Home   >   Movie Stars   >   S   >   Tilda Swinton   >   More Biographies

More Tilda Swinton Bios & Profiles

 

The most recent Tilda Swinton biography is published on the main page.
 


Biography #2 (for Constantine)

Tilda Swinton is well known for her versatility and luminous screen presence. She most recently completed shooting the independent film Thumbsucker with Keanu Reeves, Vincent D'Onofrio and Vince Vaughn. Last year, she was seen in the controversial NC-17 rated, Scottish Beat murder mystery Young Adam, opposite Ewan McGregor.

Her most recent screen credits include The Statement, for director Norman Jewison, opposite Michael Caine; Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky, with Tom Cruise; Spike Jonze's Adaptation, with Nicholas Cage and Meryl Streep; the independent Sci-Fi film Teknolust; and the critically acclaimed drama The Deep End. She also starred in Possible Worlds, The Beach, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, Tim Roth's directorial debut The War Zone, Love is the Devil, Conceiving Ada and Female Perversions.

Swinton graduated from Cambridge University and quickly began to establish a reputation in theatre – joining the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her choice of roles for the stage definitely reflected her propensity for gender bending. She portrayed Mozart in Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri and also took a role as a working class woman who impersonates her dead husband during World War II in Manfred Karges' Man to Man. She went on to star in the film adaptation of Man to Man, directed by John Maybury in 1991.

Her seven collaborations with renowned director Derek Jarman began with his life of Caravaggio in 1985, and continued to include one of a beautiful collection of opera-inspired short films entitled Aria, The Last of England, War Requiem, The Garden and Edward II. She also took a small role in Jarman's film Wittgenstein. In 1992, Swinton gained international art house fame as the lead in Sally Potter's sumptuous and daring adaptation of Virginia Wolf's novel Orlando.

In 1995, Swinton devised a series of living art exhibitions entitled The Maybe, in which the performer lays motionless in a glass box for eight hours a day. Her London performance in sleeplike repose lasted a total of 56 hours at the Serpentine Gallery, witnessed by 22,000 people, became a national phenomenon and then moved to Rome where it was a similar sensation. She hopes to continue the presentations in other major cities.

2005 will see Tilda Swinton iconic as The White Witch in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, the first of the Narnia Chronicles, directed by Andrew Adamson; as the fourth in a series of Bill Murray's old flames in the as-yet-untitled new film by Jim Jarmusch; and in The Man From London, the new film by the Hungaroan master Bela Tarr.

Bio courtesy Warner Bros. for "Constantine" (05-May-2005)


Biography #3

Tilda Swinton made her mark in film with her extraordinary performance as Orlando in Sally Potter's 1993 film of the same name. Her subsequent film credits include Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions (1995), Lynn Hershmann-Leeson's Conceiving Ada (1997), John Maybury's Love is the Devil (1998) and Tim Roth's The War Zone (1999). She most recently completed a leading role in Robert Lepage's Possible Worlds.

A graduate of Cambridge University, Swinton joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-eighties and shortly after embarked on a lengthy collaboration with Derek Jarman. She received the Best Actress Volpi Cup at the 1991 Venice Film Festival for her performance in Jarman's production of Edward II. Between 1985 and 1992, she also appeared in Jarman's Caravaggio, The Last of England, War Requiem, The Garden and Wittgenstein.

Her extensive stage work in the eighties includes a number of plays directed by Stephen Unwin, among them Peter Arnott's White Rose (1985), Bertold Brecht's Die Massnahme and Manfred Karge's award-winning one-woman play Man to Man, later reprising her role in John Maybury's 1991 film version. In 1988, she played Mozart in Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri directed by Karge in Vienna, Berlin and London. On television, she appeared in the BBC-1 production of John Byrne's Your Cheatin' Heart.

In 1995 and 1996, she won international acclaim for The Maybe, a performance-art creation in which she spent seven days in a glass case, first at The Serpentine Gallery in London and then at Museo Barraceo in Rome. She also made a nine-minute film, Will We Wake, commissioned by BBC-2 and broadcast in December, 1998.

Bio courtesy Fox (01-Jan-2000)