Tilda Swinton

Born: November 1960
Where: London, England, UK

Swinton has quietly built up an impressive body of work from her early days with the maverick Derek Jarman to American blockbusters such as The Beach and Narnia.

Born into a military family of Scottish landed gentry, her great uncle, Sir Ernest Swinton, invented the tank and another is credited as the real inventor of TV using the cathode ray tube.

The daughter of Major-General Sir John Swinton, she and her three brothers lived abroad on military postings before returning to the family home in Scotland.

She was sent to West Heath girls' boarding school in Kent where she became a champion sprinter and also befriended a young Princess of Wales.

Before going up to Cambridge to read social and political science, Swinton spent two years working with children in Kenya and a South African township.

After graduating in 1983 she was accepted by the Royal Shakespeare Company but left after a season claiming the company treated actors "like paper knickers."

A year later - at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre - she met playwright John Byrne, 21 years her senior, and the couple have been together ever since.

The late Derek Jarman gave her her first cinema role as the prostitute Lena in his biopic of the Italian painter Caravaggio in 1986.

Peter Wollen put Swinton's ethereal, somewhat androgynous presence to good use in his directorial debut, Friendship's Death in 1987, in which she played an alien android shipwrecked on earth.

Swinton's collaboration with Jarman - the second of eight team efforts - continued through films including The Last of England and The Garden, as a Madonna.

She brilliantly captured the icy hauteur of a woman scorned playing Queen Isabella in Jarman's Edward II in 1991 but delivered what is probably best remembered early performance as the eponymous hero-turned-heroine of Sally Potter's Orlando.

After a final collaboration with Jarman in 1994's Blue, Swinton garnered critical attention as a lawyer who undergoes a personality crisis at the height of professional success in Female Perversions.

In addition to Jarman, the actress had developed a working relationship with filmmaker John Maybury, starting with a recreation of her stage role of a woman who assumes her dead husband's identity in Man to Man.

Gradually moving into more mainstream fare, Swinton gave a brave performance as the mother in a family torn apart by incest in The War Zone and co-starred with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach.

The actress had one of her best roles as the mother of a gay son who goes to any length to protect her child after his older, abusive lover is found dead in the intriguing if not wholly satisfying The Deep End in 2001.

Later that year, Swinton offered her support to star Tom Cruise in a pivotal role in Vanilla Sky and can be seen in Adaptation with Meryl Streep and Nicolas Cage.

In 2003, she starred alongside Ewan McGregor in Young Adam and appeared in the religious thriller The Statement.

She also played the Angel Gabriel in the sci-fi thriller Constantine and starred as a modest mum in the comedy-drama Thumbsucker.

A card-carrying member of the Community Party of Great Britain, she lives with Byrne and their twins in the wilds of Easter Ross in Scotland.

Recent work includes the role of the the White Witch in Disney's blockbuster Narnia and a ruthless corporate executive in the thriller Michael Clayton.