Coffee with Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton, whose earliest London memory was of being denied an ice cream by her nanny in Kensington Gardens, was living out of a suitcase in Chelsea when I met her in late 1987. "I'm a sponger, I'm afraid," she claimed over coffee and biscuits. She had three films out and her "one-man play" at Edinburgh had been a hit. She had long lustrous red hair and almost neon green eyes. The muse of Derek Jarman, that year she'd performed the final scene for his The Last of England , which "after a light lunch in Docklands", involved dancing beside a bonfire in a wedding dress. She'd then cut it apart with shears, torn off its rosebud and tried to eat it. Swinton had also been in Jarman's section of the 10-director operatic movie Aria . "We felt guilty about having a meal, in a pub in Mousehole, on the arthouse budget," she said. "Then we heard Jean-Luc Godard and others had champagne on their sets." In Friendship's Death , she followed her hero Bowie and portrayed – despite a cold – an alien with no digestive system. "She can only dream of succulence," said Swinton, "so I had to keep my mouth completely dry of saliva while acting, as she didn't contain any liquids." It was a different case with the play Man to Man . She'd been swigging "six cans of Pilsner" per show while portraying a widow who adopted her dead husband's male identity. But it was a theatrical penis placed inside red Y-fronts that she found empowering on stage. "As soon as I first put the package down there," she explained, snapping a biscuit, "I wasn't scared any more and everything changed."