Tilda Swinton

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Tilda Swinton (2016)

Katherine Matilda "Tilda" Swinton (born November 5, 1960 in London ) is a Scottish actress and Oscar winner.

Life

Swinton comes from one of the oldest Scottish clans (Clan Swinton) and grew up in his father's centuries-old ancestral home. Her father, Sir John Swinton of Kimmerghame, was a major general in the Scots Guards , one of the Queen's body regiments . Her mother, Judith Balfour, is originally from Australia. Swinton has three brothers.

At the same time as Diana Spencer , who later became Princess of Wales , she attended the private English boarding school West Heath Girls School in Sevenoaks . By 1983 she completed a degree in social and political sciences at Cambridge University (formerly New Hall College, now Murray Edwards). During her time in Cambridge, she joined the Communist Party . During these years she also tried her hand at writing, spent time in a township in South Africa, where she volunteered in an aid project, and discovered her passion for the theater.

Swinton has twins from her relationship with Scottish author and painter John Byrne . She lived with him and her children in Nairn , northeast of Inverness in Scotland. In the mid-2000s, Swinton and Byrne split. Since then, Swinton has been in a relationship with the artist Sandro Kopp .

Career

Swinton 2007 at the Edinburgh Film Festival

After graduating, Tilda Swinton joined the Royal Shakespeare Company for a short time . Later, the 1.80 m tall red-haired actress on other stages was already in trouser roles , so about as Mozart in Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri and Man to Man after the piece jacket and trousers of Manfred Karge as a woman in the Third Reich in Slips into the role of her late husband. The play was also made into a film with Tilda Swinton in 1991.

In 1986 she made her debut as a film actress in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio . Up until Jarman's death in 1994, Swinton appeared in every feature film made by the director, who was her close friend. She also maintained a friendship that lasted until his death with Christoph Schlingensief , the director of Egomania - Island Without Hope (1986).

Swinton has starred in numerous experimental and off-screen mainstream films from the very beginning and continues to this day . With Jarman, she shared a preference for eccentric and very artificial cinema, in which radical political content also finds its place. Even in Caravaggio was homosexuality a topic in which the film was made in a time in which under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher , the section 28 became law, prohibiting it in all areas of public life, positive to report in any way about homosexuality. Jarman took up this issue again in Edward II , where demonstrators from the 1980s intrude into the historical scene in several scenes and demand equality for gays and lesbians. In Friendship's Death (1987, directed by Peter Wollen), Swinton portrays an alien who, sent to earth as an ambassador in friendship, gets caught in the turmoil of civil war of " Black September " in Jordan and alienates the killing all around and the strange behavior of the people observed.

Swinton 2009 during an audience discussion at the Viennale

More Independent films with Swinton emerged among others Cynthia Beatt , a friendly Berlin filmmaker with which they the Short Documentary Cycling the Frame (. 1988, 27 min) turned in which they riding a bicycle on the western side of the Berlin Wall along drives . Her international breakthrough marked Sally Potter's film Orlando in 1992, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf , in which Swinton portrays a noblewoman who lived for 400 years and during this time changed from man to woman. In Female Perversions (directed by Susan Streitfeld , 1996) she played a neurotic, bisexual lawyer . In 1997 she embodied the British mathematician and computer science pioneer Ada Lovelace in Passionate Calculation (directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson ) . In 1999 she starred in Tim Roth's directorial debut The War Zone and in 2002 in Spike Jonze's adaptation. .

In addition to the more arthouse productions, Swinton also starred in a number of films by large film studios. She took on roles in The Beach (2000) with Leonardo DiCaprio , Vanilla Sky (2001) with Tom Cruise and the comic book adaptation Constantine with Keanu Reeves (2005), in which she played an androgynous Archangel Gabriel . In the same year she was the "White Witch Jadis" in the fantasy film The Chronicles of Narnia: The King of Narnia , the first film in the series The Chronicles of Narnia , and played in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers . In 2007 she starred with George Clooney for Michael Clayton and was awarded an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2008 . She sometimes describes her excursions into the world of large-scale productions with their enormous budgets as "espionage" or realizes that she has never been involved in a film that she herself did not consider experimental.

In 2009 she repeated the bike tour on the Berlin Wall for Beatt's 60-minute TV film The invisible frame .

In addition to her work as a film actress, Swinton also regularly takes part in projects in other genres. In 1995 it was part of the installation The Maybe , which was realized with Cornelia Parker at the Serpentine Gallery in London, as a “living exhibit” . For a week she slept in a glass case eight hours a day. In 1996 she appeared in the music video for The Box by the electronica duo Orbital . On the album The Bachelor by the British musician Patrick Wolf , which was released on June 5, 2009, she took part in three songs ("Oblivion", "Thickets", "Theseus"), where she performed the text in spoken chant. In 2010 she was the leading actress in a short promotional film shot by American photographer Ryan McGinley for the Scottish textile brand Pringle of Scotland .

Swinton took over the office of jury president at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2009 .

In August 2008 she organized the film festival "The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams" with Mark Cousins, a befriended screenwriter and cultural critic, in a former ballroom she rented in a Victorian house in her hometown of Nairn . Films by Astrid Henning-Jensen , Joseph L. Mankiewicz , Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa as well as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Sylvain Chomet were shown . In the summer of 2009 she toured Scotland with a mobile cinema in order to show films at various locations outside the usual cinema program.

In 2013, Swinton played an honest couple with David Bowie in his video for the single The Stars (Are Out Tonight) from his album The Next Day . In the tragic comedy Grand Budapest Hotel she played a lady over eighty.

At the 66th Berlinale , Tilda Swinton's four-part documentary essay film The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger had its world premiere in the Berlinale Special section . In the documentary produced in collaboration with Colin MacCabe , Christopher Roth , Bartek Dziadosz and the Derek Jarman Lab , Swinton himself appears, directed and wrote the script.

Filmography (selection)

Awards and nominations (selection)

literature

  • Du Kulturmedien AG (Ed.): Tilda Swinton - Die Antidiva. Du - Kulturmagazin, issue 811, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-905931-03-7

Web links

Commons : Tilda Swinton  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tilda Swinton: We need to talk about eccentricity . In: The Guardian , May 15, 2011.
  2. Tilda Swinton: 'I was expected to marry a duke!' . In: The Independent , April 3, 2010.
  3. a b c Christina Nord: Female Misbehavior, in the accompanying volume for the Viennale 2009
  4. theartsdesk Q & A: Artist / dramatist John Byrne . In: The Arts Desk , March 19, 2011.
  5. ^ Jonathan Romney / The Independent : Tilda Swinton: "I'm not interested in acting skills" , November 30, 2008: "I've never been in something that didn't feel like an experimental film, even if two hundred thousand million dollars was spent on it. "
  6. ^ The invisible frame in the Internet Movie Database , accessed February 25, 2014
  7. Pringle of Scotland - Tilda Swinton is now promoting menswear . In Die Welt online on January 20, 2010, accessed on January 20, 2010
  8. Christina Nord: Glamor, warmth and humor for the Berlinale. In: The daily newspaper . November 14, 2008, p. 2
  9. The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams - Official website of the film festival ( Memento from September 3, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
  10. Roman Tschiedl: The Seasons in Quincy , Radio OE1 Leporello , February 15, 2016
  11. The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger , 66th Berlin International Film Festival (PDF)
  12. seasonsinquincy.com , Film Website
  13. Venice awards Swinton and Hui Golden Lions. In: ORF.at . July 20, 2020, accessed July 20, 2020 .