Word: swinton
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Anyway, some kind of royalty; it's hers by birth. Swinton was born into a clan of warrior aristocrats whose Scottish home dates back to the ninth century (they supposedly earned the family name by clearing the area of wild boar), and who served prominently in every major British military and political skirmish for a thousand years. One recent ancestor invented the tank; another helped invent television. Over the millennium the Swintons were deeded huge swatches of prime Scottish real estate; Tilda's father, Major-General Sir John Swinton, a.k.a. the Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire, lives in the family estate...
Katherine Matilda Swinton attended the poshest academies (Diana Spencer, later the Princess of Wales, was a classmate and friend at West Heath Girls? School) and took a political science degree at Cambridge. But she grew a spine, a rebellious streak, early; her privilege made her feel a displaced person. Acting was a calling that could blend her fiery Leftism with her pleasure in being looked at, so she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. Even that cutting-edge troupe was too establishment for Swinton. She starred in a miniseries based on Shelley's Zastrozzi and did fringe theater, where...
...Jarman found a swank, daring chameleonic muse; he would use Swinton in seven features. She was the Madonna in his The Garden and Queen Isabella in Edward II. She floated dead on a lake in Jarman's Caravaggio and, unseen, read the dying director's musings on mortality in Blue. After Jarman succumbed to AIDS in 1994, she mourned not only the his passing but his elliptical, confrontational style. "That kind of art is dead," she said. "What you can do now is subvert with art that disguises itself as commerce." That may sound like an admission of defeat...
Sexy, But Which Sex? An inspiration and patroness to adventurous young directors, especially women, Swinton made her American-film debut as a pan-sexually voracious attorney in Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions. Lynn Hershman-Leeson cast her as Lord Byron's daughter Ada King, who devised an early computer, in Conceiving Ada, and, in Teknolust, as a geneticist who makes three copies of herself (you must see the trio dance together in kimonos). But it was Sally Potter's Orlando, which Swinton helped raise the money for, that won the actress her sturdiest pre-Hollywood acclaim...
...this 1993 rethinking of the Virginia Woolf novel, Swinton plays Lord Orlando, a gallant 16th century nobleman whom Queen Elizabeth awards a stately manor, on one condition: "Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old." Over his 400-year life, Orlando is a man, then a woman, then a bit of both - the two sexes evolved into one. Swinton had played men before: she was Mozart in a production of Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri, and in the play and film Man to Man she was a woman in Nazi Germany who assumes her dead husband's identity...