Excellence #1: Tilda Swinton

I'm starting a new series about excellent people, places, ideas, things, and other nouns deserving of that adjective. So, to kick it off: Tilda Swinton is an excellent human being. (That's me with her the other week--thanks to Photoshop my privacy freakitude is protected by the overlay of me-as-maiko from last June in Kyoto).

Tilda Swinton is 5'11", and she was wearing interesting caramel-colored, elfishly-pointed boots with multi-hued, very sculptural wooden stack heels at least three inches high. She had to crouch down to put her arm around me (which she did spontaneously--I didn't ask her to--out of innate human warmth). The woman is statuesque, and/or I'm exceedingly small. But I'm going off on a tangent here.

Apparently two of her oldest friends live in the same city I do, which is why she was here. They put on a Q&A with her, which only maybe fifty people came to (is everyone else in this town insane?). That, plus the fact she was flanked by her friends and obviously enjoying their company, made the whole thing feel very relaxed and intimate. She just sat up there having a conversation with the audience and her friends for about an hour.

And here's why she's excellent: she's unpretentious, extremely intelligent, 100% bullshit-free, and possessed of a wonderfully understated sense of humor (e.g., of the movie Caravaggio, she said the budget was so tiny she bought her costumes herself, and "I actually spent more on costumes... for that film... than I was paid!"). She's lived an adventurous life, taking off to random foreign countries in search of people willing to contribute a few dollars (or rubles, francs, etc.) for her and her friends to make a movie, and improbably, against all odds, she's pulled it off. And when people went up after the Q&A to talk with her, she seemed not at all bothered about requests for autographs and the like. She was genuinely friendly, not in the smiley American sense, but in the sense that she actually listened to people and responded with whatever was (as far as I could tell) her genuine response. She looked at even the most ordinary strangers with a sort of mercurial, birdlike curiosity and paid attention to what they did and said. I've never met another famous person who was so there, so alive to the people and things around her.

She kept asking me why I had a Scottish accent. It took me two days to figure out the answer, which is that, having spent an hour listening to three different British accents (her and her friends) and various American ones (the audience), my syntax and inflection went British but my accent didn't quite make it: with slightly warped vowels and audible R's, it sounded vaguely Edinburgh.

I shared my theory that they should've cast her as Legolas Greenleaf, the main elf in Lord of the Rings, and she said, "Ooh, I can't talk about that, I haven't seen it. But I feel quite elfish." Yes indeed. Once you meet her, you can't help but believe in elves.