Tilda Swinton

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Tilda Swinton
Swinton in 2018
Born
Katherine Matilda Swinton

(1960-11-05) 5 November 1960 (age 63)
London, England
EducationNew Hall, Cambridge (BA)
OccupationActress
Years active1984–present
WorksFull list
Partners
Children2, including Honor Swinton Byrne
Parent
FamilySwinton
AwardsFull list

Katherine Matilda Swinton (born 5 November 1960) is a British actress. Known for her roles in

British Academy Film Award, in addition to nominations for three Golden Globe Awards. In 2020, The New York Times ranked her as one of the greatest actors of the 21st century.[1]

Swinton began her career by appearing in

British Academy Scotland Award
for Best Actress.

Swinton's performance in

Michael Clayton (2007) won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Prior to this, she appeared in the film Constantine (2005), and subsequently had roles in Julia (2008) and I Am Love (2009). She gained acclaim for her performance in Lynne Ramsay
's
Ancient One in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. She is also known for her roles in the Wes Anderson films Moonrise Kingdom (2012), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Isle of Dogs (2018), The French Dispatch (2021), and Asteroid City
(2023).

In 2006, Swinton was awarded an honorary degree by the Edinburgh Napier University for her services to performing arts.[2] She was awarded the Richard Harris Award by the British Independent Film Awards in recognition of her contributions to the British film industry. In 2013, she was given a special tribute by the Museum of Modern Art.[3] In 2020, Swinton was awarded the British Film Institute Fellowship for her "daringly eclectic and striking talents as a performer and filmmaker and recognises her great contribution to film culture, independent film exhibition and philanthropy."[4]

Early life and education

Katherine Matilda Swinton was born on 5 November 1960 in London, the daughter of Judith Balfour (née Killen; 1929–2012) and

botanist John Hutton Balfour.[9] The Swintons are an ancient Scots family who can trace their lineage to the 9th Century.[10] Swinton considers herself "first and foremost" a Scot.[11]

Swinton attended three

independent schools: Queen's Gate School in London, the West Heath Girls' School, and also Fettes College for a brief period.[12] West Heath was a boarding school, where she was a classmate and friend of Lady Diana Spencer, the future Princess of Wales.[7] As an adult, Swinton has spoken out against boarding schools, stating that West Heath was "a very lonely and isolating environment" and that she thinks boarding schools "are a very cruel setting in which to grow up and I don't feel children benefit from that type of education. Children need their parents and the love parents can provide."[13] Swinton spent two years as a volunteer in South Africa and Kenya before university.[14]

In 1983, Swinton graduated from New Hall at the University of Cambridge with a degree in social and political sciences. While at Cambridge, she joined the Communist Party;[15] she later joined the Scottish Socialist Party. It was in college that Swinton began performing on stage.[a][17]

Career

1984–2004: Rise to prominence

Swinton joined the

Gothic novel by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her first film was Caravaggio in 1986, directed by Derek Jarman. In 1987, Swinton starred along Bill Paterson in Peter Wollen's Friendship's Death, she played a female extraterrestrial robot on a peace mission to Earth.[21][22] In 1988, Swinton was a member of the jury at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival.[23]

Swinton went on to star in several Jarman films, including The Last of England (1987),[24] War Requiem (1989)[24] opposite Laurence Olivier, and Edward II (1991),[24] for which she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 1991 Venice Film Festival.[25] She performed in the performance art piece Volcano Saga by Joan Jonas in 1989. The 28-minute video art piece is based on a 13th-century Icelandic Laxdæla Saga, and it tells a mythological story of a young woman whose dreams tell of the future.

Swinton played the title role in

androgynous style. Swinton later reflected on the role in an interview accompanied by a striking photo shoot. "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 playful, androgynous French artist Claude Cahun: "Cahun looked at the limitlessness of an androgynous gesture, which I've always been interested in."[26]

In 1993, she was a member of the jury at 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 incorrectly credited to Cornelia Parker, whom Swinton invited to collaborate for the installation in London. The performance, titled The Maybe, was repeated in 1996 at the Museo Barracco in Rome and in 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[28] In 1996, she appeared in the music video for Orbital's "The Box
".

Recent years have seen Swinton move toward mainstream projects, including the leading role in the American film

2009 Venice International Film Festival

2005–2015: Career breakthrough

Swinton has collaborated with the fashion designers

In July 2008, Swinton founded the film festival

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 titled Cinema Is Everywhere. The festival was repeated in 2011.[39][40]

Swinton at the 2013 Deauville American Film Festival

She had a starring role as the eponymous character in Erick Zonca's Julia, which premiered at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival and saw a U.S. release in May 2009.[41][42][43] She starred in the film adaptation of the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, released in October 2011. She portrayed the mother of the title character, a teenage boy who commits a high school massacre.[44] In 2012, she was cast in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive.[45] The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 23 May 2013, and was released in the U.S. in the first half of 2014. She played Mason in the 2014 sci-fi film Snowpiercer.[46] Also in 2012, Swinton appeared in Doug Aitken's SONG 1, an outdoor video installation created for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. In November of the same year, she and Sandro Kopp made cameo appearances in episode 6 of the BBC comedy Getting On.

She co-founded Drumduan Upper School in

Steiner School, whose students graduate at age 14. They founded Drumduan partly to allow their children to continue their Steiner educations with neither grading nor tests.[47] Swinton resigned as a director of Drumduan in April 2019.[48]

In February 2013, she played the part of David Bowie's wife in the promotional video for his song "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)", directed by Floria Sigismondi. In 2013, she was named as one of the 50 best-dressed over 50 by The Guardian.[49] In 2015, she starred in Luca Guadagnino's thriller A Bigger Splash, opposite Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenaerts and Ralph Fiennes.[50] Also in 2015, she played Dianne, Amy Schumer's character's editor on S'Nuff Magazine, in Trainwreck.

2016–present

Swinton portrayed the

surrealist A24 comedy Problemista and David Fincher's action thriller The Killer
both released in 2023.

Personal life

Although born in London and having attended various schools in England, Swinton describes her nationality as Scottish,[62] citing her childhood, growing up in Scotland and Scottish aristocratic family background.[63] In 1997, Swinton gave birth to twins, Honor and Xavier Swinton Byrne, with John Byrne, a Scottish artist and playwright.[64] She moved to Scotland in 1997,[65][66] and as of 2023 she lives in Nairn,[67] overlooking the Moray Firth in the Highland region of Scotland, with her children and partner Sandro Kopp, a German painter, with whom she has been in a relationship since 2004.[68][69] In 2018, Swinton stated her support for Scottish independence.[63]

Swinton signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely" and that the arresting of film makers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects."[70][71]

In a 2021 interview with Vogue, Swinton mentioned that she identifies as queer. She was quoted as saying, "I'm very clear that queer is actually, for me anyway, to do with sensibility. I always felt I was queer – I was just looking for my queer circus, and I found it. And having found it, it's my world." She said that her collaborations with several creative visionaries helped her to find a sense of familiar belonging.[72] In a 2022 profile by The Guardian, she stated, "It just so happened I'd also been a queer kid – not in terms of my sexual life, just odd."[73]

In January 2022, Swinton revealed she is recovering from long COVID, with symptoms including having trouble getting out of bed, a bad cough, vertigo, and memory loss; she is also considering quitting acting to "retrain as a palliative carer", informed both by the trauma of living through the AIDS epidemic in the UK – Swinton mentions feeling a similarity between her experiences and those of the characters in Russell T Davies' 2021 TV drama miniseries It's a Sin – and "witnessing the loving support her parents received from professional carers at the end of their lives, and the impact it had on her."[73]

Filmography and accolades

Swinton at the 2012 British Academy Film Awards

Swinton has amassed a prolific list of credits, including over sixty film roles and a dozen television appearances.[74][75][76]

Throughout her career, Swinton has also received several accolades, including the

.

In 2020, Swinton was awarded the British Film Institute Fellowship for her "daringly eclectic and striking talents as a performer and filmmaker and recognises her great contribution to film culture, independent film exhibition and philanthropy."[4] Also in 2020, The New York Times ranked her thirteenth on its list of "The Greatest Actors of the 21st Century".[1]

In November 2022, she was presented with the 2022 FIAF Award "for her work on the preservation and promotion of archive film, film history and women's role in it".[77]

Notes

  1. ^ Among these early performances was a participation of Swinton in one of the earliest sketches written by the yet-to-become famous comic duo Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, during their Footlights collaboration years at Cambridge. As Stephen Fry recalled, during a public talk he gave regarding his autobiography about those early career days, that was a sketch about an American courtroom, which was to be played by Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie themselves, and needed someone to be the judge.[16]

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External links