based Scotsman, Alastair McKay, seemed eerily prophetic. She said that even as a very young child she knew she was different from her family and peers, and told McKay that indeed, she had forged her own path— but the alternative would have been equally challenging to her, which she explained would have been “to make sure that you are following the script, that you are wearing the right things and you are marrying the right person, and buying the right car, and doing the right job and eating at the right restaurant. Or whatever those things are: having the right amount of children at exactly the right time, and the right relationships with everybody. That must be a hell of an effort.”