Tilda Swinton Biography

Name:Tilda Swinton
Date of Birth:Nov. 5, 1960 
Place of Birth:London, England


Swinton was born on Nov. 5, 1960 in London, England to Australian mother Judith Swinton and Major General John Swinton, former member of the Scots Guard and head of the Queens Household Division. Tilda Swinton father's post necessitated that Swinton and her three brothers lived in various countries growing up, though they always returned to the family estate in Scotland - an estate which had been in the family since the ninth century. Tilda was educated at the exclusive West Heath Girls School in Kent, England, where her academic excellence was at odds with the school's main goal of training privileged young women for a future as the wife of royalty. Classmate and friend Lady Diana Spencer was one example of the school's success in this regard. But Swinton was not cut out for the traditional role dictated by her heritage. Instead, her intellectual and artistic instincts first lead her to study writing and literature at Cambridge University, where she graduated in 1983 with a degree in social and political science. In addition to her academic studies, she became involved with the school's drama department, participating in a number of stage productions. Though not enamored of theater, Swinton was more taken by the idea of filmmaking and felt being onstage was a means to that end.

Swinton returned to Scotland and began her performing career with the Traverse Theater in Edinburgh, before spending a year onstage with the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. Tilda Swinton  more creative voice began to surface when she shifted to avant-garde stage productions like Bertold Brecht's "Die Massnahme" and the award-winning "Man to Man," where she played a woman who assumes her dead husband's identity. A chance meeting and instant creative rapport with director Derek Jarman offered Swinton an opportunity to work in film. 


Tilda Swinton  instantly felt at home in the collaborative atmosphere of his productions, making an auspicious film debut with "Caravaggio" (1986), her classical looks custom-made for Jarman's biography of the Italian painter. Next up, Peter Wollen tapped Swinton's ethereal, androgynous presence to play an alien android shipwrecked on Earth in "Friendship's Death" (1987), before the actress played the role of Mozart in Aleksandr Pushkin's "Mozart & Salieri" on stages in Vienna, Berlin and London. Swinton gave bold performances in Jarman's "The Last of England" (1988) and "The Garden" (1990), before brilliantly capturing the icy hauteur of a woman scorned, Queen Isabella, in "Edward II" (1991), for which she earned a Best Actress Prize at the Venice Film Festival.