Book World: Francis Bacon was an elusive figure A new biography presents novel details of his iconoclastic existence lmtonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lmtonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Not many things about the enigmatic Tilda Swinton are cut and dried, but her career does neatly divide at the turn of the millennium.
Before then, she was barely known to moviegoers and was reluctant to consider herself an actor. She often said she felt like she d been pulled into art projects by her friend, the late Derek Jarman. She was his muse in eight films, beginning with her 1986 debut, Caravaggio, and peaking with the vituperative The Last of England, one of many Swinton performances (see also Snowpiercer ) that channel Margaret Thatcher.
Now the Scottish Swinton has more than 90 credits on her IMDb page. But most audiences didn t learn of her until Sally Potter s Orlando in 1992. It wasn t until The Beach in 2000 and The Deep End in 2001 that she made movies that played at multiplexes. She won an Oscar for Michael Clayton, finally making her a fixture in what she calls industrial cinema at 47.
7 great films from the slow-building, magnetic career of Tilda Swinton startribune.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from startribune.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
How Francis Bacon shunned the traditions of British art A new book,
Francis Bacon: Revelations, shows the painter as he tried to recapture the intensity of wartime when the world turned mundane. How great was the work of Francis Bacon? That’s the only question that matters, and it’s still a hard one to answer. Thirty years after his death, he hovers so large over British visual culture – such a vivid, garrulous, flamboyant, theatrical figure – that it is difficult to assess what he actually did, day after day, in the studio. This large, generous book contains it all: the childhood whippings by his father’s servants, the adolescent flight to interwar Berlin and Paris, the thieving, the cat burgling adventures, the overnight fame, the gangsters, beatings, the postwar Tangier dives and the long-lost nights of Soho in its bohemian prime; the wild, hilarious, bitchy lunches at Wheeler’s – all those oysters, all that champagne – and, of course, the dramatic se