Katherine Matilda Swinton was born on 5 November 1960 in London, the daughter of Judith Balfour (née Killen; 1929–2012) and Sir John Swinton (1925–2018), 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 1989 to 2000. 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]
Swinton played the title role in Orlando (1992), 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."[26]
In 1993, she was a member of the jury at the 18th Moscow International Film Festival.[27] 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.[28] In 1996, 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 (2001), 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 (2000),[24] featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Vanilla Sky (2001), and as the archangel Gabriel in Constantine. Swinton appeared in the British films The Statement (2003) and Young Adam (2003). For her performance in the latter film, she received the British Academy Scotland Award for Best Actress.[29][30]
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.[47] Swinton resigned as a director of Drumduan in April 2019.[48]
In 2024 Swinton had a cameo in the Amazon Prime series The Boys, in which she voiced Ambrosius, the Deep's octopus lover.[62]
Personal life
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 1997, Swinton gave birth to twins, Honor and Xavier Swinton Byrne, with John Byrne, a Scottish artist and playwright.[65] She moved to Scotland in 1997,[66][67] and as of 2023 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 2004.[69][70] In 2018, Swinton stated her support for Scottish independence.[64] In October 2023, she criticized Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip and called for a ceasefire.[71]
Swinton signed a 2017 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 1977 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 2021 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 2022 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 2022, 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 2021 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]
In 2020, 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 2020, The New York Times ranked her thirteenth on its list of "The Greatest Actors of the 21st Century".[1] In November 2022, she was presented with the 2022 FIAF Award "for her work on the preservation and promotion of archive film, film history and women's role in it".[79]
Notes
^Among these early performances was a participation of Swinton in one of the earliest sketches written by the yet-to-become famous comic duo Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, during their Footlights collaboration years at Cambridge. As Stephen Fry recalled, during a public talk he gave regarding his autobiography about those early career days, that was a sketch about an American courtroom, which was to be played by Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie themselves, and needed someone to be the judge.[16]
^"An Evening with Stephen Fry Part 5". The American Book Center. 30 June 2011. Archived from the original on 22 February 2023. Retrieved 22 February 2023. ...so we cast this girl who I – we all – thought was good actress and was a friend of ours, Tilda Swinton, so she played the judge.
^Thompson, Lorna (3 September 2019). "School saved from closure". Forres Gazette. Archived from the original on 16 September 2019. Retrieved 13 January 2021.
^Cartner-Morley, Jess; Mirren, Helen; Huffington, Arianna; Amos, Valerie (28 March 2013). "The 50 best-dressed over 50s". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 23 June 2018. Retrieved 13 December 2016.
^Martin, Penny. "Tilda Swinton". The Gentlewoman. No. 5 (Spring & Summer 2012 ed.). Archived from the original on 5 October 2022. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
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