Katherine Matilda, or Tilda Swinton, is a Scottish actress known for her performances on both stage and screen.
Swinton was born in 1960 in London, England. A childhood classmate and friend to Lady Diana. After graduating from Cambridge University and performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Swinton made her film debut in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio.
Swinton collaborated with artist and director Derek Jarman, who cast her in her first film, Caravaggio. She appeared in eight of Jarman’s films, including The Last of England, and an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, after which she gained international recognition.
“… The Last of England, which is a non-narrative film shot on Super 8 with a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner, had big reviews, important reviews. I mean, they were terrible reviews; I remember this very right-wing critic called Norman Stone excoriated it in the Sunday Times. But that film was taken very seriously. It was not marginal at all. There’s a great repertory cinema in London called the Prince Charles Cinema, which showed The Last of England for an entire year,” Swinton once said.
In 1992, Swinton starred in Orlando, director Sally Potter’s adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel, in which she played both the male and female roles, and soon attracted Hollywood’s attention.
Swinton played many roles in different films such as Michael Clayton, The Limits of Control, Only Lovers Left Alive, Three Thousand Years of Longing and many more. She also appeared in many performances; in 2013, she appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, lying in a glass case, in the installation piece titled The Maybe, which was a performance she originally had in London in 1995, then in Rome to honor Jarman following his death from AIDS. Swinton also collaborated with the fashion house Viktor & Rolf in their Fall/Winter 2003/2004 Ready-to-Wear collection, titled the One Woman Show.
Swinton returned to the stage for the first time in four decades to play her role in the one-woman play Man to Man. The play’s very first performance took place on September 5, 2026, at London’s Royal Court Theatre. The New York run of Man to Man will begin on February 21, 2027
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