As burn after reading, the new Coen Brothers movie starring Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt, opens the Venice film festival this month, the Oscar-winning British actor speaks to Voyager about her unconventional career in film

When Tilda Swinton won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Michael Clayton in February of this year, she didn’t need to feign surprise at receiving the honour. After all, practically every odds-maker had placed their bets on Cate Blanchett (for I’m Not There) and Amy Ryan (for Gone Baby Gone) to win. Some pundits even put Swinton’s odds behind those of octogenarian actress Ruby Dee (for American Gangster). But Swinton’s turn as villainous Karen Crowder – the cunning and conniving legal counsel for an ethically dubious multinational conglomerate – was merely the latest in a string of impeccable performances from the classically trained Scottish actress. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all should have been the fact that it took the powers-that-be so long to recognise this heretofore Hollywood outsider’s immense talent. When I meet her in a Los Angeles hotel though, she certainly seems to belong.

Born in London in 1960 into one of Scotland’s oldest aristocratic families, Katherine Matilda Swinton, the daughter of an army major general, attended boarding school at the exclusive Heathfields where she was in the same class as the late Princess Diana. She also briefly attended Fettes (where Tony Blair was educated) before studying English literature at Cambridge University. While there, she performed in numerous stage productions, eventually moving on to work for a single season with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But the visually striking redhead’s cultural tastes were decidedly unconventional, and her penchant for the unusual eventually led her into a professional partnership with experimental film director Derek Jarman. Beginning in 1985 and continuing for nine years, the duo collaborated on seven critically acclaimed films, including Caravaggio, Edward II and Wittgenstein, before Jarman succumbed to complications from Aids in 1994.

“There was a time in the 1980s when filmmakers like Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Sally Potter and Terence Davis were encouraged to develop a voice as artists,” Swinton recalls of this heady creative period. “After the British Film Institute production wing, which funded all of these artists, was closed, all the funding for film became encompassed under an umbrella. That’s what’s now called the UK Film Council, which is closely allied to a tourism objective. It’s a completely different thing. In those days, the idea of making a profit was absolute anathema to film artists.”

Her most noteworthy performance during her first decade as an actress came in the Sally Potter-directed Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf’s novel, in which she played a nobleman who lives 400 years and changes sex from man to woman. But Swinton still insists that she owes her career to Jarman.

“I don’t think there’s any way that I would be what you call an actress now if I hadn’t met Derek,” she declares, her green eyes wide with emphasis, “because working alongside him made it possible for me to be the way that I have to be. If the only cinema that had been available to me had been everything else in the UK at that time – which was basically Richard Attenborough or Merchant Ivory– there’s no way I would be working in film.”

Jarman’s impact on her is clearly profound. The year after his death, Swinton participated in an art installation which required her to lie asleep in a glass box for eight hours a day in a subversive take on Sleeping Beauty. Entitled The Maybe, it was part of a high-profile show by the artist Cornelia Parker in London’s Serpentine Gallery and Swinton’s already milk-pale colouring combined with her prone figure laying in a see-through coffin-type box raised questions about mortality.

Fortunately, she returned to work in film, though it was six years after Jarman’s death before she took on what could even remotely be considered a major role, starring opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Scottish director Danny Boyle’s The Beach. The film launched a pattern in Swinton’s career that soon found her veering from edgy indie fare to left-of-centre studio films which exposed her to an increasingly broader audience. Glossy Tom Cruise vehicle Vanilla Sky was offset by the darker Young Adam with Ewan McGregor. Then, after sci-fiflick Constantine with Keanu Reeves, came the genrestretching Adaptation with Nicolas Cage, followed by the ponderous Bill Murray movie Broken Flowers.

Working with critically acclaimed directors, ranging from Cameron Crowe and Spike Jonze to Jim Jarmusch, the actress found herself with a raised profile internationally. And her unconventional looks also made her an unlikely style icon. Cutting-edge Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf, known for their androgynous tailoring, called her their muse and based several fashion collections on her.

Recently, Swinton has found herself with a renewed enthusiasm for the job. “I’ve never been addicted to acting,” she confesses. “Acting is something that I have relatively little interest in. If I’m addicted to anything, I would say I’ve always been a paid-up film fan, and the idea of being able to make film is still truly thrilling to me. My modus operandi has crystallised, because I was spoiled very early. Working with one filmmaker [Jarman] for nine years, I learned to work with my friends, and to feel happy while working. Fortunately, I have never had to move outside of that. I’m so blessed: I keep running into people who become new friends and create that sort of family atmosphere.”

But it was her own family situation that ultimately led Swinton to the most accessible role of her career, portraying the White Witch in 2005’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe and its recently released sequel The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. In 1997 she gave birth to twins Honor and Xavier (their father is Scottish artist/writer John Byrne), and made the personal decision not to take roles that would require her to be away from her north Scotland home for months at a time while her children were little. So when the films’ director Andrew Adamson offered her a small but pivotal role in the first of his eagerly anticipated adaptations of C.S. Lewis’ beloved fantasy novels, which fitted in with her new practical requirements, the devoted mum felt that “on a scale of 1-100, it was 101 in terms of irresistibility”.

Still, Swinton denies that the canny choice was motivated by any sort of career blueprint to balance box-office blockbusters with more personally fulfilling independent film fare. “Honestly, I’m not aware of having a career,” she insists. “I’m aware of having a life. I wasn’t a ‘Narnian’ as a child, so I didn’t have the feelings of pressure. I knew Narnia was a big thing to people, but I didn’t realise until recently quite how big it was. But I’m truly thrilled at the idea that maybe, thanks to Walt Disney [Pictures], people might go and seek out Derek Jarman films. That really gives me a thrill. And this might make it easier for me to get films made in the future.”

The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe went on to gross more than $500 million internationally and whether by clever career calculation or sheer circumstance, it landed Swinton on the A-list for the first time. Suddenly, the maverick actress found herself working with Hollywood’s crème de la crème. It was starring opposite George Clooney on the suspense thriller Michael Clayton, written and directed by Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Ultimatum, Armageddon) that earned her that coveted gold statuette. About the high-profile role, Swinton says: “I’m such a tourist to go into that exotic world with these people. [Michael Clayton] was written by someone who’s so sophisticated and playing with that genre in such a way that you’re not only dealing with a hero and a villain, but also collateral damage victims along the way. You’re dealing with someone who’s really looking at character and human behaviour so he can write a part like the one I was asked to play, and really make it a meal in itself for the person who gets to do it, which I’m grateful to say was me.”

While she has said that all her roles have a little bit of her in them, none of the parts she has played resembles her unconventional personal life. Soon after her Oscar win it was revealed that while she and Byrne, 68, live together to raise their 10-year-old twins, they each have other lovers. Swinton’s is German artist Sandro Kopp, 18 years her junior, whom she met on the set of Narnia…, and with whom she travels abroad.

However offbeat, Swinton appears to have found simultaneous happiness in her relationships and career. Now no longer the dark horse, this surprise Oscar winner seems to have her pick when it comes to plum roles for actresses ‘of a certain age’ (which is how Hollywood regards 47-yearold women). She stars in next month’s highly anticipated Burn After Reading, a dark comedy directed by fellow Oscar winners Joel and Ethan Coen, in which Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand play two unscrupulous gym employees who find a CD-Rom containing the top-secret memoirs of a high-ranking CIA agent, played by John Malkovich.

“I’m married to John Malkovich and I am the lover – there’s no other word for it – of Mr George Clooney,” Swinton says of her role in the Coen brothers’ follow-up to No Country For Old Men. “I haven’t cleared this with them, so I hope they don’t kill me for saying this, but I would call it a caper movie,” she says of the film, which early previews have compared to the Coen’s dark comedy classics Fargo and The Big Lebowski.

Swinton also stars with Pitt in David Fincher’s (Fight Club) forthcoming The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, adapted from an F Scott Fitzgerald story, (which sees a debut cameo from Pitt’s infant daughter with Angelina Jolie, Shiloh Nouvel). She then re-teams with Bill Murray and Jim Jarmusch for The Limits of Control, and rumour has it she’ll co-star opposite Sean Bean in Come Like Shadows, a Macbeth adaptation. Clearly, this fiercely independent icon is just beginning to enter her prime in her late 40s, and having the time of her life doing so.

“I think I enjoy my work now even more,” she says with a smile. “It sounds sacrilegious to say that anything’s a delight when you’re away from your children, but the truth is that making films, going round the world on promotional tours, all these crazy things that were so difficult before are so much easier after raising twins that, frankly, it is a delight.”

Burn After Reading opens the Venice Film Festival this month and goes on general release in September. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is due for release in November