THE SNOW QUEEN
A Hollywood actress known for her frosty, androgynous looks, Tilda Swinton’s silverscreen fame has never been enough to keep her from her beloved Highlands, says Siobhan Synnot
The incredible success Tilda Swinton has seen in Hollywood won't keep her from her beloved Highlands
She’s played a vampire, a rock star, the mother of a murderous teenager, ruthless lawyer, a white witch and several men, making Tilda Swinton one of the most idiosyncratic and sought-after stars in Hollywood.
Yet at 59, despite accolades that include Oscars and Bafta awards, as well as a British Film Institute fellowship last month, Tilda Swinton considers her acting success to be an accident and a mystery. ‘I honestly never set out to have a career. I set out to have a life, which I have,’ she told broadcaster Charlie Rose in 2015.
‘I never set out to do most of the things that I’ve done and I’m doing. I certainly never set out to be an actor. I still find it embarrassing when I hear myself referred to as an actor – I expect real actors to stand up and protest.’
The daughter of Major-General Sir John Swinton, lord lieutenant of Berwickshire and former head of the Queen’s Household Division, Tilda Swinton was born in London and into privilege, complete with an ancestral castle owned by her family since the ninth century. Her family are related to Sir Walter Scott, who once said that he was honoured to be ‘a mere twig’ on the Swinton family tree.
When she was a student, she invited a teenage friend to meet her parents at their home in the Scottish Borders, where he accidentally committed the social faux pas of pointing a loaded shotgun at one of Tilda’s brothers during a shoot, and then turned up late for lunch, a casual meal for 20 guests. Asked to pass the relish by a famous peer of the realm, he instead dropped it onto a large plate, and smashed it. Tilda’s mother,
Lady Judith Swinton, gracefully assured him that the platter was ‘just some old thing of granny’s’ but according to the horrified guest, it was an antique dating from the Renaissance.
Tilda later said that her desire to perform was influenced by seeing paintings of her aristocratic ancestors. ‘It was significant for me seeing all these images of my face, but with a ruff or a big wig,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if that made me think of myself as a performer, but it helped me think of myself in the frame.’
As a child, her father told her she was a coward for listening to her own desires. Aged ten, she learned how to conceal her emotions by holding back tears on a train headed for boarding school. ‘Suddenly I was aware that nobody on the train would be able to know how miserable I felt because I wasn’t showing it, and I remember being very fascinated by that and imagining a life doing that,’ Swinton recalls. ‘That’s what I realised in that moment, which was that one had an interior life, and that everybody does. It was more to do with the activity of performance, the idea of expression. What would be expressive of my misery? Now, of course, I find that kind of contained emotion the most moving thing.’
Her school was in West Heath in Kent, where she was bullied and homesick but struck up a friendship with future Princess of Wales, Diana Spencer, that lasted until the Princess of Wales’ marriage in 1981. She also found some acceptance as a talented county-level sprinter until she heard two teachers haggling over which trial she should run in, pretended to sprain her ankle and never ran again. Instead, she appeared in school plays, and when she was accepted by Cambridge to study social and political science, joined a college theatre company.
She also joined the Communist Party, drawn to the idea of collective effort. Collaboration seems key to everything she does: after graduating, she performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Southampton Repertory, but says she didn’t like it. ‘I realised that the environment of that huge organisation just didn’t suit me. It was a little bit like joining IBM might be, and so I just learned really fast, really young that I didn’t want to be there.’
Her turning point was meeting the radical and subversive film-maker Derek Jarman, who cast her in his film Caravaggio. ‘The first few days were the only time I’ve ever felt remotely nervous in front of a camera,’ she remarks. ‘I asked Derek if I could have a look through the camera and that cured my apprehension pretty quickly. I realised it’s just a camera.’
The aristocrat and the auteur struck up a close friendship
and made seven mostly silent, improvised features and one short together. It was obvious even then that she was heading for great things.
‘She had technique, presence, physicality, intelligence and beauty – a voice of amazing resonance, that acting forehead and those amazing eyes,’ said a friend of them both. ‘She never tried to do “Estuary” vowels and she always dressed in a kind of gardening chic – looking like you’re going into the garden of your stately home. But there was nothing grand about her.’
During the eight years she worked with Jarman, she helped out with everything from refining the scripts to raising funds. Her family did not support her, and at one point her main income was betting on horse racing, after being tutored by the Swintons’ gardener on what to look for in a winning animal. One wager – one horse, named Devilry, running one race – ‘kept us for nearly a year’.
She worked with other arthouse directors, notably Sally Potter, who cast her in Orlando as an Elizabethan nobleman who starts out male, transitions to female and moves through the centuries largely untouched by the ravages of time. Swinton handled it all with ease, and it showed a career trajectory outside the Jarman films.
When Jarman died of complications from AIDS in 1994, she was set adrift by grief and withdrew for a while. When she returned to performing, she sought out new challenges, exhibiting herself lying in a glass case for a week at London’s Serpentine gallery in a 1995 performance piece The Maybe, produced in collaboration with the artist Cornelia Parker. She also went elsewhere in acting – to southeast Asia, for example, for Danny Boyle’s 2001 film The Beach, in which she played Sal, a charismatic commune leader.
‘The Beach is my experimental film,’ she admitted at the time. For some actors, that would suggest a small-scale, personal film; for Swinton it means the opposite. ‘My departure was to go to Thailand and make a film with Leonardo DiCaprio.’
She went on to appear with Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, with Nicolas Cage in the Oscar-winning Adaptation and played Ewan McGregor’s lover in Young Adam. However, her real break came when Michelle Pfeiffer had to back out of playing the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. With her hair dyed platinum, and her corset so tight that she had to be propped upright on a stand between takes, she proved inspirational casting as she channelled her legendary froideur into producing a supremely nasty ice-witch.
She seemed a less obvious choice for We Need to Talk About Kevin, the nightmare story of an American wife and mother whose son is monstrously sadistic, manipulative and cruel. ‘It’s the feel-good film of the year,’ she chuckled over her shoot with film-maker and fellow Scot Lynne Ramsay. ‘All the parents who see it think, “well I thought my kid was bad but what’s a little bit of substance abuse next to that?” And the people who don’t
“Her corset was so tight that she had to be propped upright on a stand between takes
have kids feel like they might leave it for a few more years.’
In 2007, she took a supporting role as a sharky lawyer in a twisty, clotted legal corruption thriller called Michael Clayton. Roles which suggest the frailties and anxiety behind a highgloss facade have become a specialty of Swinton’s, and this is one of her first and best versions of it. Her final breakdown scene may have been the work that won her the Oscar for best supporting actress – a trophy she promptly gave away to her agent. ‘I remember someone asked me, “What’s the most challenging thing you ever did?” And I said, quite honestly: “Playing a corporate lawyer was really a stretch”.’
What is perhaps more surprising is that Swinton has retained her cult quality despite shifting to more conventional blockbusters. Only occasionally does she find herself in deep water. In 2016 she joined the Marvel universe as the Ancient One, sensei and guru to Benedict Cumberbatch’s miracleseeking surgeon on Doctor Strange. Bald and brainy, she was also playing a character who was originally an Asian man in the Marvel comic books, leading to accusations of Hollywood whitewashing. Swinton had a thoughtful response to the uproar, pointing out that writer-director Scott Derrickson and Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige had sought an older Celtic woman because the character in the 1960s comics was a racist stereotype.
‘The outcry about needing more diversity, particularly for AsianAmericans in an American cinema, is absolutely valid and important,’ Swinton added. ‘If that outcry has been made more visible by being attached to our film then frankly I’m all for it. All strength to the outcry.’
She might also have pointed out her support for world cinema filmmakers, and was an early adopter of South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho, this year’s Oscar winner with his film Parasite. Back in 2013, she was part of his film Snowpiercer and his later film Okja. This spring, she seems set to join his six-episode English spin-off of Parasite.
Swinton’s androgynous porcelain looks and fashion sense have made her an icon of style as well as screen, but she remains ambivalent about the cult of celebrity.
‘Actors’ lives are so dull,’ she said. ‘They have so little to occupy them. And that’s why they pursue celebrity careers. The actual job of being hired to say lines in other people’s films, where your mind and your heart are not required, because it’s not valued or because, you know, there’s not much of it, but all you’re required to do is to wear a certain set of clothes and stand in a certain light – can you think of a more boring life?
‘So, what do you do? You have to
create something. You have this desire to be some kind of con artist. So you act the part of yourself as a celebrity.’
This may be why she chooses to place herself at some distance from Hollywood, by settling north of Inverness. She first moved north with her partner John Byrne, the artist and writer best known for the Slab Boy trilogy and Tutti Frutti. The couple met at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in the 1980s, and Swinton was instantly smitten by the lanky, lugubrious Scot. In turn, Byrne created the character of Cissie, the stroppy butch cowgirl in the BBC Scotland television drama series Your Cheatin’ Heart, especially for her.
The birth of their twins, Honor and Xavier, put the seal on the couple’s decision to move to Tain in the Moray Firth. The couple took Gaelic lessons and sent their children to a Gaelic nursery. She might have bought a second house, but it was in Nairn, not New York. Swinton has said she could never leave the Highlands. ‘How on earth do people go to their houses in Beverly Hills after going through all that you need to make a film?’ she asked. ‘The north of Scotland is so precious to me.’
It also became a home to Sandro Kopp, a German actor and artist who met Swinton on the set of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. When the relationship first came to light, the tabloids made much of their 18-year age gap, and also that she, Kopp and Byrne seemed to be living together as a ménage à trois. The reality turned out to be more a case of house-sharing than polyamory. Swinton and Byrne had not been a couple for ‘many, many years’, and both are now in new partnerships, with Byrne now based in Edinburgh. ‘It was like having my identity papers checked,’ she said of her tabloid period. ‘Actually, I live in a much less exotic situation than people would like.’
Her local community seems to regard her as a slightly eccentric ornament, albeit with a small squawk when she submitted plans to renovate her Nairn home with a new ‘snug’ room, a pantry, a terrace and a dog wet room for her pack of springer spaniels, which had a starring role in a music video she directed last year. A conversation with her neighbours and some tactful revisions would appear to have smoothed things over, and she is certainly an active part of the local scene, buzzing through the local butchers, founding a school which was attended by Honor and Xavier, and a local film festival which was set up in a disused bingo hall furnished with beanbags, charging an entrance fee of £3 or the equivalent in fairy cakes.
‘We meant it to be quite off the cuff and casual,’ she recalled of the school. ‘It just kind of exploded in our faces. We got six times the amount of people we could house. People came from Papua New Guinea to Helsinki, but mainly from Nairn, so you had the little old ladies of Nairn watching The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or Fellini’s 8½.’
Swinton remains an elusive, fuzzy personality away from the screen. Is she living a simple life, or one of countrified poshness? Is she shy or extrovert? Ebullient or low-key? Is she still a member of the Communist Party she joined at university?
She certainly seems an inspirational character to those close to her – daughter Honor recently followed her into acting with a lead role in Joanna Hogg’s tale of a bad boyfriend, Souvenir. Swinton, of course, played her mother. At the very least, Tilda Swinton has been clear about the value she places on her retreat from public scrutiny.
‘I have the great good fortune of coming from a little country that I wasn’t always brought up in, so I’ve always been trying to get back to it,’ she says. ‘Very often, when people are brought up in little places, they’re desperate to leave. I never got to that, I was always desperate to go home. I just love Scotland.’
“Her local community seem to regard her as a slightly eccentric ornament