When she did find her voice, it was as a poet. “I was unexpected, but my parents didn’t try to squash me,” she says. “When it became clear that I probably wasn’t going to marry a duke, they just went, ‘You want to be a poet and go to university? Well fine, but we don’t know anything about that.’” So Swinton went to Cambridge, dropping poetry to study social and political science and performing in several stage productions. After graduation, she briefly joined the Royal Shakespeare Company before finding in Jarman a fellow traveler whose communal style of artmaking fed her through seven influential, if little seen, films. “He was the first artist I’d ever met,” she says, “which is surprising considering that I was brought up surrounded by beautiful paintings.” (Her Russian-raised great-grandmother had been a favorite subject of John Singer Sargent’s.)
Swinton recently wrote and coproduced a documentary about Jarman, whose death from AIDS in 1994 left a void in her life. She coped by becoming an artist herself. Fascinated by the idea of “scrutinizing an unwatched face,” she created a performance piece, The Maybe, in which she lay, eyes closed, in a glass box in the Serpentine Gallery in London (and later in Rome) for eight hours a day for one week in 1995. By her count, nearly 22,000 people—8,000 of them children—came to see it in London. “Interestingly, the girls totally accepted it. It was very familiar, that thing of waiting, of being watched,” she says. But the boys, she adds, “just wanted to wake me up!”
Since 1997 Swinton has lived in a remote corner of Scotland, where “you can really hear your own ears.” She’s intent on raising Xavier and Honor with views of the sea and sky and, when at home, avoids e-mail and phone calls, “which is making me a lot of enemies, but the children and I love it!” There, her kids “are up trees most of the time,” she says. “They live a very particular life, and I try and live it with them as much as I can.”
Swinton shares the rambling stone house with her children’s father, the painter and writer John Byrne, who is 20 years her senior. Their Bloomsburian domesticity is one many might envy: When away from home, she travels with her handsome boyfriend, painter Sandro Kopp, 30, whom she met while shooting the first Narnia film. Occasionally they all stay together. “It’s the way we have been for nearly four years,” she says, pointing out that she and Byrne have not been a couple for five years. “I’m very fortunate. It takes some extraordinary men to make a situation like that work.”
