‘She disappears or goes blank like Garbo’: the enigma of Tilda Swinton
msn.comMemoria, 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) set to premiere before the year is out, along with a 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. Tall and physically startling, 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 avant-garde 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 gender-switching title character in Sally Potter’s film of Orlando.
It wasn’t the first time she’d played with gender in performance: in 1987, her stage turn as a second world war widow assuming her husband’s identity in Manfred Karge’s Man to Man made enough of an impact to be filmed for the BBC’s ScreenPlay series a few years later.
From the start, she knew film acting is a visual rather than literary jobSwinton 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.
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