Oh noooooo,” said Tilda Swinton in a low, dolorous tone, eyes cast to the ground, as she was handed the Oscar for best supporting actress in February 2008.
Those aren’t the words with which stars typically begin an acceptance speech on Tinseltown’s shiniest night – and sure enough, hers rallied from that muted beginning, via quirky, crowd-pleasing quips about George Clooney’s Batman and her agent’s arse, and closed with an exhilarated, “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
But for a brief second, the then 47-year-old British actor seemed almost apologetic, as if she’d crashed a party and hadn’t expected to be caught out. She was in Hollywood now, and couldn’t just melt back into the crowd. Oh no, indeed.
Sure enough, Swinton today is among the most ubiquitous names and faces in the business. In the past year, UK cinemagoers have already seen her in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II. She’ll shortly be seen opposite Idris Elba in George Miller’s oddball romantic fantasy Three Thousand Years of Longing, with further collaborations with Hogg (The Eternal Daughter) and Anderson (Asteroid City) set to premiere before the year is out, along with a voice role in Guillermo del Toro’s animated Pinocchio.
Earlier in her career, few would have bet on Swinton winning an Oscar, and not for want of admiration. Tall and physically startling, she had long held a reputation as one of the most gifted and fearless actors of her generation, but predominantly via projects that didn’t seem in any danger of breaking into the mainstream: entering the industry as a suitably avant-garde inspiration for Derek Jarman, she won best actress at Venice in 1991 for her rampantly sexualised interpretation of Isabella of France in his Edward II, and a year later turned further heads as Virginia Woolf’s gender-switching title character in Sally Potter’s film of Orlando. It wasn’t the first time she’d played with gender in performance: in 1987, her stage turn as a second world war widow assuming her husband’s identity in Manfred Karge’s Man to Man made enough of an impact to be filmed for the BBC’s ScreenPlay series a few years later.
Swinton had no formal acting training, having read political science at Cambridge while dabbling in student drama and joining the Royal Shakespeare Company a year after graduating. But it was with Jarman, with whom she made nine films in eight years, that she found both her craft and her outsider identity.
In a direct address to Jarman at the 2002 Edinburgh Film Festival, eight years after his death from Aids, she likened joining his company to joining the circus: “You were the first person I met who could gossip about St Thomas Aquinas and hold a steady camera at the same time, as you did at our first meeting.
“Our outfit was an internationalist brigade. Decidedly pre-industrial. A little loud, a lot louche. Not always in the best possible taste. And not quite fit, though it saddened and maddened us to recognise it, for wholesome family entertainment.”
Her first film role in 1986 was as the eponymous artist’s doomed lover in Jarman’s Caravaggio, the sensual intensity of her presence eclipsing the size of the part. Film-maker and critic Mark Cousins, later to be her close friend and collaborator, remembers the immediate impact of that first appearance: “Right from the start,” he told the Observer, “she knew that film acting is a visual rather than literary job.”
When she entered US cinema in 1996, it wasn’t through Hollywood or even awards-baiting prestige cinema, but in Susan Streitfeld’s audacious, psychoanalysis-based erotic drama Female Perversions. These were not the choices of someone out to be the next Meryl Streep.
In the earlier years of her career, either Swinton or casting directors (or perhaps both) were loath ever to see her as an everywoman. Critical descriptions of her work tend to hinge heavily on her extraordinary appearance, with her imposing height, pale, glass-cut features and (often as much on screen as in person) unusual, space-taking fashion sense often making viewers ascribe a certain cool, impermeable mystique to her work. If Swinton ever reads her publicity, she’s probably sick to death of words like “otherworldly,” “ethereal” or even “statuesque” – often a byword for women looking like supermodels. In Swinton’s case it casts her as walking sculpture, living art.
New York Times critic Vincent Canby was one of the few not to exoticise (or even alien-ise) Swinton like this. His review of Orlando – in which he forecast “a major international career” for her – noted that “she has a sweetness, gravity and intelligence about her that make the more bizarre events appear to be completely normal”.
For Cousins, it is “because she leapfrogs over the conventional way of doing things” that the perceived enigma of Swinton has been created. “She’s like the Road Runner in Chuck Jones’s cartoons: ahead, outrunning Wile E Coyote, the obvious or middlebrow,” he says. “In real life she’s practical – she stacked my dishwasher well – but even chatting over breakfast her brain is speeding.”
Eventually, a screen presence that is consistently arresting is going to be noticed by bigger industry players. At the turn of the century, after a decade and a half of dazzling and flummoxing fringe audiences, she appeared as a charismatic cult leader in Danny Boyle’s much-ballyhooed The Beach, a muddled adaptation of Alex Garland’s Gen-X bestseller that nonetheless felt stranger and more dangerous whenever she was on screen, commanding her minions with priestly assurance, and firmly coercing Leonardo DiCaprio’s character into having sex with her.
For all its oddities, it was a hit, and suddenly Swinton was in Hollywood demand as a creepy supporting cypher, whether as a cold techno-dystopian functionary opposite Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky (2001) or, a year later, as a brisk, soulless studio executive in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation or, absurdly, as the vengeful Archangel Gabriel in the lavish Keanu Reeves nonsense Constantine (2005). That same year, an appropriately icy turn as the White Witch in the blockbuster franchise-starter The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe made her a fixture in children’s nightmares for years to come – so much for being not quite fit for family entertainment. Still, she might have been even more frightening as a ruthlessly venal general counsel in the George Clooney legal thriller Michael Clayton, for which she won that once-improbable Oscar.
Swinton’s ascent to the A-list, however, has come at no expense to her creative curiosity. For every Chronicles of Narnia instalment or Marvel product or big-name collaboration with David Fincher or the Coen Brothers on her latter-day CV, there’s been an unpredictable risk: playing high melodrama in perfect Italian for Luca Guadagnino’s 2010 in I Am Love, collaborating with old schoolfriend Hogg on her reflexively autobiographical Souvenir films, finding an actorly state of being to match Weerasethakul’s experimental wavelength in Memoria.
Now often saving her most stylised, playful work for the big genre films, she’s grown more human, more knowable, as a performer in the smaller projects. In Erick Zonca’s 2008 Julia, she channels Gena Rowlands and gives what might be her best performance as an alcoholic trainwreck on a hopeless kidnap mission; in Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 We Need to Talk About Kevin, she essays every parent’s worst nightmare as a mother who never finds a way to bond with her son. Her onscreen identity remains mutable but vividly eccentric – enough so that her own unconventional personal life has never dominated conversations about her. Even suggestions she at one point shared a home and a menage a trois with her former partner, playwright John Byrne (who has denied this was ever the case), and her present one, artist Sandro Kopp, did not become a subject of tabloid fixation. For Swinton, it’s merely part of a complex picture.
This year, she’ll give us the full spectrum of her capabilities: she’s dreamily heightened, her emotions writ large, in Three Thousand Years of Longing; The Eternal Daughter, set to be unveiled at Venice next month, promises quiet contemplation; you need only hear her name in connection with Pinocchio to guess that she’s voicing the Blue Fairy. Beyond that, her to-do list includes new films with Fincher and documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer in his first fiction outing: she remains the auteur’s choice, though her career never feels authored by them.
I ask Cousins if he believes in the concept as actor as auteur, and if Swinton is one. He’s not sure. “You could say that all Marlon Brando films are Brando films, because of his presence and atmosphere, but I think Tilda is different,” he says. “People of course build films around her because of the scale of her talent, but she also likes to disappear in a film, or to go blank like Garbo goes blank at the end of Queen Christina. With Tilda you often don’t get big crescendos of acting: you get a dissolution, a void.”
For one of the most recognisable faces in the medium, shape-shifting has become a signature.
