5 megastar British faces honoured by the BFI — but can you name them?
Yes, all these pictures really are her — the ultra-versatile actress who’s just been honoured with a BFI Fellowship. But, as BRIAN VINER reveals, she’s been hiding her true self from the limelight since childhood
TILDA Swinton is hardly ever upstaged. Until recently, that is. She was typically wonderful as a posh, caring but emotionally stifled mother in last year’s film The Souvenir, yet the newcomer who played her daughter drew most of the attention.
That was Honor Swinton Byrne, her daughter in real life. Naturally, Swinton was happy in that instance to be nudged out of the limelight, but then the same instinct has stayed with her since childhood.
at West Heath, the exclusive boarding school where lady diana Spencer was a friend (they remained in contact until diana’s marriage in 1981), she was a champion sprinter without ever caring whether she won or lost.
Her impressive pedigree — her late father was Major-General Sir John Swinton, lordlieutenant of Berwickshire, and she was fully expected to marry a duke — makes her the least likely of movie stars (she drives a Skoda) and never one to make a fuss.
So although she has pronounced herself ‘very happy and touched’ by this week’s news that she is to receive the huge accolade of a British Film institute Fellowship, she probably would rather not have all the hoopla. She is a glorious contradiction, protecting her privacy fiercely, yet it is hard to think of an actress so willing to flaunt herself on screen.
She has never minded nudity (or lesbianism, as in the 1996 thriller Female Perversions) and embraces her almost translucent, somewhat androgynous beauty to the extent that in the brilliant black comedy a Bigger Splash (2015), in which she played a rock star recovering from throat surgery, she conspicuously drew inspiration from david Bowie.
(They were friends, incidentally, as well as lookalikes. it is said that he once saw himself in some pictures from a fashion shoot he couldn’t recall doing. it was her.)
There is surely no actor or actress working in the movies as versatile as Tilda Swinton. arguably, there never has been.
FOR not only does she inhabit a startling variety of roles — witch, robot, vampire, angel, nobleman, duchess — but she often does so in disguise. She is the living antithesis of the notion that a movie star’s face is her fortune.
Unlike Margot robbie or Scarlett Johansson, both nominated for oscars this week, Swinton actually trades on her remarkable chameleon quality, while continuing to steal the show even when she is all but unrecognisable as herself. She did so as an elderly dowager in Wes anderson’s delicious The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), as a bitchy magazine editor in 2015’s Trainwreck, and as a pipe-smoking male psychoanalyst in the 2018 horror film Suspiria.
(She rather enjoys playing men; one of her most notable early film roles was the precious titular nobleman in the 1992 film orlando, a fellow who might these days be described as non-binary).
in all those films, if you hadn’t seen the credits you wouldn’t have known it was her. She is that rarest of beasts, a film star apparently without ego. She is sometimes described as her generation’s Meryl Streep, but it is debatable whether even the great Streep has consistently challenged herself as Swinton has, or can boast such an eclectic mix of characters.
and she nails it every time, not least as a chillingly but hilariously convincing vampire in Jim Jarmusch’s 2013 comedy only lovers left alive. a fondness for quirky arthouse pictures does not stop her from throwing herself into Hollywood blockbusters, and even taking moolah from Marvel.
Her performance as The ancient one was one of the best things about doctor Strange (2016), notwithstanding the daft hullabaloo that erupted over the casting of a white Scottish woman as a Tibetan mystic. like many screen greats, she makes average or even downright poor films worth seeing.
i didn’t care much for another Jarmusch picture, last year’s zombie comedy The dead don’t die, but if there was a reason to see it, it was Swinton as a weirdo undertaker with a strange fondness for martial arts.
it’s sad that neither Bowie, nor her early mentor, director derek Jarman, are still around to see her honoured by the BFI. But the rest of us can consider ourselves lucky to have her, in whatever clothes she is wearing, whatever prosthetics she is sporting.
and the best thing about her, as she prepares to receive an award normally bestowed on people at the very tail-end of their careers, is that she’s not yet 60.
There’s plenty of the singular Tilda Swinton still to come.