| Date of Birth |
5 November
1960
, London, England, UK |
| Birth Name | Katherine Matilda Swinton |
| Nickname |
Swilda |
| Height |
5' 10½" (1.79 m) |
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 (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.
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