Ugly Sisters made me want to keep doing it for myself
Actress inspired by panto double act
Toby McDonald Oscar winner Tilda Swinton has revealed that her acting career was inspired by panto double act Stanley Baxter and Ronnie Corbett.
The Scots duo were playing the Ugly Sisters and dazzled the star when she was six years old.
Tilda, who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, had been taken for a Christmas treat by her parents, Sir John Swinton of Kimmerghame and his wife Judith. Now 55, she recalls how that outing to Edinburgh with her three brothers transformed her life.
She said: “The f irst l ive performances I saw were the great Scottish comics Stanley Baxter and Ronnie Corbett as the Ugly Sisters in pantomime at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh. This experience, I have to confess, stole my heart and has been clearly, profoundly influential.”
She says their huge talent gave her a love of slapstick theatre.
She added: “I suppose my taste in performance was always more naked, open, sometimes blanker, often wilder and more raucous than tasteful thespianism. I have a love
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of mess and awkwardness and inexpressible nonsense. Dressing-up and ambiguity and the vagaries of identity have always interested me the most.”
Baxter and Corbett’s double act in 1966 and 1967 at the King’s and in Cinderella at the Alhambra Theatre, Glasgow, were among the most successful pantos staged in Scotland.
Highlights of the show with Baxter, who had made his film debut, and Corbett, who was on The Frost Report at the time, included a cod ballet and a musical sisters routine.
Swinton, who was raised at Kimmerghame House in Duns, Berwickshire, went on to study at Cambridge but says acting was never part of a grand plan.
She added: “I never set out to be an actress in the way so many people do. I never had – and this still holds true today – anything invested in the notion of being ‘a good actor’.”
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