Tilda Swinton's Main TV Roles Show Character(s) Your Cheatin' Heart (UK) Cissie Crouch Zastrozzi: A Romance (UK) Julia

Main Movie Roles 2010 - The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 2009 - The Limits of Control 2008 - The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian 2008 - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 2008 - Burn After Reading 2008 - Julia 2007 - Michael Clayton 2006 - Deep Water 2005 - Constantine 2005 - Broken Flowers 2005 - Thumbsucker 2005 - The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 2003 - The Statement 2003 - Young Adam 2002 - Adaptation. 2001 - Vanilla Sky 2001 - The Deep End 2000 - The Beach 2000 - Possible Worlds 1999 - The War Zone 1998 - Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon 1992 - Orlando 1989 - War Requiem 1988 - The Last of England 1987 - Aria 1986 - Caravaggio

BIOGRAPHY:

The iconoclastic gifts of the visually striking and fiercely talented Scottish actress Tilda Swinton, who was born on November 5th, 1960, have been appreciated by a more international audience of late. Born into a patrician military family, she was educated at an English and a Scottish boarding school. Tilda subsequently studied Social and Politcal Science at Cambridge University and graduated in 1983 with a degree in English Literature. During her time as a student, she performed countless stage productions and proceeded to work for a season in the Royal Shakespeare Company. A decided rebel when it came to the arts, she left the company after a year as her approach shifted dramatically: With a taste for the unique and bizarre, she found some genuinely interesting gender-bending roles come her way, such as the composer Mozart in Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri", and as a working class woman impersonating her dead husband during World War II, in Karges' Man to Man (1992). In 1985 the pale-skinned, carrot-topped actress began a professional association with gay experimental director Derek Jarman. She continued to live and work with Jarman for the next nine years, developing seven critically acclaimed films. Their alliance would produce stark turns, such as turner-prize nominated Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1988), The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), and Wittgenstein (1993). Jarman succumbed to complications from AIDS in 1994. His untimely demise left a devastating void in Tilda's life for quite some time. Her most notable performance of that period however comes from a non-Jarman film: For the title role in Orlando (1992), her nobleman character lives for 400 years while changing sex from man to woman. The film, which Swinton spent years helping writer/director Sally Potter (I) develop and finance, continues to this day to have a worldwide devoted fan following. Over the years she has preferred art to celebrity, opening herself to experimental projects with new and untried directors and mediums, delving into the worlds of installation art and cutting-edge fashion. Consistently off-centered roles in Female Perversions (1996), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), Teknolust (2002), Young Adam (2003), Broken Flowers (2005) and Béla Tarr's A londoni férfi (2007) have only added to her mystique. Hollywood too has picked up on this notoriety and, since the birth of her twins in 1997, she has successfully moved between the deep-left-field art-house and quality Hollywood blockbusters. The thriller The Deep End (2001), earned her a number of critic's awards and her first Golden Globe nomination. Such mainstream U.S. pictures as The Beach (2000/I) with Leonardo DiCaprio, fantasy epic Constantine (2005) with Keanu Reeves, her Oscar-decorated performance in Michael Clayton (2007) alongside George Clooney and of course her iconic White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) have cemented her place as one of cinema's most outstanding women.


TRIVIA:

• Gave birth to twins, a daughter named Honor Byrne and a son named Xavier Byrne, in 1997.
• Can trace her paternal ancestry back 35 generations, to the ninth century. Her father, Major-General Sir John Swinton, is the former head of The Queen's Household Division and Lord-Lieutenant of Berwickshire.
• Was declared one of the ten best dressed women in the world by Vanity Fair in 2007.
• While at Cambridge University, she appeared in student productions of plays such as "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Duchess of Malfi" and "The Comedy of Errors".
• In her acceptance speech, she said she would give the Oscar she won for _Michael Clayton (2007)_ (qv) to her agent 'Brian Swardstrom' (qv).
• Has three brothers.
• Contributed vocals on four tracks of the album 'The Bachelor' by glam-goth-folk singer/songwriter Patrick Wolf.
• The father of her children, 'John Byrne (I)' (qv), is a Scottish artist and writer.