Hollywood's Anti-Star.(Tilda Swinton, actor in Norman Jewison's film, The Statement)(Interview)

Tilda Swinton struts into the ornate government office in Paris and sinks into a Louis XVI chair, her long, pale legs provocatively askew. She looks quizzically at Sir Alan Bates. "Being summoned by a minister- -this is very mysterious," she says. "What's it all about?" This confrontation between Swinton's character, a French magistrate tracking down a former Nazi collaborator, and her uncle [Bates] is the pivotal scene in Norman Jewison's controversial new political thriller "The Statement." It is also the moment the flame-haired Swinton, a queen of the indie-film circuit, gets her long-awaited Hollywood close-up. "From the beginning, I wanted someone like Tilda for this role--extremely intelligent and strong," says Jewison. "There's a confidence in her work that I like and her instincts are so solid."

Swinton is Hollywood's anti-star, an actress who swats down the contemporary notion of her "day job" faster than you can say Nicole Kidman. She shuns the red-carpet limelight for her home in the Scottish highlands, where she lives with her beau, the artist John Byrne, and their 6-year-old twins. She has been known to read Nancy Mitford between takes and to quote poet Joseph Brodsky when trying to make a point. And she can comfortably reference both the artistic foundations of European haute couture and Santa Monica skateboarders in the same sentence.

Swinton likes to give directors and audiences the unexpected--like spreading her legs apart in front of an uncle. It's an approach--"a sensibility," she says--that can stir up long-suppressed emotions in viewers. It also makes her work a welcome alternative to the Botox- injected fluff rampant in Hollywood today; she recently won supporting roles in such mainstream films as "Adaptation" and "Vanilla Sky" in addition to her star billing in "The Statement."

It took her a while to get here. Swinton was born in 1960 in London to an Australian mother and a distinguished Scottish father: Maj. Gen. Sir John Swinton, former commander of the Queen's Household Guards and distant relative of Sir Walter Scott. She and her three brothers had a traditional upper-class British upbringing: nanny, boarding school in Kent (where Diana Spencer, the future princess of Wales, was a classmate), then on to Cambridge where she read English and political science. Upon graduation she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, but dropped out after a ...