Tilda Swinton Trivia: 45 interesting facts you didn’t know about her!

Tilda Swinton is an Anglo-Scotish actress, perfomance artist, model and fashion icon, known for both arthouse and mainstream films. Let’s see some awesome facts and trivia about her!

1.Her full name is Katherine Matilda “Tilda” Swinton of Kimmerghame.

2. She was born on 5 November 1960.

3. She was born in London, the daughter of Judith Balfour (née Killen; 1929–2012) and John Swinton

4. She has three brothers

5. Tilda Swinton was raised entirely around men, with her father and three brothers. Because of this, she claims to have been raised as a boy and became a girl when she went off to boarding school. Meaning that she actually is a Virginia Woolf novel.

6. Her father is a Major-General, KCVO, OBE, DL, and Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire from 1989 to 2000.

7. Her mother was Australian.

8. Her paternal great-grandfather was a Scottish politician and herald, George Swinton, and her maternal great-great-grandfather was the Scottish botanist John Hutton Balfour.

9. The Swinton family is an ancient Anglo-Scots family that can trace its lineage to the Middle Ages

10. As a child, Tilda once planned to kill her brother, but they’re okay now.

11. The Swinton family is one of only three families (along with the Ardens and the Berkeleys) that can trace their unbroken land ownership and lineage to before the Norman Conquest.

12. Tilda Swinton attended three independent schools: Queen’s Gate School in London, the West Heath Girls’ School and also Fettes College for a brief period.

13. West Heath was an expensive boarding school where she was a classmate and friend of Princess Diana.

14. Tilda Swinton went to volunteer in Kenya during a break from college.

15. In 1983, she graduated from New Hall (now known as Murray Edwards College) at the University of Cambridge with a degree in Social and Political Sciences.

16. While at Cambridge, she joined the Communist Party.

17. She later joined the Scottish Socialist Party.

18. On television, she appeared as Julia in the 1986 mini-series Zastrozzi: A Romance based on the Gothic novel by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

19. Her first film was Caravaggio in 1986, directed by Derek Jarman.

20. Swinton also played the title role in Orlando, Sally Potter’s film version of the novel by Virginia Woolf. The part allowed Swinton to explore matters of gender presentation onscreen which reflected her lifelong interest in androgynous style.

21. Swinton later reflected on the role in an interview accompanied by a striking photoshoot. “People talk about androgyny in all sorts of dull ways,” said Swinton, noting that the recent rerelease of Orlando had her thinking again about its pliancy. She referred to 1920s French artist and playful gender-bender Claude Cahun: “Cahun looked at the limitlessness of an androgynous gesture, which I’ve always been interested in.

22. Tilda Swinton was originally supposed to play Bridget Jones in the film Bridget Jones’ Diary. Which would have been a very, very different film.

23. In 1995, with producer and friend Joanna Scanlan, Swinton developed a performance/installation live art piece in the Serpentine Gallery, London, where she was on display to the public for a week, asleep or apparently so, in a glass case, as a piece of performance art. The piece is sometimes wrongly credited to Cornelia Parker, whom Swinton invited to collaborate for the installation in London.

24. The performance, entitled The Maybe, was repeated in 1996 at the Museo Barracco in Rome and in 2013 at the Museum of Modern Artin New York.

25. She has collaborated with the fashion designers Viktor & Rolf. She was the focus of their One Woman Show 2003, in which they made all the models look like copies of Swinton, and she read a poem (of her own) that included the line, “There is only one you. Only one

26. She was offered to play Prof. Sybil Trelawney on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), but role went to Emma Thompson.

27. She learned how to speak Italian and Russian for I Am Love (2009).

28. In 2013, Tilda Swinton was named as one of the fifty best-dressed over 50s by The Guardian, and often appears on International Best Dressed Lists.

29. In May 2013 it was announced that Swinton would be the face of the Chanel Pre-Fall Paris-Edinbourg collection. This collection was inspired by Scottish traditional fashion and fabrics.

30. In 1988, she was a member of the jury at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival.

31. In 1993, she was a member of the jury at the 18th Moscow International Film Festival.

32. In 1996, she appeared in the music video for Orbital’s “The Box”.

33. In August 2006, she opened the new Screen Academy Scotland production centre in Edinburgh.

34. In July 2008, she founded the film festival Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Of Dreams.

35. In 2009, Swinton and Mark Cousins embarked on a project where they mounted a 33.5-tonne portable cinema on a large truck, hauling it manually through the Scottish Highlands, creating a travelling independent film festival. The project was featured prominently in a documentary called Cinema is Everywhere. The festival was repeated again in 2011

36. Initially, she didn’t want to do A Bigger Splash (2015). Not this movie nor others, due to the recent death of her mother, she ended up changing her mind and at a moment in her own life when she was all out of words, she proposed the idea of this woman unable to speak.

37. In February 2013, she played the part of David Bowie’s wife in the promotional video for his song, “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”, directed by Floria Sigismondi.

38. Hardly limited to acting, Swinton and her friend Joanna Scanian developed a performance art piece that featured Swinton in a glass case, asleep, and on display to the public for a week. She performed this piece in 1995 in London, 1996 in Rome, and 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

39. Tilda’s ex is Bela Tarr.

40. She has appeared in three movies with Ralph Fiennes: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), A Bigger Splash (2015) and Hail, Caesar! (2016).

41. In July 2013, Swinton appeared photographed in front of Moscow’s Kremlin holding a rainbow flag in support of the country’s LGBT community, reportedly releasing a statement: “In solidarity. From Russia with love.

42. Tilda Swinton lives in Nairn, overlooking the Moray Firth in the Highland region of Scotland, with her twins and her partner Sandro Kopp, a German/New Zealand painter. John Byrne, father to their twins Honor and Xavier Swinton Byrne (born 6 October 1997), lives in Edinburgh with his partner Jeanine Davies.

43.She received a 90-minute tribute at the 2008 AFI (American Film Institute) Festival.

44. Her favorite films are School of Rock (2003), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Brüno (2009), ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ (1945), Let the Right One In (2008), and Kiseye Berendj (1998).

45. She was the first non-director to be have a Film Benefit Gala held in her honor at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The event took place on her 53rd birthday, November 5th, 2013 and was hosted by Karl Lagerfeld, Wes Anderson and David Bowie.