Katherine Matilda Swinton was born on 5 November 1960 in London, the daughter of Judith Balfour (née Killen; 1929–2012) and Sir John Swinton. She has three brothers.[5] Her father was a retired major general in the British Army, and was Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire from 1989 to 2000. Her mother was Australian.[6][7][8] Her paternal great-grandfather was a Scottish politician and herald, George Swinton, and her maternal great-great-grandfather was the Scottish botanist John Hutton Balfour.[9] The Swinton family is an ancient Anglo-Scots family that can trace its lineage to the Middle Ages.[10] Swinton considers herself "first and foremost" a Scot.[11] The family is one of only three British families (along with the Ardens and the Berkeleys) that can trace their unbroken land ownership and lineage to before the Norman Conquest. Swinton attended three independent schools: Queen's Gate School in London, the West Heath Girls' School, and also Fettes College for a brief period.[13] West Heath was an expensive boarding school, where she was a classmate and friend of Lady Diana Spencer.[7] As an adult, Swinton has spoken out against boarding schools, stating that West Heath was "a very lonely and isolating environment" and that she thinks boarding schools "are a very cruel setting in which to grow up and I don't feel children benefit from that type of education. Children need their parents and the love parents can provide."[14] Swinton went to volunteer in Kenya during a break from college with an educational gap year charity called Project Trust. In 1983, Swinton graduated from New Hall (now known as Murray Edwards College) at the University of Cambridge with a degree in Social and Political Sciences. While at Cambridge, she joined the Communist Party;[16] she later joined the Scottish Socialist Party. It was in college that Swinton began performing on stage. Swinton joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984, appearing in Measure for Measure.[18] She also worked with the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, starring in Mann ist Mann by Manfred Karge in 1987.[19][20] On television, she appeared as Julia in the 1986 mini-series Zastrozzi: A Romance based on the Gothic novel by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her first film was Caravaggio in 1986, directed by Derek Jarman. She went on to star in several Jarman films, including The Last of England (1987), War Requiem (1989) opposite Laurence Olivier, and Edward II (1991), for which she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 1991 Venice Film Festival. Swinton performed in a performance art piece, Volcano Saga, by Joan Jonas in 1989. The 28-minute video art piece is based on a thirteenth-century Icelandic Laxdeala Saga, and it tells a mythological myth of a young woman whose dreams tell of the future. Swinton also played the title role in Orlando, Sally Potter's film version of the novel by Virginia Woolf. The part allowed Swinton to explore matters of gender presentation onscreen which reflected her lifelong interest in androgynous style. Swinton later reflected on the role in an interview accompanied by a striking photo shoot. "People talk about androgyny in all sorts of dull ways," said Swinton, noting that the recent rerelease of Orlando had her thinking again about its pliancy. She referred to 1920s French artist and playful gender-bender Claude Cahun: "Cahun looked at the limitlessness of an androgynous gesture, which I've always been interested in."[21]