Burning brightly

AT THE 80th annual Academy Awards back in February, the stars gracing the red carpet were a typically glamorous mix of suave actors in pristine tuxedos and beautiful actresses, all teeth, hair and diamonds, dressed in plunging, clinging, jaw-dropping gowns. Artfully they posed, hand-on-hip or coyly glancing over a shoulder.

Among them all, there was one woman who stood out from the crowd for all the wrong reasons by Hollywood standards. Tilda Swinton, who was nominated for (and later won) the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in Michael Clayton, was tall and gangly, pale yet interesting, wearing a stunning but sexless Lanvin dress and short red hair slicked back off her bare, unmade-up face. She looked every inch the anti-starlet.

She faced the flashbulbs again in June, as a patron of the successful Edinburgh International Film Festival. And just last week she was at the helm of a small, family film festival she organised in her home town of Nairn – The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Of Dreams – where admission to screenings cost either £3 or a tray of home-baked cakes.

Yet this week the actress more commonly associated with art-house films than mainstream blockbusters is once again in full-blown Hollywood mode. Sandwiched between two of the world's biggest film stars – George Clooney and Brad Pitt – Swinton attended the high-profile premiere of the three actors' latest film, Burn After Reading, at the Venice Film Festival.

While by no means a signed-up member of the teeth/hair/diamonds brigade, Swinton has moved between quirky, independent cinema and Hollywood's A-list circle with relative ease over the past few years. Interestingly, she is one of the few people in her industry able to flit between the two camps and be warmly embraced by both.

At 47, the half-Scottish actress, who lives in Nairn with her family (of whom more later), has reached an age at which leading, challenging or glamorous roles begin to dry up for many actresses. Yet over the past few years, Swinton has played characters as diverse as the Snow Queen in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the scheming archangel Gabriel in 2005's Constantine and a corrupt corporate lawyer in Michael Clayton.

Cambridge-educated Swinton is often described as "fiercely intelligent" and one would be forgiven for thinking that beneath her icy physical appearance and back catalogue of arthouse films lies a pretentious luvvie. But George Clooney knows better. "She is one of the dearest, funniest people," he says of his co-star. "It's funny. She plays these uptight characters all the time and she is just funny as hell … always cracks me up."

It seems strange that she can move so effortlessly between the world's smallest film festival in the Scottish Highlands and the star-spangled premiere of a multi-million-dollar film. However, she has cleverly built a very successful career out of doing just that.

Born in London to an Australian mother, and a Scottish father, Swinton enjoyed a privileged upbringing and can trace her family's lineage back to the 9th century. She attended West Heath Girls' School alongside Diana, Princess of Wales, and, briefly, Fettes College before going on to graduate with a degree in social and political sciences from Cambridge.

In her twenties she worked with the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and the Royal Shakespeare Company, but realised early on that her passion lay in film. She worked with the late director Derek Jarman a number of times, notably in 1989's War Requiem opposite Sir Laurence Olivier, and played the title role in Sally Potter's ambitious 1992 film Orlando, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel in which the main character changes gender. In 1995 Swinton developed her own piece of performance art, The Maybe, which was shown at London's Serpentine Gallery: the actress spent a week lying at rest in a glass box, a human exhibit on display.

Since 2000 her choices have become increasingly commercial, with roles in Deep End (2001), The Beach (2000) and Vanilla Sky (2001). But these she has interspersed with parts in smaller, more obscure films, such as last year's Hungarian film The Man From London.

She seems to be comfortable switching between the two worlds, describing films like Michael Clayton as part of a new "Hollywood Lite" genre. She picks her roles, she says, according to the director, not the role itself, and chooses her big-budget films carefully.

"With Hollywood films, if one was attracted to the packaging, one could get badly derailed, really confused," she says. "Hollywood makes people snowblind, there's so much money spent, so much faffing about. It would drive you insane if you got attached to it. So I don't."

Instead she lives a mostly peaceful life in Nairn, with her nine-year-old twins, Xavier and Honor, and their father, the Scottish artist John Byrne, who is 21 years her senior. The former couple now share a platonic relationship and both have taken new partners (Swinton frequently travels with hers, the 29-year-old artist Sandro Kopp).

It's an unconventional arrangement that seems to fascinate people and helps to cement her reputation as Hollywood's avant-garde "freak", a label to which she has previously responded with an enigmatic "I wouldn't want to be highfalutin' enough to pretend to be ordinary".

However, it's her bold appearance that provides endless fascination. Her friend Johnnie Shand Kydd, a renowned photographer, has described how Swinton can look "like Marlene Dietrich one minute and Gollum the next", saying that whenever she is photographed, "every frame is different".

Her sartorial style is androgynous, often eccentric (she is a muse to the edgy Dutch fashion design duo Viktor & Rolf) and her insistence in living in a place as far removed as possible from Hollywood seems to puzzle people. But then, she simply loves Scotland.

She moved away from London after her twins were born, to a village "where everybody kens yer faither" and has relatively unhappy memories of living down south. The experience of boarding school, she said, "put me off England for life". She remembers "longing for Scotland, longing for the holidays, to come home to nature, to everything I understood".

She is far from being a hermit, though. In addition to Burn After Reading, this year she has made a cameo appearance in Prince Caspian, and will also appear in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, alongside Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Roles in a further five films are scheduled for 2009. A stellar, varied and satisfying career indeed – and all the more surprising given that it belongs to a woman who insists that "I'm just making it up as I go along".