Tilda Swinton
(5 of 5)
And Swinton is as much Buster Keaton as Lillian Gish. Kevin is both leavened and made more shocking by moments of physical comedy: Eva, pushing a buggy down a New York City street and visibly relaxing when the noise of a pneumatic drill drowns out her baby's squalling; or, years later, after the baby has grown up to kill his classmates, trying to hide from one of their mothers in the supermarket. These are mordant moments; Swinton can also deliver belly laughs, as in the Coen brothers' 2008 Burn After Reading, again opposite Clooney, as his fizzlingly furious lover.
She's been clowning since childhood, Swinton says, a defense mechanism born of her status as the only girl among four siblings. At the age Kevin plans to destroy his contemporaries, Swinton was planning to make them laugh. She recalls turning up at a teenage party dressed as a man; the joke wore thin as soon as a more conventionally pretty--and conventionally attired--girl appeared and the boys swarmed around her, leaving Swinton hunched alone on a hay bale. To launch the 8 Foundation, Swinton performed in an Edinburgh street as Stan Laurel to Cousins' Oliver Hardy, re-creating the duo's comic dance from Way Out West. She remained poker-faced throughout, but you could see she was in her element.
And what of her current element? E-mails to Swinton trigger the following automatic response: "Hello, I am away until 01/01/2070 and am unable to read your message." Over lunch she had talked about a desire to pull back from acting, tend her garden ("I don't just mean sorting out where the dogs have dug huge bunkers"), sing in a choir ("completely unproductive, totally private and yet thrilling"). But she had also mooted a more radical option. As an aspiration, "vanishing is high up there, really," she said. Hopefully the auto-response is a Swintonesque joke. If not, a distant planet may be glowing a little brighter.