Tilda Swinton's bizarre double life

SHE went to school with Princess Diana, lives with an older man and travels with a toyboy lover. So will winning an Oscar tame eccentric Tilda Swinton?

Tilda starred with Billy Zane in Orlando Tilda starred with Billy Zane in Orlando

A Cambridge University contemporary of Tilda Swinton, who this week won the best supporting actress Oscar for her performance in the thriller Michael Clayton, recalls a mutual friend falling in love with the white-skinned, red-haired beauty when they acted together in a student play.

She, not suspecting his passion, invited him to meet her parents at their home in the Scottish borders.

The lovesick youth, unused to the ways of the landed gentry, committed the immediate faux pas of pointing a loaded shotgun at one of Tilda’s brothers during a shoot.

Then, after getting lost on a walk, he turned up late for an informal lunch for 20 guests. Asked to pass the chutney by a hugely distinguished peer of the realm, he failed to fasten the lid, whereupon the jar fell on to a huge platter, which smashed into smith­ereens.

Accepting her Oscar for best supporting actress Accepting her Oscar for best supporting actress

“Don’t worry,” said Tilda’s mother Lady Swinton, ever the perfect hostess. “It was just some old thing of granny’s.” According to the hapless guest, the plate actually dated from the Renaissance.

The impeccably well-spoken Kath­erine Matilda Swinton, 47 – daughter of Major-General Sir John Swinton KCVO, the former Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire, who can trace his family back to the ninth century – has never sought to hide her grand origins.

Unlike film director Guy Ritchie, whose stepfather is a baronet, she has never affected a mockney accent. But it is hard to exaggerate just how far the actress, who has raised eyebrows with an apparent ménage à trois involving the 68-year-old father of her children and her 30-year-old German lover, has travelled from the conventional life she was born into.

We are the best of pals and adore being parents.

In the mid-Eighties she met the working-class Glaswegian playwright and painter John Byrne, celebrated in Scotland for the play The Slab Boys and the TV series Tutti Frutti. Twenty years her senior, he left his wife and daughter in 1990 to live with her and they settled on the Moray Firth, north of Inverness, which is home to their 10-year-old twins, Xavier and Honor. The couple took Gaelic lessons and sent their children to a Gaelic nursery and Swinton has said she could not imagine living anywhere else.

“I don’t know how people do it without living in Scotland – that’s how I think of it,” she said last year. “How on earth do people go to their houses in Beverly Hills after going through all that you need to make a film? The north of Scotland is so precious to me.”

She still says she is happy there but since this year’s Baftas, where she also won the best supporting actress award, it has become obvious that her life is not as simple as it seemed. She was escorted by Sandro Kopp, a Ger­man actor and artist based in New Zealand, whom she met three years ago while filming The Lion, The Witch And The Ward­robe (he had a non-speaking part).

He also accompanied her to the Oscars, while Byrne stayed in Scotland – and at first it appeared as if both men were still her lovers. “What is true is that John and I live here with our children and Sandro is sometimes here with us, and we travel the world together. We are all a family,” she said in Scotland last week.

But after her Oscars win, she implied that her physical relationship with Byrne is now over. “We are the best of pals and adore being parents and are devoted to that project. We ostensibly live in the same house but I travel the world with another delightful painter,” she said.

And asked if it was true that she had a boyfriend and a husband, she replied: “I don’t have a husband, I’ve never been married. I have children with someone else, with whom I’m bringing up my children, and I’ve lived with someone else, my sweetheart for the past three years, and maybe it’s extraordinary that we’re really all friends.”

Extraordinary it may be, because they really do seem to be friends. And if there is any rancour involved, it is well disguised. “I couldn’t go to the Oscars because I am working on a new play, which opens in April, so Sandro went with her,” said Byrne at the weekend. “We all love him dearly. I love him and the twins love him.”

For Tilda, family conventions were never her goal and she has always been an instinctive rebel.

The daughter of a Conserv­ative family – Sir John was once chairman of his local party – she says she can trace her Left-wing instincts back to the age of five, when she couldn’t understand why children she’d been playing with had to sit in a different part of the local church.

At West Heath boarding school in Kent, where she was a friend of Lady Diana Spencer and rose to become head girl, she swam against the non-academic trend – girls were expected to find rich husbands – and won a place at Cambridge.

A talented student actress, she chose not to follow the Footlights Society path to success. A member of the Communist party, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company but hated it and left to join collab­orators of the anti-­establishment film-maker Derek Jarman.

Starting with his well-regarded art-house film Caravaggio, in which she played the lover of a young unknown called Sean Bean, she made a total of eight films with the radical gay director and became one of his closest friends.

“It was obvious even then that she was heading for great things because she had class in every way,” says a friend of Jarman, who died of Aids in 1994. “She had technique, presence, physicality, intelligence and beauty – a voice of amazing resonance, that acting forehead and those amazing eyes.

“She never tried to do ‘Estuary’ vowels and she always dressed in a kind of gardening chic – looking like you’re going into the garden of your stately home. But there was nothing grand about her.

“When Derek took part in a gay rights demonstration at Bow Street magistrates court and ended up in the cells, Tilda was there the whole time. I remember she was so worried for him she nearly wrenched my hand off.”

Her androgynous looks made her the perfect choice as the lead in the film of Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel Orlando, which was nominated for two Oscars. After Jarman’s death she took part in a bizarre art installation, sleeping for eight hours a day in a glass box at London’s Serpentine Gallery.

But she moved into the mainstream by playing the overbearing commune leader Sal in The Beach, with Leonardo DiCaprio, and was nominated for a Golden Globe for her starring role in The Deep End.

She appeared with Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, with Nicolas Cage in the Oscar-winning Adaptation and played Ewan McGregor’s lover in Young Adam.

But her real break came when Michelle Pfeiffer had to back out of playing the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch And The Ward­robe. With her hair dyed platinum, her corset was so tight that she had to be propped upright on a stand between takes. “I am a soldier,” she said at the time. “I live a soldier’s life when I’m working. That’s how it feels to me, except I’ve got a slightly better chance of survival.”

With the second Narnia film already in production, her Oscar for her portrayal of a ruthless, guilt-ridden lawyer in Michael Clayton – a film for which she bulked up by eating a lot of pies – has cemented her international reputation.

Her next project, in which she appears with Michael Clayton co-star George Clooney, as well as Brad Pitt and John Malkovich, is written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, this year’s walk-on-water Oscar-winners for their film No Country For Old Men.

With her career soaring, revelations about her unusual private life – and the unapologetic way in which she has reacted to them – are a firm indication that Tilda has no intention of being moulded into a Hollywood factory star.

And if anyone can pull off the most unconventional of lifestyles, it is surely Tilda Swinton.

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