Regardless of whether Sunday's Oscars broadcast was your first look at surprise winner Tilda Swinton, her much-discussed shiny black frock showed what you need to know about her: She doesn't scare easily. Steeliness and inhibition are her stocks in trade.
Swinton, the best supporting actress winner for "Michael Clayton," has been pushing boundaries for more than 20 years. That her prize came for playing a corporate lawyer is ironic. Her movie past is checkered with the kind of avant-garde, ultra-independent work that would make her least likely to play a lawyer in a big Hollywood movie, let alone win an Oscar for it.
Before Sunday, Swinton was best known for her ongoing role as the dreadlocked White Witch in those "Chronicles of Narnia" movies. At the time that seemed like a nutty choice (Tilda, really: a franchise?). This is a woman who in the mid-1990s conceived and starred in a piece of performance art that put her on public display in a glass case for a entire week. She cut her cinematic teeth with the late experimental director Derek Jarman. Now she has an Oscar for playing a suit. Based on her shock at the Kodak Theatre the other night, she can't quite believe it either.
Here's a look at Tilda Swinton as you've probably missed her. All of these movies are available on DVD.
"Edward II" (1992) The fourth of Swinton's feature collaborations with Jarman was her best. As lusty, fiery Queen Isabella in this deeply eroticized, sky-lit take on the Marlowe play, she vamps and rages and connives. Swinton is so good at expressing the trappings of power it's possible to miss her human frustration. But it's there.
"Orlando" (1992) I was a teenage art-house usher when Sally Potter's brainy adaptation of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending novel sold out the first weekend. It was a big deal, this Tilda Swinton playing a man, sharing a bed with Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I. Here we have Swinton being avant-garde before it was award-worthy. She paved the cosmic way for Cate Blanchett's Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There."
"The Beach" (2000) Swinton's first big Hollywood movie, directed by Danny Boyle, landed her what was more or less the Grace Jones part opposite Leonardo DiCaprio - the increasingly heartless leader of a tropical commune. This thriller wasn't a hit, but Swinton's mercurial coldness suggested an altogether more interesting movie about a kind of totalitarianism. Cross her, and you're off the island.
"The Deep End" (2001) Before this thriller, having Swinton to play an average mother mixed up in a murder was probably the most subversive thing you could ask of her. The movie has a lot of problems, including Swinton's being stuck with a character who has no common sense. But for the first time she thawed on screen in the sort of taxed maternal roles you might have seen Lana Turner play 50 years ago, or Nicole Kidman play now.
"Young Adam" (2003) A friend jokes that Swinton has the face of a robotic doe. I disagree. Hers is a gloomy face. It has a great capacity for grimness, which this miserable movie showcases. As the mirthless owner of a barge, Swinton gnaws on bread, flashes her breasts, has unsexy sex with Ewan McGregor. The movie is the anti-Jarman. It celebrates nothing - nothing but Swinton's knack for combining the primitive, the carnal, and the depressing. Her disgust is so unfiltered you have to look away. They don't give Oscars for this kind of existential rawness. But if she'd done it wearing a business suit, who knows?
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
