Tilda Swinton ƒ

"A tall, delicately beautiful, red-haired English performer, Tilda Swinton has chosen to specialize in non-mainstream films, coming to prominence as the muse of the late British director Derek Jarman. Film theoretician Peter Wollen put Swinton's ethereal, somewhat androgynous presence to good use in his directorial debut, "Friendship's Death" (1987), in which she played an alien android shipwrecked on earth. Swinton's teaming with Jarman began with his biography of Italian painter "Caravaggio" (1986), in which she played a prostitute who transforms herself in a lady, and continued through films including "The Last of England" (1987), in which she memorably sliced up a wedding gown in a windstorm with a pair of garden shears, "The Garden" (1990), as a Madonna. She brilliantly captured the icy hauteur of a woman scorned playing Queen Isabella in Jarman's "Edward II" (1991) but delivered what is probably her best (and best-known) performance as the eponymous hero-turned-heroine of Sally Potter's "Orlando" (1992). In the same film, she also doubled as the young Elizabeth I, prompting reviewers to note her resemblance to portraits of the Virgin Queen."