Biography for
Tilda Swinton More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

5 November 1960, London, England, UK

Birth Name

Katherine Matilda Swinton

Nickname

Swilda

Height

5' 10½" (1.79 m)

Mini Biography

The iconoclastic gifts of the visually striking and fiercely talented Scottish actress Tilda Swinton, who was born on November 5th, 1960, have been appreciated by a more international audience of late. Born into a patrician military family, she was educated at an English and a Scottish boarding school. Tilda subsequently studied Social and Politcal Science at Cambridge University and graduated in 1983 with a degree in English Literature. During her time as a student, she performed countless stage productions and proceeded to work for a season in the Royal Shakespeare Company. A decided rebel when it came to the arts, she left the company 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' "Screenplay: Man to Man: Another Night of Rubbish on the Telly (#7.5)" (1992). In 1985 the pale-skinned, carrot-topped actress began a professional association with gay experimental director Derek Jarman. She continued to live and work with Jarman for the next nine years, developing seven critically acclaimed films. Their alliance would produce stark turns, such as turner-prize nominated Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1988), The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), and Wittgenstein (1993). Jarman succumbed to complications from AIDS in 1994. His untimely demise left a devastating void in Tilda's life for quite some time. Her most notable performance of that period however comes from a non-Jarman film: For the title role in Orlando (1992), her nobleman character lives for 400 years while changing sex from man to woman. The film, which Swinton spent years helping writer/director Sally Potter develop and finance, continues to this day to have a worldwide devoted fan following. Over the years she has preferred art to celebrity, opening herself to experimental projects with new and untried directors and mediums, delving into the worlds of installation art and cutting-edge fashion. Consistently off-centered roles in Female Perversions (1996), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), Teknolust (2002), Young Adam (2003), Broken Flowers (2005) and Béla Tarr's The Man from London (2007) have only added to her mystique. Hollywood too has picked up on this notoriety and, since the birth of her twins in 1997, she has successfully moved between the deep-left-field art-house and quality Hollywood blockbusters. The thriller The Deep End (2001), earned her a number of critic's awards and her first Golden Globe nomination. Such mainstream U.S. pictures as The Beach (2000/I) with Leonardo DiCaprio, fantasy epic Constantine (2005) with Keanu Reeves, her Oscar-decorated performance in Michael Clayton (2007) alongside George Clooney and of course her iconic White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) have cemented her place as one of cinema's most outstanding women.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Trivia

Lives 16 miles east of Inverness in Nairn, Scotland, with her partner Sandro Kopp (an artist of some note) and her children, Xavier and Honor Byrne, whose father is Scottish painter and playwright John Byrne.

Mother is Australian.

Has three brothers.

Daughter of Major-General Sir John Swinton, whose ancestral home has been within the family since the 9th century.

Functioned as the muse and mascot of Dutch fashion designers Viktor and Rolf, who made an entire collection inspired by her (2003).

Her family is one of the oldest in Scotland.

Does not always play women; she has played Mozart on stage, an Elizabethan nobleman in Orlando (1992) and an androgynous angel, Gabriel, in Constantine (2005).

The father of her children, John Byrne, is a Scottish artist and writer.

While at Cambridge University, she appeared in student productions of plays such as "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Duchess of Malfi" and "The Comedy of Errors".

Won the Venice Film Festival award for Edward II (1991).

Member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival 1988.

Attended West Heath Girls' School, with Princess Diana as one of her classmates, and later Fettes College.

Since 2004, she has been in a relationship with Sandro Kopp, a painter from New Zealand.

Lived in Germany when she was a child because her father was posted there.

Spent two years in South Africa and Kenya as a voluntary worker in children's schools, before studying at Cambridge.

On her days off from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), she could be seen on-set, offering encouragement to her young co-stars.

Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1998.

Was member of the dramatic jury at the Sundance Film Festival in 2003.

Reached great artistic acclaim through her art installation/performance piece "The Maybe", for which she lay sleeping in a glass case on public display for a week, once at the Sepentine Gallery in London and once at the Museo Barracco in Rome. The piece is often erroneously credited to artist Cornelia Parker, whom Swinton invited to collaborate for the installation in London (1995).

Gave birth to twins, a daughter named Honor Byrne and a son named Xavier Byrne, in November 1997.

Was declared one of the ten best dressed women in the world by Vanity Fair in 2007.

Delivered the seminal State of Cinema Address in 2006 at the San Francisco International Film Festival, discussing the relationship of dreams, inarticulacy and film.

Can trace her paternal ancestry back 35 generations, to the ninth century. Her father, Major-General Sir John Swinton, is the former head of The Queen's Household Division and Lord-Lieutenant of Berwickshire.

In her acceptance speech, she said she would give the Oscar she won for Michael Clayton (2007) to her agent Brian Swardstrom.

In the top ten of the 2008 International Best-Dressed List.

Funded and held her own very successful Film Festival in her small Scottish highland home-town: The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams. A purely cinephile, glamour-free community event. For eight and a half days in August 2008, she personally introduced and showed an eclectic mix of classics and rare films from around the world. The admission price was 3 pounds for adults, 2 pounds for children or a plate of home-baked cakes.

Received a 90-minute tribute at the 2008 AFI (American Film Institute) Festival.

Contributed vocals on four tracks of the album 'The Bachelor' by glam-goth-folk singer/songwriter Patrick Wolf.

Performed live with Patti Smith on four nights of the 2005 London Meltdown Festival reading texts by Susan Sontag, Bertolt Brecht, William Blake and William S. Burroughs.

Head of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival in 2009.

She was heavily pregnant with her twins during filming Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998). She had to be filmed from the waist up.

Her favorite films are The School of Rock (2003), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Brüno (2009), 'I Know Where I'm Going!' (1945), Let the Right One In (2008), and Kiseye Berendj (1998).

She and Marion Cotillard are the only actors to receive a Golden Globe, SAG, BAFTA and Critics' Choice nomination for the same performance and then fail to be Oscar-nominated for it.

She stated her interest in appearing in a movie directed by Alain Resnais.

Personal Quotes

The other day, I was going through the airport security and I was searched by a male security guard. I'm very often referred to as "Sir" in elevators and such. I think it has to do with being this tall and not wearing much lipstick. I think people just can't imagine I'd be a woman if I look like this.

I'm basically interested in identity, and I still find fascinating the question, "How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?"

There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt, to me anyway, is what makes you human, and without doubt even the righteous lose their grip not only on reality but also on their humanity.

True, there is all sorts of religious extremism all over the place, but the reason for this partly has to do with the fascist attitudes and language of absolutism coming from Washington. It's challenging for people outside of America that Bush was re-elected. It means we're all going to have to work a lot harder to understand what so many more Americans than we thought really want. It's an identity shift in our minds about America and maybe for many Americans as well.

I don't work the future - I don't want to know what's coming. I don't feel I need any guarantees.

There's such an effort to try and explain people.

I sometimes think I was always left-wing. I know that sounds completely crazy, but I do know that I asked questions when I was about four, and I remember noticing that I wasn't getting an answer, and I remember it annoying me. Like why when we went to church on Sunday were we sitting upstairs and the people we'd been playing with the day before were sitting downstairs. And I noticed that my brothers were not asking these questions. I was aware that I was being embarrassing.

You're always playing yourself. It's all autobiography, whatever you're doing. It's using them as a kind of prism through which to throw something real about yourself, or something relaxed at least. Because the last thing you want is to look like you're acting.

I think I enjoy my work now even more simply because it's even easier than it was. It sounds sacrilegious to say that anything's a delight when you're away from your children, but the truth is that it is refreshing to only have yourself to dress in the morning, and to lie diagonally across the bed. Making films, going round the world on tour - all these crazy things that were so difficult before are so much easier than breastfeeding twins for 14 months that frankly it is a delight.

In order for the story to move forward, the character has to do certain things. You don't have to be anything but interested in telling the story.

I don't love the theatre. I'm just not one of them.

I am a soldier. I live a soldier's life when I'm working. That's how it feels to me, except I've got a slightly greater chance of survival.

[on the Oscar statuette] I have an American agent who is the spitting image of this. Really truly, the same shape head and, it has to be said, the buttocks.

I really just had a reverse Zoolander (2001) moment when I think I heard someone else's name and suddenly slowly heard my own. I'm still recovering from that moment, and I have absolutely no idea what happened after that. So, you know, you can tell me my dress fell off and I'd believe you, so don't be cruel. - on winning the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award.

[on how she believes Derek Jarman would have reacted to her winning an Oscar] I think he would have laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed... And then, he would ask me for the thing to melt it down into an artwork.

I'm not one of those performers who says the theatre is my great love. It really isn't. I'm not really interested in the theatre at all to be honest. I don't go to it. I find it really boring.

I don't think I'm courageous. One man's courage is another man's comfort zone. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) explored a taboo subject: the idea of a less than perfect mother. I knew that, when an audience watched the film, there would be a gag reflex at some point. But I was fascinated by the subject - it scared me, and that interested me.

When we were trying to finance We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), we would reference Rosemary's Baby (1968). It's every pregnant woman's nightmare to give birth to the devil. And every mother worries that she won't connect with her children. When I had my children, my manager asked me what project I wanted to work on next. I said, "Something Greek, perhaps Medea." Nobody quite understood what I meant, what I was feeling.

It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien.

[on We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)] I call this the feel-good film of the year, because parents will leave the cinema going, 'There but for the grace of God go I'. And people who don't have children will leave the cinema going, 'There but for the grace of God go I!. So it's a win-win situation, I reckon.

[on Delphine Seyrig] The most important thing to strive for is to never look like an actress. Just always look like a person. And that's exactly what Delphine achieved.

[on meeting Delphine Seyrig] She was so beautiful, but that wasn't the most important thing about her. She knew she was beautiful, and she'd stare at you as if to say, 'alright, have a look,' but then she drew you in much, much deeper.