Tilda Swinton
(4 of 5)
Ernest is not the only member of the Swinton clan to have anticipated the power of the moving image. (And it is truly a clan--one of Scotland's oldest and most powerful families, descended from Scots King Robert the Bruce and related to the Greystokes of Tarzan legend.) In 1908, Tilda's great-great-uncle Alan Campbell-Swinton set out his theory of "distant electric vision"--the idea of broadcasting images to a remote screen. It would be nearly two decades before another Scot, John Logie Baird, demonstrated his invention based on Campbell-Swinton's theories: television.
His great-great-niece may have once thought herself a bohemian cuckoo in a starchily conventional nest, but in discussing her illustrious ancestors, Tilda Swinton acknowledges that the truth is more interesting. "I'm not a changeling after all," she says. Photographs of Ernest and Alan attest to a tenacious gene set that's passed on those wide-set Swinton eyes for generations. Fans may even suspect that Swinton--rather like Woolf's Orlando--has survived for hundreds of years, changing sex, ruling Scotland, inventing tanks and TVs and commanding battalions and box office. On Planet Swinton, anything seems possible.
We Need to Talk About Tilda
Immediately after winning her oscar in 2008, Swinton gave the statuette to Brian Swardstrom, her U.S. agent. In her acceptance speech, she proclaimed Swardstrom to be Oscar's "spitting image ... the same-shaped head and, it has to be said, the buttocks." We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapted from Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel, is not the sort of life-affirming British fare that traditionally wins over the Academy. But its star has an outside chance of clutching a second facsimile of Swardstrom's buttocks come February for her turn as "a beaten-down mum," in director Lynne Ramsay's phrase.
Ramsay first saw her future leading lady in 1995, when Swinton was lying in a glass case in London's Serpentine Gallery, asleep in--or rather as--an art installation. The actress was "so beautiful, so striking, so unusual-looking," says Ramsay. It wasn't how she later pictured Eva, but Ramsay overcame her doubts. Swinton "is a canvas," she says. "You can change her. I had to age her, because she's ageless. It's weird--you can make her older or younger."
Ramsay coaxed vivid performances from John C. Reilly as Eva's sweetly gullible husband and from the three young actors who depict Kevin first as a disturbed toddler, then a malign child and finally a murderous teenage sociopath. Swinton studied all the iterations of her screen son and learned to mirror their movements to underline the idea that mother and child are not only related but also more alike than either cares to acknowledge. Swinton is in almost every scene, frequently in closeup, often speechless but all the more eloquent for that. "She can do so much just with her face," Ramsay says. "Tilda's really into silent films, actually. She once said to me, 'Film went downhill when words came in.'"