Swinton is Hollywood’s anti-star, an actress who swats down the contemporary notion of her “day job” faster than you can say Nicole Kidman. She shuns the red-carpet limelight for her home in the Scottish highlands, where she lives with her beau, the artist John Byrne, and their 6-year-old twins. She has been known to read Nancy Mitford between takes and to quote poet Joseph Brodsky when trying to make a point. And she can comfortably reference both the artistic foundations of European haute couture and Santa Monica skateboarders in the same sentence.
Swinton likes to give directors and audiences the unexpected–like spreading her legs apart in front of an uncle. It’s an approach–“a sensibility,” she says–that can stir up long-suppressed emotions in viewers. It also makes her work a welcome alternative to the Botox-injected fluff rampant in Hollywood today; she recently won supporting roles in such mainstream films as “Adaptation” and “Vanilla Sky” in addition to her star billing in “The Statement.”
It took her a while to get here. Swinton was born in 1960 in London to an Australian mother and a distinguished Scottish father: Maj. Gen. Sir John Swinton, former commander of the Queen’s Household Guards and distant relative of Sir Walter Scott. She and her three brothers had a traditional upper-class British upbringing: nanny, boarding school in Kent (where Diana Spencer, the future princess of Wales, was a classmate), then on to Cambridge where she read English and political science. Upon graduation she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, but dropped out after a year, bored.
Swinton’s life took a sharp creative turn when she met Derek Jarman, a British filmmaker known for his gay-themed movies, who cast her in his 1986 biopic “Caravaggio” and later as Queen Isabella in “Edward II,” a role that won her the 1991 best-actress prize at the Venice Film Festival. They made seven films together before he died of AIDS in 1994. But it was her 1992 performance in “Orlando”–a film based on a Virginia Woolf novel that she and Sally Potter spent five years developing–that won Swinton her first mainstream critical and public acclaim.
It was the sort of project–rich with “conversations” and daydreaming–that Swinton thrives on, and which sets her apart from other actresses. She fondly recalls sitting at the table with Potter, staring at the book “Orlando” and talking out the script. While making “Young Adam,” a new noir thriller in which Swinton plays a bargekeeper’s wife who has a fiery affair with a drifter, the production folded twice; Swinton not only stuck with it but also encouraged the director, David Mackenzie, to keep going, too.
Swinton’s profound power on the screen seems to come from her rejection of the notion of “acting.” As she is quick to point out, she is “scrupulously unlearned in the ‘craft’.” She prefers to think of herself as a “performer.” Acting, she says, is “putting on a mask. I’m not interested in losing myself in a role.” Instead, she seeks out parts that have an “element of autobiography.” She agreed to play a mother trying to protect her son from murder charges in the thriller “The Deep End” because the film recalled a recurring dream she has had since childhood: finding a corpse and being held responsible for its death. She admits her approach is “very selfish, because I’m working entirely to answer questions about my own life.”
Next, Swinton will play the mother of a troubled teenager in “Thumbsucker,” a comedy-drama by first-time director Mike Mills about, as Swinton puts it, “the Ritalin culture and the heightened mystique of banal American suburbia.” After that, she hopes to help American photographer Gregory Knudson put together a film called “Beneath the Roses.” “We don’t know completely yet what it will be,” she confesses, “and it may be silent.” Just the sort of mystery we’ve come to expect.
