Scottish actress Tilda Swinton was BOTD in 1960. Born Katherine Matilda Swinton in London to an aristocratic Scottish family, she went to boarding school with Lady Diana Spencer and studied at Cambridge University, before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company. After a brief theatrical career, she shifted her focus to cinema, forging a long collaboration with filmmaker Derek Jarman, and starring in nine of his projects, including Caravaggio, The Garden, Edward II (for which she won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival),Wittgenstein (playing Ottoline Morrell), The Last of England and Blue. She became an international star as the hero(ine) of Sally Potter’s film Orlando, a witty adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel about a gender-swapping aristocrat who lives for 400 years. Tall, statuesque and androgynous, she became a singular presence in cinema, starring as an angel in the Hollywood action film Constantine and the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia films alongside a lustrous career in independent film. Her Hollywood credentials were unexpectedly boosted in 2007 when she won an Oscar for playing an amoral lawyer in the corporate thriller Michael Clayton, accepting the prize in what appeared to be a velvet garbage bag. Credited with single-handedly reviving the woman-in-crisis melodrama, she played a blackmailed military wife in Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Deep End, the mother of a teen killer in Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, an unravelling alcoholic in Erick Zonca’s Julia and an adulterous trophy wife in Luca Guadagnino‘s Visconti-inspired drama Io sono l’amore (I Am Love). A regular collaborator with Guadagnino, she also played a David Bowie-esque singer in A Bigger Splash and a demonic ballet mistress in his remake of horror film Suspiria. Describing herself as a “Hallowe’en actor”, she was unrecognisable as Muriel Belcher in John Maybury‘s Francis Bacon biopic Love is the Devil, was well-cast as a hipster vampire in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, and played a series of loveable grotesques in the films of Bong Joon-ho, Wes Anderson and the Coen Brothers. A long-time collaborator with English filmmaker Joanna Hogg, she appeared in her coming-of-age film The Souvenir and played a mother and daughter in the ghost story The Eternal Daughter. Her other deranged projects include sleeping in a glass cube in the Serpentine Gallery, hauling a 33-tonne mobile cinema through the Scottish Highlands for an itinerant film festival, various modelling gigs for Chanel, Dior, Jil Sander, Pringle of Scotland and Tom Ford, and appearing with Bowie in a music video where they dressed as each other. In recent years, she has worked with Pedro Almodóvar‘s English-language projects The Human Voice (an adaptation of Jean Cocteau‘s play La voix humaine) and the euthanasia-themed drama The Room Next Door. Swinton was in a long-term relationship with artist John Byrne, with whom she had twin children. Her daughter is the actress Honor Swinton Byrne, with whom she co-starred in Souvenir. She has been in a relationship with artist Sandro Kopp since 2004. She earns Honorary SuperGay status for her distinctly queer persona, her life-long support of LGBTQ filmmakers and on- and off-screen fearlessness, making her the coolest person on the planet.