Beautifully Out of Touch: Tilda Swinton

Fresh off a plane from her hometown in the highlands of Scotland (read: the boondocks), Tilda Swinton is tired and stressed out. The angular actor hikes up the sleeve of her Maria Cornejo blouse and reveals a red welt on her pale white arm. "I have shingles again today," she confesses, narrowing her reptilian green eyes. It all sounds very Victorian, especially given Swinton's aristocratic background -- her family pedigree goes back 35 generations in Scotland.

She has reason to be exhausted: In the past year she has wrapped three films, Young Adam, Norman Jewison's The Statement and Mike Mills's Thumbsucker.

Swinton is an unconventional movie star. For one thing, she lives in Scotland and only goes to Hollywood when work calls. For another, she has wildly diverse artistic interests -- her work bridges the worlds of big-time movies, fashion, performance art and film criticism. Moreover, her androgynous beauty is hard for mainstream audiences to embrace in a romantic lead, though fashionistas and art-school students adore the star of Sally Potter's 1992 film Orlando, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, in which Swinton happens to change her sex twice and lives through four centuries.

Swinton has also been seen in more mainstream fare. She co-starred with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach and appeared with Tom Cruise in Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky. Most surprisingly, she is about to star as a rogue angel opposite Keanu Reeves in the action flick Constantine, based on a DC/Vertigo comic about a supernatural detective in Los Angeles.

Independent-film darling Tilda Swinton in a big-budget Hollywood action movie?

Don't spaz out yet. Swinton is currently appearing in a film with edgy photographer Gregory Crewdson, and her new movie Young Adam is a dark cinematic turn, reminiscent of her role in the noir thriller The Deep End.

At 5'11", with razor-sharp cheekbones and a noble air, Swinton is built for the runway. It's no surprise that she's the muse for Dutch designers Viktor and Rolf, who used Swinton in their Autumn/Winter 2003 show and often dress her for events. "They had me secretly engineered in a laboratory north of Utrecht," Swinton jokes. "We're very compatible." Swinton mentions that she admires Maria Cornejo of Zero and Bernard Wilhelm's new designs for Capucci. "It's all about sticking with your friends and making new ones."

Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, who met Swinton through mutual friends, the fashion-photography duo Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, agree that affection is a key part of their collaboration. "We don't have particular fetishes for certain actresses," says Viktor. "We love Tilda because we know her. The personal aspect is very important." Rolf adds, "She's quite something."

Born Katherine Matilda Swinton in London in 1960, the future actor was shuttled with her three brothers and Australian-bred mother between London and Germany. Her father, Major General Sir John Swinton, a professional soldier, was often being re-posted. At age 10, she was shipped off to West Heath school, an all-girls boarding school in the countryside of Southern England. Diana Spencer, who would become the Princess of Wales, was a classmate. Swinton's experience at boarding school was so bad that today she believes the practice should be classified as "child abuse." "I was very unhappy," Swinton recalls, shaking her head. "You make the best of it though. I have friends my age who are doing it to their children."

After boarding school Swinton fled to Africa for two years to do volunteer work. In 1979 she lived in a South African black township "under heavy apartheid," then worked in a school in the Kenyan bush. Although she describes Africa as a formative experience, Swinton has never returned to the continent and doesn't want to. "I loved Africa so much," she says. "I don't feel like I can go back and be a tourist."

When she returned to England in 1980, Swinton studied English literature and social and political science at Cambridge. "I started out as a writer. Then I became allergic to that red marker." Yet over the past year and a half, Swinton has been persuaded by editors to write again, mostly film criticism for publications like The Guardian, Tank, Rebel and Another Magazine.

At university, Swinton was itching to perform. She joined the Cambridge Mummers theater group and then spent a year at the Royal Shakespeare Company. "To be honest, I was never interested in theater," she admits, popping a potato crisp into her mouth. "I was always really interested in film."

A monumental period in Swinton's artistic life began in 1986, when she met experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman, with whom she would collaborate on nine projects. Their initial meeting, she says, "was really orthodox. I auditioned for him." She got the part, playing Lena in Caravaggio. Perhaps her favorite Jarman film is the documentary-style The Last of England (1988). Even though it didn't cost much money to make, "it's a masterpiece," she says. She describes her work with Jarman as a bohemian, workshop-style experience. "We'd sit around having a conversation for many months, and out of that would come a film, and we would make that film and that conversation would continue."

When Jarman became ill with AIDS in 1993, Swinton was devastated with grief and stopped working completely. "When we finally made [Orlando], I just didn't want to work anymore," she says. "And Derek was dying at that stage." Jarman died in 1994.

Swinton was lured back to acting in 1995 by a "great script," Female Perversions. "It was a very ambitious film, which I'm really proud of. It was way ahead of its time."

That same year Swinton made news when she branched off into performance art, although she sees it as simply a continuation of her work as an actor. For her piece "The Maybe," Swinton spent eight hours a day on display in a glass box, like a rare, exotic specimen. It debuted at London's Serpentine Gallery, then moved to Rome's Museo Barraco. Over the course of seven days, 22,000 visitors came to gawk as Swinton sat (or attempted to sleep). "My performance was about passivity and the audience, really," she says. "The boys wanted to wake me up, and the girls just totally got it. I'm always intending to do it again." Then, referring to magician David Blaine, who spent 44 days living in a glass box suspended by a crane over the Thames River in London, she adds, "I don't know why he didn't get in touch with me and ask my advice."

Swinton is certain to get plenty of attention for her upcoming film Young Adam, in which her love scenes with co-star Ewan McGregor are almost NC-17 raw, both emotionally and physically. Set in the 1950s, the brooding murder mystery is based on Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi's novel of the same name. Swinton plays the married Ella Gault, who lives and toils on a barge that runs between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Then she meets and begins an affair with Joe (McGregor). "We looked for a texture to the sex in the film that would mean real human energy rather than received notions of the way sex looks and is looked at in film," Swinton says, pushing a thick strand of red hair from her forehead. "It's about loneliness, like any interesting piece of work. Joe tries to find company through sex. It's an erotic world he's living in."

In Thumbsucker, Swinton plays the mother of a teenage boy who can't stop sucking his thumb. "It's like a family film by Stanley Kubrick," Swinton explains with a laugh.

Although her professional life is hectic once again, Swinton is still something of a recluse in her personal life. In fact, she claims to have spent just five nights in the past six years in London. "I'm beautifully out of touch," she proudly announces. "I left London six years ago and never went back. I used to live at the end of King's Road. But London's changed a lot."

She and her husband of 14 years, the figurative painter and playwright John Byrne, left the city when their twins, Xavier and Honor, were born. "They don't like the idea of me being in films," she whispers, as she whips out her Nokia phone to show off pictures of them. "They've actually asked me to stop. I said that I loved doing it. The awful thing about my work is that they can't see any of it -- not until they're 21." (Swinton made an exception for Orlando, which she says the twins "quite loved," though they fell asleep by the middle of the film.)

Her children might not like it, but one sure bet is that Swinton will soon break out and become a full-fledged Hollywood star -- despite her seclusion in the Scottish countryside. "I very much enjoy having a double life," Swinton boasts, gazing out over the Manhattan skyline. "If you're drawn to an artistic life, it's a matter of DNA."

Hair by Colin Gold for T.I.G.I. at See Management * Makeup by Rie Omoto for See Management * Stylist's assistant: Jessica McCullough