Tilda Swinton
Katherine Matilda Swinton is a British actress. Known for her transformative performances of eccentric and enigmatic characters on stage and screen, she has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards, and a Volpi Cup, in addition to nominations for five Screen Actors Guild Awards and four Golden Globe Awards. In 2020, The New York Times ranked her as one of the greatest actors of the 21st century.
Swinton began her career by appearing in Derek Jarman's experimental films Caravaggio, The Last of England, War Requiem, and The Garden. For her portrayal of Isabella of France in Edward II, she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. She next starred in Orlando, Female Perversions, and The Beach, and was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of a desperate mother in The Deep End.
Swinton received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a corporate attorney in Michael Clayton. Other notable credits include Vanilla Sky, Adaptation, Young Adam, Constantine, Broken Flowers, Burn After Reading, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I Am Love, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Only Lovers Left Alive, Snowpiercer, Trainwreck, Suspiria, Memoria, The Eternal Daughter, and The Room Next Door. Swinton garnered mainstream recognition with her roles as the White Witch in the Chronicles of Narnia series and the Ancient One in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. She frequently collaborates with filmmaker Wes Anderson, appearing in Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch and Asteroid City.
Swinton has received various honours throughout her career, including a special tribute by the Museum of Modern Art in 2013, the British Film Institute Fellowship and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2020, and the Honorary Golden Bear in 2025.
Early life and education
Katherine Matilda Swinton was born on 5 November 1960 in London, the daughter of Sir John Swinton and Judith Balfour. She has three brothers. Her father was a retired major-general in the British Army, and was Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire from 1989 to 2000. Her father was Scottish and her mother was Australian. The Swintons are an ancient Scots family whose members can trace their lineage to the 9th century. Swinton considers herself "first and foremost" a Scot.Swinton attended three independent schools: Queen's Gate School in London, the West Heath Girls' School, and also Fettes College for a brief period. West Heath was a boarding school, where she was a classmate and friend of Lady Diana Spencer, the future Princess of Wales. 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." Swinton spent two years as a volunteer in South Africa and Kenya before university.
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; she later joined the Scottish Socialist Party. It was in college that Swinton began performing on stage.
Career
1980s: Early work
Swinton joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984, appearing in Measure for Measure. She also worked with the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, starring in No Son of Mine written and directed by Philippe Gaulier in 1985 and Mann ist Mann by Manfred Karge in 1987. On television, she appeared as Julia in the 1986 mini-series Zastrozzi, A Romance based on the 1810 Gothic novel Zastrozzi 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. In 1988, Swinton was a member of the jury at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival.Swinton went on to star in several Jarman films, including The Last of England, War Requiem opposite Laurence Olivier, and Edward II, for which she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 1991 Venice Film Festival. 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.
1990s: Rise to prominence
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 1920s playful, androgynous French artist Claude Cahun: "Cahun looked at the limitlessness of an androgynous gesture, which I've always been interested in."In 1993, she was a member of the jury at the 18th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1995, 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 1996 at the Museo Barracco in Rome and in 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1996, she appeared in the music video for Orbital's "The Box".
2000s: Career breakthrough
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, 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.Swinton has collaborated with the fashion designers Viktor & Rolf; she was the focus of their One Woman Show 2003, in which they made all the models look like copies of Swinton, and she read a poem that included the line, "There is only one you. Only one." In 2005, Swinton performed as the White Witch Jadis, 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 Narnias sequels The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In August 2006, she opened the new Screen Academy Scotland production centre in Edinburgh. In 2007, Swinton played ruthless corporate attorney Karen Crowder in Michael Clayton. Her performance earned her Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, Critics' Choice, BAFTA and Oscar nominations. She went on to win the BAFTA and Oscar.
In July 2008, Swinton founded the film festival Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams. The event took place in a ballroom in Nairn on Scotland's Moray Firth in August. Swinton next appeared in the 2008 Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading. She was cast in the role of wealthy British socialite Elizabeth Abbott in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring alongside Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. She collaborated with artist Patrick Wolf on his 2009 album The Bachelor, contributing four spoken word pieces. Also in 2009, she and 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. She also 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.
2010s: Continued acclaim
Swinton 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. In 2012, she was cast in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive. 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. 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. In 2014, she played secondary antagonist Minister Mason in Bong Joon Ho's post-apocalyptic action thriller film Snowpiercer. The film received critical acclaim and appeared on many film critics' top ten lists of 2014. She received a Critics' Choice nomination.She co-founded Drumduan Upper School in Findhorn, Scotland in 2013 with Ian Sutherland McCook. Swinton and McCook both had children who attended the Moray 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. Swinton resigned as a director of Drumduan in April 2019.
In February 2013, she played the part of David Bowie's wife in the promotional video for his song "The Stars ", directed by Floria Sigismondi. In 2013, she was named as one of the 50 best-dressed over 50 by The Guardian. In 2015, she starred in Luca Guadagnino's thriller A Bigger Splash, opposite Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenaerts and Ralph Fiennes. Also in 2015, 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 2016 film Doctor Strange and the 2019 film Avengers: Endgame. Swinton starred in Luca Guadagnino's 2018 remake of the horror film Suspiria. She played three roles, and was credited as Lutz Ebersdorf for one of them. She was ranked one of the best dressed women in 2018 by fashion website Net-a-Porter.