The iconoclastic gifts of the visually striking and enigmatic actress Tilda Swinton, who was born on November 5th, 1960, in London, have been appreciated by a more international audience of late. Born into a patrician Scottish military family, she was educated in an English boarding school along with Princess Diana. Tilda subsequently studied at Social and Politcal Science Cambridge University, but changed courses and graduated in 1983 with a degree in English Literature. She performed a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company. A decided rebel when it came to the arts, she left abruptly after a year as her approach shifted dramatically. With a taste for the unique and bizarre, she found some genuinely interesting gender-bending roles come her way, such as the composer Mozart in Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri", and as a working class woman impersonating her dead husband during World War II, in Karges' Man to Man (1992). Tilda would commit the latter role to film in 1991. In 1985 the pale-skinned, carrot-topped actress began a professional association with director/mentor Derek Jarman. This quirky alliance would produce such stark turns in Caravaggio (1986), Aria (1987), The Last of England (1988), The Garden (1990) Edward II (1991), and Wittgenstein (1993), while feeding this voracity for playing the unique and unusual. Tilda provided a voice in his final film, an inventive documentary entitled Blue (1993/I), which used only a blue screen and interweaving vocal soundtrack to drive home its themes of dying and death. Jarman succumbed to complications from AIDS shortly after its completion. His untimely demise left a devastating void in Tilda's life for quite some time. Ironically, her most notable film role may come from a non-Jarman film. For the title role in the Sally Potter-directed stunner Orlando (1992), her nobleman character actually lives for 400 years while changing sex from man to woman. Over the years she has preferred to sacrifice celebrity for art, opening herself to experimental projects with new and untried directors and mediums. Consistently off-centered roles in Female Perversions (1996), Conceiving Ada (1997), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), and Possible Worlds (2000) have only added to her mystique. Hollywood too has picked up on this notoriety, but not nearly as well. With the exception of the thriller The Deep End (2001), which earned her a number of critic's awards, such mainstream U.S. pictures as The Beach (2000/I) with Leonardo DiCaprio, Vanilla Sky (2001) starring Tom Cruise and the Keanu Reeves horror epic Constantine (2005) have tended to undermine her seemingly boundless abilities.