Tilda Swinton is a pretty unconventional kind of movie star. The daughter of a Scottish Major-General and one-time classmate of Princess Diana, she got her start acting in experimental theater and at the Royal Shakespeare Company before going on to become a muse of British iconoclast Derek Jarman. Over time, she’s featured in performance art (including sleeping in a glass box in the Serpentine Gallery in London for a week), worked with fashion designers, founded a traveling film festival in the Scottish Highlands, and even appeared on an album by pop eccentric Patrick Wolf. Not exactly Julia Roberts, right?
But all the same, she’s become a household name, a favorite of auteurs like Jim Jarmusch, David Fincher and the Coen Brothers, and has cropped up in blockbusters from Danny Boyle‘s “The Beach” to the “Chronicles of Narnia” series. And most importantly, she’s one of our finest actors, winning an Oscar in 2008 for her supporting turn in “Michael Clayton,” and seeking out the finest directors the world over, from Bela Tarr to Spike Jonze. For her latest film, it seems that she’s found another directorial soulmate in Lynne Ramsay for “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” As a mother struggling with the titular child, who seems to have been born bad to the bone, she gives arguably the best performance in her career, and it seemed as good a time as any to look over that eclectic, wonderful body of work, of which we’re sure there’s much more to come. Check out our five favorite Swinton performances below.
“Orlando” (1992)
Though her cinematic collaboration with Derek Jarman was already well underway by this point and her theatre career taking off in parallel, it was another arthouse darling, Sally Potter, who would provide Swinton with what can probably be judged her breakout role. In Orlando, the undying, eternally youthful aristocrat who lives for centuries as a man before turning into a woman overnight, Swinton found a part that, though based on Virginia Woolf‘s 1928 novel, could have been written for her. And not just because of the sexual ambiguity and gender politics that it explores. Swinton is impressive as a man, but this is not a “Crying Game” or “Boys Don’t Cry“-style bait-and-switch; the point of the performance is never to fool you. Instead, Potter wisely exploits that other essential trait of Swinton as an actor, her David Bowie-like otherworldliness (if the word “androgynous” has any rival as adjective of choice for Swinton, it might be “unearthly” — small wonder she has variously played an immortal, a witch and the archangel Gabriel during her career). This alienness, this odd intelligence, fits the character like a glove so that moments, like when the Lady Orlando realises she needs to turn sideways in order for her wide skirts to fit through a doorway, become not just gimmicky symptoms of sexual transformation but relatable instances of feeling like a strange creature trying to fit into the “normal” world. “Orlando” is a visually sumptuous, sometimes impenetrable, sometimes delightful treat, but its greatest coup is in eliciting from Swinton an almost-definitive early role that fully exploits the many facets of her unique and fascinating actorly persona. And even lets her wink at the camera while doing it.