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Tilda Swinton
Tilda Swinton is very pale, with cropped red hair and a severe little nose. She’s also nearly six feet tall and her dislike of make–up and preference for wearing suits and high heels often leads her, she says, to being called “Sir” in hotels and restaurants.
It does not take long in her company to appreciate that she’s a one–off: an original, open–minded woman who says what she thinks. She has also hit a remarkable winning streak as she nears her fifties.
In her latest film, Burn After Reading, she is married to John Malkovich and takes George Clooney as a lover: something of a reflection of her own living arrangements, of which more later. If ever there was a case of a woman having her cake and eating it, this is it.
Swinton is sharp and witty when discussing how the slightly smaller Clooney seems to tower above her in the film. “I bent my knees a bit,”she says with a smile, when we meet to discuss the role at the Venice Film Festival. “He pretends he likes the fact that I am tall. He’s very brave about it.”
She already has an Oscar, as best supporting actress, for working with Clooney in last year’s hit thriller, Michael Clayton. But, with typical Swinton unpredictability, she gave it to her American agent. “I have no need for it,”she explains. And while other actors drone on about their work as if they’ve discovered a cure for cancer, she is refreshingly dismissive.
“I am the most idle individual you will ever meet,”she tells me. “A balanced life? No, I make it up as I go along. I would never work unless my hardy and wily representatives practically mud–wrestle me to the ground. Even then, what is it that I do? I am not down a coalmine.
“As for being any sort of perfectionist, no I am not. At home, I do not keep a tidy kitchen or bedroom and never look in the mirror before I go out. Why do I wear suits rather than skirts? I have always been comfortable in trousers.
“I am not making a statement. Life is way too short to worry about what you wear. I am also not an actress who fights issues. I am interested in peace and art. Art, to me, is the canary in the coalmine.”
She is equally forthright when talking of her personal beliefs. “I believe the greatest taboo in Western civilisation is loneliness,”she says. “We talk about everything else, but that’s the thing that most people don’t want to discuss. Loneliness is a fact and we all die alone. If you accept it as a fact, then you are going to come to terms with it and have a healthier relationship with people. And you are going to buy less stuff.
“As for movies, I have faith in the audience. When an audience is really sick of what Hollywood is giving it, then it will stop going to the movies. I am a film fan who is lucky enough to be an actress. I am a lucky woman.” This all sounds like good sense. Before we first met, I had always thought Swinton to be something of a nutcase. One example was her decision, in 1995, to lie motionless in a glass box as one of the most controversial performance works of art, called The Maybe, at London’s Serpentine Gallery. Her acting career has been equally unpredictable.
After an expensive education, a degree in social and political science from Cambridge and several years in theatre, her debut film in 1986 was Caravaggio, Derek Jarman’s imaginary biopic of the Italian painter. Jarman, the homosexual painter and film director, became her mentor and she worked on eight films with him until his death in 1994, aged 52, of an Aids–related illness…
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