Date of Birth

5 November 1960, London, England, UK

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' "Screenplay: Man to Man: Another Night of Rubbish on the Telly (#7.5)" (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 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 The Man from London (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

Lives 16 miles east of Inverness in Nairn, Scotland, with her partner Sandro Kopp (an Artist of some note)and her children, Xavier and Honor Byrne whose father is Scottish painter and Playwright John Byrne.

Mother is Australian.

Has three brothers.

Daughter of Major-General Sir John Swinton, whose ancestral home has been within the family since the 9th century.

Functioned as the muse and mascot of Dutch fashion designers Viktor and Rolf, who made an entire collection inspired by her (2003).

Her family is one of the oldest in Scotland.

Does not always play women; she has played Mozart on stage, an Elizabethan nobleman in Orlando (1992) and an androgynous angel, Gabriel, in Constantine (2005).

The father of her children, John Byrne, is a Scottish artist and writer.

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".

Won the Venice Film Festival award for Edward II (1991).

Member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival 1988.

Attended West Heath Girls' School, with Princess Diana as one of her classmates, and later Fettes College.

Since 2004, she has been in a relationship with Sandro Kopp, a painter from New Zealand.

Lived in Germany when she was a child because her father was posted there.

Spent two years in South Africa and Kenya as a voluntary worker in children's schools, before studying at Cambridge.

On her days off from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), she could be seen on-set, offering encouragement to her young co-stars.

Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1998.

Was member of the dramatic jury at the Sundance Film Festival in 2003.

Reached great artistic acclaim through her art installation/performance piece "The Maybe", for which she lay sleeping in a glass case on public display for a week, once at the Sepentine Gallery in London and once at the Museo Barracco in Rome. The piece is often erroneously credited to artist Cornelia Parker, whom Swinton invited to collaborate for the installation in London (1995).

Gave birth to twins, a daughter named Honor Byrne and a son named Xavier Byrne, in 1997.

Was declared one of the ten best dressed women in the world by Vanity Fair in 2007.

Delivered the seminal State of Cinema Address in 2006 at the San Francisco International Film Festival, discussing the relationship of dreams, inarticulacy and film.

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.

In her acceptance speech, she said she would give the Oscar she won for Michael Clayton (2007) to her agent Brian Swardstrom.

In the top ten of the 2008 International Best-Dressed List.

Funded and held her own very successful Film Festival in her small Scottish highland home-town: The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams. A purely cinephile, glamour-free community event. For eight and a half days in August 2008, she personally introduced and showed an eclectic mix of classics and rare films from around the world. The admission price was 3 pounds for adults, 2 pounds for children or a plate of home-baked cakes.

Received a 90 minute tribute at the 2008 AFI (American Film Institute) Festival.

Contributed vocals on four tracks of the album 'The Bachelor' by glam-goth-folk singer/songwriter Patrick Wolf.

Performed live with Patti Smith on four nights of the 2005 London Meltdown Festival reading texts by Susan Sontag, Bertolt Brecht, William Blake and William S. Burroughs.

Head of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival in 2009.

She was heavily pregnant with her twins during filming "Love is the Devil". She had to be filmed from the waist up.

Her favorite films are School of Rock (2003), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Brüno (2009), 'I Know Where I'm Going!' (1945), Let the Right One In (2008), and Kiseye Berendj (1996).

Price:  £35.00