Tilda Swinton
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Even gliding across tangled bracken while this correspondent stumbles behind her, the actress/creature/vampire/mermaid invests Wellington boots and an old corduroy jacket with glamour, as befits a red-carpet veteran and occasional model. (She has collaborated with Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf and modeled both the men's and women's collections for knitwear line Pringle of Scotland.) And she punctuates her wide-ranging discourse with moments of pure theatricality. "You must lie down on the heather!" Swinton cries as we reach the brow of a hill. "There. Has there ever been a more comfortable pillow?"
The Making of Mathilda
Such bohemianism could be construed as affectation, and it's possible that early in life, Katherine Mathilda Swinton deliberately cultivated a style that would signal her disregard for a world she found stultifying. Born in London, the daughter of a moneyed Australian and an aristocratic Scottish major general, she was packed off to a series of stuffy boarding schools because of her father's peripatetic military career. (Her "fellow inmate" at the first of these was a girl called Diana Spencer; at another elite institution, she was a few years behind Tony Blair.)
The architecture of Swinton's life today might look defiantly modern: the father of her children, Scottish writer and artist John Byrne, 71, continued to live amicably for some time with Swinton after she began seeing the man she calls her "sweetheart," Sandro Kopp, 33, also an artist. (Byrne now resides in Edinburgh and visits regularly.) But this domestic constellation also echoes an older world, that of the Bloomsbury set, and Swinton has more than a touch of Mrs. Dalloway about her ("the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its own element," as Virginia Woolf wrote of her heroine).
Swinton was always left-leaning. As a child, she asked her parents why they sat in a different part of church from less privileged members of the congregation. For two years after high school, she volunteered in Africa. Just after university, she joined the Communist Party. Immersion in unfamiliar cultures appeals to her, whether of the developing world or Hollywood. "It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien," she says.
When she returned from Africa to take up a place at Cambridge University, she shunned the balls and clubs that are the seedbed of Britain's Oxbridge establishment and got involved with the theater society instead. "I always was good at [acting] slightly in spite of myself. I didn't really want to be good at it," she says. After graduating, Swinton's burdensome talent secured her a place in the Royal Shakespeare Company, though she never felt at home in what she calls "industrial" theater: "I like music hall, I like live music, I like audience participation."