Author of her own mystique
British actor Tilda Swinton’s new films show the full spectrum of her capabilities as the most unconventional of Hollywood Alisters, writes
‘‘Oh noooooo,’’ said Tilda Swinton in a low, dolorous tone, eyes cast to the ground, as she was handed the Oscar for best supporting actress in February 2008.
Those aren’t the words with which stars typically begin an acceptance speech on
Tinseltown’s shiniest night — and sure enough, hers rallied from that muted beginning, via quirky, crowdpleasing quips about George Clooney’s Batman and her agent’s bottom, and closed with an exhilarated, ‘‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’’.
But for a brief second, the then 47yearold British actor seemed almost apologetic, as if she’d crashed a party and hadn’t expected to be caught out. She was in Hollywood now, and couldn’t just melt back into the crowd.
Sure enough, Swinton today is among the most ubiquitous names and faces in the business. In the past year, cinemagoers have already seen her in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria ,Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch
and Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II. She’ll shortly be seen opposite Idris Elba in George Miller’s oddball romantic fantasy Three Thousand Years of Longing,
with further collaborations with Hogg (The Eternal Daughter )and Anderson (Asteroid City )to premiere this year, along with a
Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in
voice role in Guillermo del Toro’s animated Pinocchio.
Earlier in her career, few would have bet on Swinton winning an Oscar, and not for want of admiration. She had long held a reputation as one of the most gifted and fearless actors of her generation, but predominantly via projects that didn’t seem in any danger of breaking into the mainstream. Entering the industry as a suitably avantgarde inspiration for Derek Jarman, she won best actress at Venice in 1991 for her rampantly sexualised interpretation of Isabella of France in his Edward II, and a year later turned further heads as Virginia Woolf’s genderswitching title character in Sally Potter’s film of Orlando.
Swinton had no formal acting training, having read political science at Cambridge while dabbling in student drama and joining the Royal Shakespeare Company a year after graduating. But it was with Jarman, with whom she made nine films in eight years, that she found both her craft and her outsider identity.
In a direct address to Jarman at the 2002 Edinburgh Film Festival, eight years after his death from Aids, she likened joining his company to joining the circus: ‘‘You were the first person I met who could gossip about St Thomas Aquinas and hold a steady camera at the same time, as you did at our first meeting.
‘‘Our outfit was an internationalist brigade. Decidedly preindustrial. A little loud, a lot louche. Not always in the best possible taste. And not quite fit, though it saddened and maddened us to recognise it, for wholesome family entertainment.’’
In the earlier years of her career, either Swinton or casting directors (or perhaps both) were loath ever to see her as an everywoman. Critical descriptions of her work tend to hinge heavily on her extraordinary appearance, with her imposing height, pale, glasscut features and unusual, spacetaking fashion sense often making viewers ascribe a certain cool, impermeable mystique to her work. If Swinton ever reads her publicity, she’s probably sick to death of words like
‘‘otherworldly’’, ‘‘ethereal’’ or even ‘‘statuesque’’ — often a byword for women looking like supermodels. In Swinton’s case it casts her as walking sculpture, living art.
New York Times critic Vincent Canby was one of the few not to exoticise (or even alienise) Swinton like this. His review of Orlando — in which he forecast ‘‘a major international career’’ for her — noted that ‘‘she has a sweetness, gravity and intelligence about her that make the more bizarre events appear to be completely normal’’.
Eventually, a screen presence that is consistently arresting is going to be noticed by bigger industry players. At the turn of the century, after a decade and a half of dazzling and flummoxing fringe audiences, she appeared as a charismatic cult leader in Danny Boyle’s muchballyhooed The Beach, a muddled adaptation of Alex Garland’s GenX bestseller that nonetheless felt stranger and more dangerous whenever she was on screen, commanding her minions with priestly assurance, and firmly coercing Leonardo DiCaprio’s character into having sex with her.
For all its oddities, it was a hit, and suddenly Swinton was in Hollywood demand as a creepy supporting cypher, whether as a cold technodystopian functionary opposite Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky(2001) or, a year later, as a brisk, soulless studio executive in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation or, absurdly, as the vengeful Archangel Gabriel in the lavish Keanu Reeves nonsense
Constantine (2005). That same year, an appropriately icy turn as the White Witch in the blockbuster franchisestarter The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe made her a fixture in children’s nightmares for years to come.
Still, she might have been even more frightening as a ruthlessly venal general counsel in the George Clooney legal thriller
Michael Clayton, for which she won that onceimprobable Oscar.
Swinton’s ascent to the Alist, however, has come at no expense to her creative curiosity. For every
Chronicles of Narnia instalment or Marvel product or bigname collaboration with David Fincher or the Coen Brothers on her latterday CV, there’s been an unpredictable risk: such as playing high melodrama in perfect Italian for Luca Guadagnino’s 2010 in
Am Love.
This year, she’ll give us the full spectrum of her capabilities: she’s dreamily heightened, her emotions writ large, in Three Thousand Years of Longing; The Eternal Daughter promises quiet contemplation; you need only hear her name in connection with
Pinocchio to guess that she’s voicing the Blue Fairy. Beyond that, her todo list includes new films with Fincher and documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer in his first fiction outing: she remains the auteur’s choice, though her career never feels authored by them. — Guardian News and Media
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