Known as 'thousand and one faces' with the roles she played: Who is Tilda Swinton?

Her full name is Katherine Matilda Swinton, she was born on November 5, 1960 in London. She was born the daughter of her Australian mother, Judith Balfour Killen, and her father, Sir John Swinton, Laird of House of Kimmerghame. Swinton has three brothers. Her father was a retired major general in the British Army and her paternal great-grandfather was George Swinton, a Scottish politician and messenger. Her maternal great-great-grandfather is the Scottish botanist John Hutton Balfour.

Swinton was educated at three private schools. The first was Queen's Gate School in London. Then West Heath Girls' School and Fettes College, where she studied briefly. West Heath Girls' School was a boarding school where the future Princess of Wales, Lady Diana Spencer, was a classmate. Before going to university, Swinton volunteered for two years in South Africa and Kenya.

In 1983, Swinton graduated in social and political science from New Hall at Cambridge University and joined the Communist Party while at Cambridge. Later, Swinton joined the Scottish Socialist Party and began performing while studying at university.

Swinton joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984 and was featured in the original "Measure for Measure". She also worked at the Traverse Theater in Edinburgh in 1987 she. On television, she played the role of Julia in the mini-series "Zastrozzi: A Romance" (1986), based on a gothic novel. She made her film debut in 1986 with the historical drama film "Caravaggio" directed by Derek Jarman. The following year, Swinton appeared with Bill Paterson in "Friendship's Death," directed by Peter Wollen. Also that year, Swinton appeared in the art film "The Last of England" (1987) with Laurence Olivier.

She continued to be recognized as a jury member at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival in 1988. She later appeared in "War Requiem" (1989), a film adaptation of the song of the same name. That same year, she appeared in Joan Jonas' performance art "Volcano Saga". The 28-minute video art piece is based on the Laxdæla Saga in 13th century Iceland and tells the mythological story of a young woman whose dreams tell of the future. Two years later, she starred in the romantic historical drama "Edward II" (1991), for which she won the Volpi Award for Best Actress at the 1991 Venice Film Festival.

Swinton co-starred with Billy Zane in the historical drama fantasy film "Orlando" (1992), a film version of Virginia Woolf's novel directed by Sally Potter. This film allowed her to explore issues of gender promotion on screen, reflecting her interest in androgynous style.

In 1993, Swinton was a jury member at the 18th Moscow International Film Festival, and in 1995 she developed a performance/installation live artwork at the Serpentine Gallery in London with producer Joanna Scanlan. Here it was displayed to the public for a week as a piece of performance art in a glass box. In 1996 her performance of "The Maybe" was performed at the Museo Barracco in Rome. The same performance was repeated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2013. In 1996, she appeared in the music video for the Orbital music group "The Box" single.

In recent years, Swinton has starred in the American thriller "The Deep End" (2001), in which she plays the mother of a gay son whom she suspects killed her boyfriend. She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for her performance. She then starred as a supporting character in the adventure drama "The Beach"(2000) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, as the archangel Gabriel in the science fiction thriller "Vanilla Sky"(2001) and in the superhero horror movie "Constantine". took. Swinton has also appeared in the British films drama "The Notice"(2003) and the erotic drama "Young Man"(2003). She won the British Academy Scotland Best Actress Award for her performance in the second film.

Swinton made a collaboration with fashion designers Viktor & Rolf. In the collaboration, she recited a poem containing the line "There's only one. There's only one" as the focal point of One Woman Show 2003, where they made all the models look like replicas of Swinton. In 2005, she appeared as Jadis the White Witch in the high fantasy film "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion", the film version of the Witch and the Wardrobe. She then starred as Audrey Cobb in the comedy-drama film based on the novel "Thumbsucker" directed by Mike Mills.

Swinton later had minor roles in the sequels "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader". In August 2006, it opened a new Screen Academy Scotland production center in Edinburgh. The following year, she won both a British Academy Film Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the 80th Academy Awards in 2008 for her role as Karen Crowder in Swinton's legal thriller "Michael Clayton".

In July 2008, Swinton founded the "Ballerina Ballroom Dream Cinema" Scottish film festival. The event took place in a ballroom in Nairn on the Moray Firth street, Scotland, from 15 to 23 August. She later appeared as one of the leading roles in "Burn After Reading", the black comedy spy movie directed by the Coen Brothers. That same year, she took on the role of Elizabeth Abbott in the fantastic romantic drama film "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" with Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt.

Collaborating with singer-songwriter Patrick Wolf on his 2009 album "The Bachelor", she contributed four vocal tracks. Also that same year, she and director Mark Cousins embarked on a different project where they mounted a portable cinema on a large truck and manually towed it out of the Scottish Highlands, creating a traveling independent film festival. The project featured prominently in a documentary called "Cinema Is Everywhere". The festival was repeated in 2011 and was received positively.

She played the eponymous character in the crime drama film "Julia" (2009) directed by Erick Zonca, which premiered at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. enlivened. She was cast as one of the lead roles in the psychological thriller drama film "We Need to Talk About Kevin", based on the novel of the same name, released in October 2011. In the movie, she played the mother of the main character, a teenage boy who committed a high school murder.

In 2012, she starred in the fantasy comedy-drama film "Only Lovers Left Alive" directed by Jim Jarmusch. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival on May 23, 2013, the film was released in the US in the first half of 2014. She played Mason in director Bong Joon-ho's 2014 post-apocalyptic science fiction film "Snowpiercer," with a large cast including Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Jamie Bell, Ed Harris, and Octavia Spencer. In November of the same year, she made a guest appearance in episode 6 of her comedy "Getting On", which was broadcast on the BBC, together with Sandro Kopp.

In 2013, she starred in the promotional video for her song "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" directed by Floria Sigismondi.  In 2015, she appeared alongside Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenaerts and Ralph Fiennes in the psychological drama thriller "A Bigger Splash" directed by Luca Guadagnino. She also played Dianne, the editor of Amy Schumer's character at S'Nuff Magazine, as part of a large cast including Bill Hder, Brie Larson, LeBron James, Norman Lloyd in the movie "Trainwreck" in 2015. The film received positive and rave reviews from critics.

Swinton portrayed the role of the Ancient One in the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the 2016 superhero movie "Doctor Strange" and the 2019 superhero movie "Avengers: Endgame." Later, she appeared in the 2018 movie version of the supernatural horror movie "Suspiria" directed by Luca Guadagnino. Swinton, in 2021 newspaper columnist J.K.L. Wes Anderson appeared as Berensen in the anthology film "The French Dispatch" and as Jessica Holland in "Memoria", the first English-language fantasy drama thriller directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

In 2022, she took the lead role with Idris Elba in the fantastic romantic drama film "Three Thousand Years of Longing" directed, written and produced by George Miller. The film received a six-minute standing ovation at its premiere, and received positive reviews for its visuals and performances. However, it was a huge failure at the box office. In the same year, she appeared as a double lead in the gothic mystery drama film "The Eternal Daughter" directed by Joanna Hogg. Carly-Sophia Davies and Joseph Mydell played supporting roles in the film.

Also that year, she co-starred with Tim Blake Nelson and Christoph Waltz in the musical dark fantasy film "Pinocchio" directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson. The film managed to receive great acclaim with its animation, visuals, music, story, voiceover and many other aspects. The film received multiple awards, including the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, three nominations at the 80th Golden Globe Awards, and winning the Best Animated Feature Film Award. The director became the first Latino to win the Golden Globe category. It also became the director's first film for a streaming service to win at both ceremonies, making it the second stop-motion animated feature film after "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were". It is also the first non-Disney/Pixar movie to win an Oscar after "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" (2018).

Personal life

She married Scottish artist and playwright John Byrne in 1989. In 1997, the couple gave birth to twins, Honor and Xavier Swinton Byrne, and they divorced in 2003. Swinton lives with her twin children and German painter Sandro Kopp, with whom she has been in a relationship since 2004, in Nairn, overlooking the Moray Firth in Scotland's Highland.

Swinton identified herself as gay in an interview with Vogue magazine in 2021. In a 2022 profile of The Guardian newspaper, she was seen saying, "I was a weird kid too. Not in terms of my sex life, just weird." Although born in London and attended many schools in England, Swinton identifies as Scottish by nationality as she was raised in Scotland, referring to her Scottish aristocratic family background.

In 2013, she and Ian Sutherland McCook opened Drumduan Upper School in Findhorn, Scotland. Both had children who attended the Moray Steiner School, whose students graduated at age 14. They founded the school they opened to allow their children to continue their Steiner education without grades or exams. In April 2019, Swinton resigned from the school's directorship. In a survey conducted by The Guardian in 2013, she was listed as one of the "50 best dressed people over 50". She was named one of the "best dressed women of 2018" by fashion website Net-a-Porter.