Tilda Swinton

Katherine Matilda Swinton was born on 5 November 1960 in London, the daughter of Judith Balfour (née Killen; 1929–2012) and Sir John Swinton (1925–2018), the Laird of Kimmerghame House. She has three brothers.[7] Her father was a retired major general in the British Army, and was Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire from 1989 to 2000. Her mother was Australian.[8][9][10] Her paternal great-grandfather was a Scottish politician and herald, George Swinton, and her maternal great-great-grandfather was the Scottish botanist John Hutton Balfour.[11]

The Swinton family is an ancient Anglo-Scots family that can trace its lineage to the Middle Ages.[12] Swinton considers herself "first and foremost" a Scot.[13]

Swinton attended three independent schools: Queen's Gate School in London, the West Heath Girls' School, and also Fettes College for a brief period.[14] West Heath was an expensive boarding school, where she was a classmate and friend of Lady Diana Spencer.[9] As an adult, Swinton has spoken out against boarding schools, stating that West Heath was "a very lonely and isolating environment" and that she thinks boarding schools "are a very cruel setting in which to grow up and I don't feel children benefit from that type of education. Children need their parents and the love parents can provide."[15] Swinton spent two years as a volunteer in South Africa and Kenya before University.[16]

In 1983, Swinton graduated from New Hall at the University of Cambridge with a degree in Social and Political Sciences. While at Cambridge, she joined the Communist Party;[17] she later joined the Scottish Socialist Party. It was in college that Swinton began performing on stage.[18][19]

Swinton at the 2018 Vienna International Film Festival

In 1988, she was a member of the jury at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival.[49] In 1993, she was a member of the jury at the 18th Moscow International Film Festival.[50]

In 1996, she appeared in the music video for Orbital's "The Box".

In August 2006, she opened the new Screen Academy Scotland production centre in Edinburgh.[51]

In July 2008, she founded the film festival Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams.[52] The event took place in a ballroom in Nairn on Scotland's Moray Firth in August. Swinton has collaborated with artist Patrick Wolf on his 2009 album The Bachelor, contributing four spoken word pieces.[53]

In 2009, Swinton and Mark Cousins embarked on a project where they mounted a 33.5-tonne portable cinema on a large truck, hauling it manually through the Scottish Highlands, creating a travelling independent film festival. The project was featured prominently in a documentary titled Cinema Is Everywhere. The festival was repeated in 2011.[54][55] In September 2009, Swinton joined a petition of Hollywood stars in support of Roman Polanski, and calling for his release from custody after he was detained in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.[56]

In 2012, Swinton appeared in Doug Aitken's SONG 1, an outdoor video installation created for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. In November of the same year, she and Sandro Kopp made cameo appearances in episode 6 of the BBC comedy Getting On.

Swinton co-founded Drumduan Upper School in Findhorn, Scotland in 2013 with Ian Sutherland McCook. Swinton and McCook's both had children who attended the Moray Steiner School, whose students graduate at age 14. They founded Drumduan partly to allow their children to continue their Steiner educations with neither grading nor tests.[57] Swinton resigned as a director of Drumduan in April 2019.[58]

In February 2013, she played the part of David Bowie's wife in the promotional video for his song "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)", directed by Floria Sigismondi. In July 2013, Swinton appeared photographed in front of Moscow's St. Basil's Cathedral holding a rainbow flag in support of the country's LGBT community, reportedly releasing a statement: "In solidarity. From Russia with love."[59]

Although born in London and having attended various schools in England, Swinton describes her nationality as Scottish, citing her childhood, growing up in Scotland and Scottish aristocratic family background.[60] Swinton and her former partner John Byrne, a Scottish artist and playwright, have two children, twins Honor and Xavier Swinton Byrne, born in 1997. She has lived in Scotland for over two decades, currently in Nairn, overlooking the Moray Firth in the Highland region of Scotland, with her children and partner Sandro Kopp, a German painter.[61] In 2018, she stated her support for Scottish independence.[60]

In a 2009 interview with The WIP, Swinton said, "I'm probably a woman. I don't know if I could ever really say that I was a girl – I was kind of a boy for a long time. I don't know, who knows? It changes." In her work, she has "played with the idea of transformative gender" and enjoys "walking the tightrope of identity, of sexual identity, of gender identity."[62]

In a 2021 interview with Vogue, Swinton mentioned that she identifies as queer. She was quoted as saying "I'm very clear that queer is actually, for me anyway, to do with sensibility. I always felt I was queer – I was just looking for my queer circus, and I found it. And having found it, it’s my world." She further stated that her collaborations with several creative visionaries helped her to find a sense of familiar belonging.[63]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tilda Swinton.

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• Tilda Swinton at IMDb
• BFI: Tilda Swinton
• Tilda Swinton Online - All things Tilda
• Tilda Swinton: A Life in Pictures, BAFTA webcast, 27 November 2007
• Portraits of Tilda Swinton at the National Portrait Gallery, London