Los Angeles - British actress Tilda Swinton won the Oscar for best supporting actress Sunday for her role as a corporate lawyer in Michael Clayton. Known as an uncompromising perfectionist and passionate artistic rebel, Swinton was born in November 1960 in London, England to a patrician Scottish military family and was educated in an English boarding school along with Princess Diana. Swinton studied at Cambridge University and performed a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company. First coming to fame through her collaboration with director/mentor Derek Jarman she starred in movies like Caravaggio (1986), Aria (1987), The Last of England (1988), War Requiem (1989), The Garden (1990) Edward II (1991), Orlando (1992)and Wittgenstein (1993). Her more mainstream films include The Deep End (2001), The Beach (2000) with Leonardo DiCaprio, Vanilla Sky (2001) starring Tom Cruise and the Keanu Reeves horror epic Constantine (2005).
"You are always playing yourself," she says. "It's all autobiography, whatever you are doing. It's using them as a kind of prism through which to throw something real about yourself, or something relaxed at least. Because the last thing you want is to look like you are acting."
Swinton lives in Scotland with artist John Byrne, the father of her twins, Xavier and Honor.
