 A formidably gifted actress who has carved out an international reputation as a risk-taker, a one-off, resolutely eschewing conventional leading lady roles.
Cambridge-educated, she worked with the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and the RSC before entering films in the mid 1980s, embarking on a rewarding association with director Derek Jarman, for whom she appeared notably in Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987) and, as the spurned Queen Isabella, in his revisionist Edward II (1991).
There is a unique glamour about the red-headed Swinton, a glamour that is not cosmetically derived but comes from the genuine whiff of the exotic she gives off, nowhere better seen than as the gender- and time-traversing Orlando (UK/France/Italy/Netherlands/Russia, 1992) in Sally Potter's daring adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel.
But she was just as distinctive as bitchy Muriel, part of Francis Bacon's circle in Love Is the Devil (UK/France/Japan, d. John Maybury, 1998), was terribly poignant in Tim Roth's excoriating family drama, The War Zone (UK/Italy, 1999), relaxed the tension somewhat in the more mainstream drama of The Beach (UK/US, d. Danny Boyle, 2000), and won universal acclaim as the housewife protecting her son from the law in The Deep End (US, d. Scott McGehee & David Siegel, 2001).
Her work persistently and intelligently explores aspects of women's experience of a kind and at a level of intensity unusual in commercial cinema.
Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Cinema
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FILM & TV CREDITS
