British actress (born )
Katherine Matilda Swinton (born 5 November ) is a British actress. She is known for playing eccentric and enigmatic characters, often working with auteur directors. She has received various accolades, including an Academy Award and a British Academy Film Award as well as nominations for four Golden Globe Awards. In , The New York Times ranked her as one of the greatest actors of the 21st century.[1]
Swinton began her career by appearing in Derek Jarman's experimental films Caravaggio (), The Last of England (), War Requiem (), and The Garden (). Swinton won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for her portrayal of Isabella of France in Edward II (). She next starred in Sally Potter's Orlando () and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for her performance in The Deep End (), followed by appearances in Vanilla Sky (), Adaptation (), and Young Adam ().
Swinton won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a general counsel in the legal thriller Michael Clayton (). She has also acted in films such as Constantine (), Burn After Reading (), I Am Love (), We Need to Talk About Kevin (), Only Lovers Left Alive (), Snowpiercer (), Suspiria (), Memoria (), The Eternal Daughter (), and The Room Next Door (). Swinton has also gained popular recognition for playing the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia series (–) and the Ancient One in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. She is also known for her roles in the Wes Anderson films Moonrise Kingdom (), The Grand Budapest Hotel (), Isle of Dogs (), The French Dispatch (), and Asteroid City ().
In , 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 , she was given a special tribute by the Museum of Modern Art.[3] Swinton was awarded the British Film Institute Fellowship and the Honorary Golden Lion in [4]
Katherine Matilda Swinton was born on 5 November in London, the daughter of Judith Balfour (née Killen; –) and Sir John Swinton (–), the Laird of Kimmerghame House. She has three brothers.[5] Her father was a retired major-general in the British Army, and was Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire from to Her mother was Australian.[6][7][8] Her paternal great-grandfather was a Scottish politician and herald, George Swinton, and her maternal great-great-grandfather was the Scottish botanistJohn Hutton Balfour.[9] The Swintons are an ancient Scots family whose members 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 , 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]
Swinton joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in , appearing in Measure for Measure.[18] She also worked with the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, starring in Mann ist Mann by Manfred Karge in [19][20] On television, she appeared as Julia in the mini-series Zastrozzi: A Romance based on the Gothic novel by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her first film was Caravaggio in , directed by Derek Jarman. In , 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 , 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 (),[24]War Requiem ()[24] opposite Laurence Olivier, and Edward II (),[24] for which she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival.[25] She performed in the performance art piece Volcano Saga by Joan Jonas in The 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 Orlando (), Sally Potter's film version of the novel by Virginia Woolf. The part allowed Swinton to explore matters of gender presentation onscreen, which reflected her lifelong interest 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 s playful, androgynous French artist Claude Cahun: "Cahun looked at the limitlessness of an androgynous gesture, which I've always been interested in."[26]
In , she was a member of the jury at the 18th Moscow International Film Festival.[27] In , with producer Joanna Scanlan, Swinton developed a performance/installation live art piece in 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 at the Museo Barracco in Rome and in at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[28] In , 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 The Deep End (), in which she played the mother of a gay son she suspects of killing his boyfriend. For this performance, she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. She appeared as a supporting character in the films The Beach (),[24] featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Vanilla Sky (), and as the archangel Gabriel in Constantine. Swinton appeared in the British films The Statement () and Young Adam (). For her performance in the latter film, she received the British Academy Scotland Award for Best Actress.[29][30]
Swinton has collaborated with the fashion designers Viktor & Rolf; she was the focus of their One Woman Show , in which they made all the models look like copies of Swinton, and she read a poem (of her own) that included the line "There is only one you. Only one".[31] In , Swinton performed as the White Witch Jadis,[32] in the film version of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and as Audrey Cobb in the Mike Mills film adaptation of the novel Thumbsucker. Swinton later had cameos in Narnia's sequels The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In August , she opened the new Screen Academy Scotland production centre in Edinburgh.[33] In , Swinton's performance as Karen Crowder in Michael Clayton earned her both a British Academy Film Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role as well as the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the 80th Academy Awards, the film's sole win from the latter association.[34][35][36]
In July , Swinton founded the film festival Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams.[37] The event took place in a ballroom in Nairn on Scotland's Moray Firth in August. Swinton next appeared in the Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading. She was cast in the role of Elizabeth Abbott in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, alongside Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. She collaborated with artist Patrick Wolf on his album The Bachelor, contributing four spoken word pieces.[38] Also in , she and Mark Cousins embarked on a project where they mounted a 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 [39][40]
She had a starring role as the eponymous character in Erick Zonca's Julia, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and saw a U.S. release in May [41][42][43] She starred in the film adaptation of the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, released in October She portrayed the mother of the title character, a teenage boy who commits a high school massacre.[44] In , she was cast in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive.[45] The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 23 May , and was released in the U.S. in the first half of She played Mason in the sci-fi film Snowpiercer.[46] Also in , 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 Findhorn, Scotland in with Ian Sutherland McCook. Swinton and McCook both had children who attended the Moray Steiner School, whose students graduate at age 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 [48]
In February , 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 , she was named as one of the 50 best-dressed over 50 by The Guardian.[49] In , she starred in Luca Guadagnino's thriller A Bigger Splash, opposite Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenaerts and Ralph Fiennes.[50] Also in , she played Dianne, Amy Schumer's character's editor on S'Nuff Magazine, in Trainwreck.
Swinton portrayed the Ancient One in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in the film Doctor Strange and the film Avengers: Endgame.[51][52][53][54] Swinton starred in Luca Guadagnino's remake of the horror film Suspiria.[55][56][57] She played several roles, and was credited as Lutz Ebersdorf. She was ranked one of the best dressed women in by fashion website Net-a-Porter.[58] In , Swinton starred as newspaper writer J.K.L. Berensen in the Wes Anderson anthology film The French Dispatch,[59] and as Jessica Holland in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's first English-language film, Memoria.[60] In she starred in George Miller's fantasy film Three Thousand Years of Longing and voiced Wood Sprite and Death in the animated film Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. Also that year she played dual roles of mother and daughter in Joanna Hogg's gothic drama The Eternal Daughter (). Richard Brody of The New Yorker praised Swinton's performance describing the acting feat as a "tour de force".[61] The following year she reunited with Wes Anderson for the film Asteroid City (). Swinton starred in Julio Torres's surrealistA24 comedy Problemista and David Fincher's action thriller The Killer both released in
In Swinton had a cameo in the Amazon Prime series The Boys, in which she voiced Ambrosius, the Deep's octopus lover.[62]
Although born in London and having attended various schools in England, Swinton describes her nationality as Scottish,[63] citing her childhood, growing up in Scotland and Scottish aristocratic family background.[64] In , Swinton gave birth to twins, Honor and Xavier Swinton Byrne, with John Byrne, a Scottish artist and playwright.[65] She moved to Scotland in ,[66][67] and as of she lives in Nairn,[68] 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 [69][70] In , Swinton stated her support for Scottish independence.[64] In October , she criticized Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip and called for a ceasefire.[71]
Swinton signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival because of sexual abuse charges filed against him in a incident. The petition argued that his detention undermined the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely" and that the arrest of filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects".[72][73]
In a 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.[74] In a 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."[75]
In January , 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 also stated that she was considering quitting acting to "retrain as a palliative carer", informed both by the trauma of living through the AIDS epidemic in the UK (feeling a similarity between her experiences and those of the characters in Russell T Davies's 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."[75]
Main articles: Tilda Swinton filmography and List of awards and nominations received by Tilda Swinton
Swinton has amassed a prolific list of credits, including over sixty film roles and a dozen television appearances.[76][77][78] Swinton has also received several accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the British Academy Scotland Award for Best Actress, the British Academy Film Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, in addition to nominations for five Critics' Choice Awards and three Golden Globe Awards.
In , 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 , The New York Times ranked her thirteenth on its list of "The Greatest Actors of the 21st Century".[1] In November , she was presented with the FIAF Award "for her work on the preservation and promotion of archive film, film history and women's role in it".[79]