These were not the choices of someone out to be the next Meryl Streep. When she entered US cinema in 1996, it wasn’t through Hollywood or even awards-baiting prestige cinema, but in Susan Streitfeld’s audacious, psychoanalysis-based erotic drama Female Perversions. Film-maker and critic Mark Cousins, later to be her close friend and collaborator, remembers the immediate impact of that first appearance: “Right from the start,” he told the Observer, “she knew that film acting is a visual rather than literary job.” Her first film role in 1986 was as the eponymous artist’s doomed lover in Jarman’s Caravaggio, the sensual intensity of her presence eclipsing the size of the part. And not quite fit, though it saddened and maddened us to recognise it, for wholesome family entertainment.”
“Our outfit was an internationalist brigade.
In a direct address to Jarman at the 2002 Edinburgh Film Festival, eight years after his death from Aids, she likened joining his company to joining the circus: “You were the first person I met who could gossip about St Thomas Aquinas and hold a steady camera at the same time, as you did at our first meeting. But it was with Jarman, with whom she made nine films in eight years, that she found both her craft and her outsider identity. Swinton had no formal acting training, having read political science at Cambridge while dabbling in student drama and joining the Royal Shakespeare Company a year after graduating. From the start, she knew film acting is a visual rather than literary job Mark Cousins, film-maker and critic
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It wasn’t the first time she’d played with gender in performance: in 1987, her stage turn as a second world war widow assuming her husband’s identity in Manfred Karge’s Man to Man made enough of an impact to be filmed for the BBC’s ScreenPlay series a few years later. Tall and physically startling, she had long held a reputation as one of the most gifted and fearless actors of her generation, but predominantly via projects that didn’t seem in any danger of breaking into the mainstream: entering the industry as a suitably avant-garde inspiration for Derek Jarman, she won best actress at Venice in 1991 for her rampantly sexualised interpretation of Isabella of France in his Edward II, and a year later turned further heads as Virginia Woolf’s gender-switching title character in Sally Potter’s film of Orlando. She’ll shortly be seen opposite Idris Elba in George Miller’s oddball romantic fantasy Three Thousand Years of Longing, with further collaborations with Hogg ( The Eternal Daughter) and Anderson ( Asteroid City) set to premiere before the year is out, along with a voice role in Guillermo del Toro’s animated Pinocchio.Įarlier in her career, few would have bet on Swinton winning an Oscar, and not for want of admiration. In the past year, UK cinemagoers have already seen her in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II. Sure enough, Swinton today is among the most ubiquitous names and faces in the business. She was in Hollywood now, and couldn’t just melt back into the crowd. But for a brief second, the then 47-year-old British actor seemed almost apologetic, as if she’d crashed a party and hadn’t expected to be caught out.
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