Swinton’s spectral-twin relationship with David Bowie led to this music-video collaboration. While, like most Bowie videos, it is pretty annoying, it at least demonstrates Swinton’s ability to look good in trying circumstances.

65. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Only a brief scene here, in her guise as the Ancient One, handing over the time stone to Banner/Hulk. Not especially demanding, even if she had to reshoot it a year later after some plot details changed.

64. The Zero Theorem (2013)

Sporting prosthetic teeth, a wig and a funny accent, Swinton pops up briefly as Christoph Waltz’s virtual therapist, Dr Shrink-Rom, in Terry Gilliam’s chaotic and frankly unenlightening fantasy parable.

63. Egomania: Island Without Hope (1986)

Swinton has always been game for anything: this bizarre, freeform work with overtones of Derek Jarman, orchestrated by German theatre director Christoph Schlingensief, is decent evidence.

62. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008)

Another one-minute wonder: Swinton’s White Witch tries to tempt Caspian into freeing her from her ice prison. Doesn’t work.

61. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)

A third Narnian walk-on (float-on, perhaps?): her White Witch appears in a cloud of evil mist, as a temptation for her former victim Edmund. Doesn’t work this time, either.

60. The Party: Nature Morte (1991)

A rambling black-and-white film from Jamaican director Cynthia Beatt, mostly in German, with Swinton playing a woman whose marriage is in meltdown, and who throws a party instead.

59. War Machine (2017)

As a German politician who nervously tells off Brad Pitt’s gung-ho US general, Swinton has about three minutes on screen here, but she makes them count.

Take a memo … Swinton in Female Perversions. Photograph: G Lefkowitz/Map/Transatlantic Ent/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

58. Female Perversions (1996)

This probably seemed like an interesting project, inspired by Louise Kaplan’s study of sexuality and fetish. It has Swinton as an uptight lawyer with a sideline in rambunctious sexual encounters, freaky dreams and an erratic sister. But it doesn’t look all that great now: clunky direction and cheesy set design undermine its intentions.

57. Teknolust (2002)

The second of Swinton’s collaborations with artist and film-maker Lynn Hershman Leeson: a digital-paranoia fantasy fable about hybrid online succubi.

56. Letters from Baghdad (2016)

Swinton acted as executive producer, as well as contributing some letter-reading voiceover, for this documentary profile of traveller-diplomat Gertrude Bell; she would arguably have been better cast for the feature film about Bell the year before, which eventually starred Nicole Kidman.

55. Remembrance of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies (1994)

In the early 90s, John Maybury was very much the heir apparent to Jarman, so it was no surprise to see Swinton popping up in this collage of queer imagery tricked out with then-cutting-edge video graphics. She is not given too much to do, if we are being honest, lolling about with Rupert Everett in a hospital room in Maybury’s “uncommercial presentation” short blips.

54. Aria (1987)

Short but sweet, Jarman’s contribution to this multi-part opera film still looks lovely. Swinton spends most of the six-minute running time fooling about on a beach with hunky Spencer Leigh, all scored to Depuis le Jour from Gustave Charpentier’s Louise. A compressed example of the kind of playfulness Jarman liked to conjure up.

53. Play Me Something (1989)

Swinton is one of the delayed passengers sitting around an in airport on a remote Scottish island, listening to John Berger tell a convoluted Venice-set story. She does not get much screen time (and her Scots accent attracted criticism) but it put her adjacent to Berger, another long-term collaborator and friend.

52. War Requiem (1989)

Swinton plays multiple roles – nurses, mostly – in Jarman’s collage-like treatment of Benjamin Britten’s first world war requiem. In effect, it is a silent-movie performance, with Swinton’s emotional intensity matching the music.

51. Friendship’s Death (1987)

One of the earlier attempts to take advantage of Swinton’s otherworldly air: here she plays a self-confessed alien (named Friendship) who has accidentally landed slap-bang in the middle of the Black September war between the PLO and the Jordanian army. A talky, experimental film, very much of its time, from the late film theorist and academic Peter Wollen.

Chasing Caine … with Jeremy Northam in The Statement. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

50. The Statement (2003)

Swinton is in lawyerly mode in this sturdy but old-fashioned drama: she is hunting down Nazi-collaborator-in-hiding Michael Caine, apparently the target of a Jewish hit squad. Not, perhaps, one of her flashier roles; maybe the chance to work with Caine was not one to turn down.

49. The Limits of Control (2009)

Loyalty clearly plays a big part in Swinton’s job choices, especially if it offers her a chance to climb into a fancy getup. This is her second, and slightest, film for Jim Jarmusch, playing one of the philosophical hitman Isaach de Bankole’s cafe contacts. In a blond wig, outsize sunglasses, leopard-print knee boots and white mac, for once she looks like she lost a fight with the costume cupboard.

48. Vanilla Sky (2001)

Swinton’s first foray into the Hollywood big league, playing another business-suited corporate type: the creepy representative of Life Extension, who sells Tom Cruise his “lucid dream”.

47. The Invisible Frame (2009)

Building on an earlier short, Cycling the Frame, with the same film-maker, Cynthia Beatt, Swinton got back on her bike for an art-concept project, following the line of the (by then mostly demolished) Berlin wall. Lots of peering over bridges and weaving in and out of traffic.

46. Conceiving Ada (1997)

In the first of Swinton’s collaborations with Hershman Leeson, she plays the 19th-century computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, with whom a modern-day scientist is obsessed. It is all a bit on the clunky side until Swinton shows up in the flesh; the impressive delicacy of her performance makes a major difference.

Absolutely fabulous … with Michael Gough in Wittgenstein. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

45. Wittgenstein (1993)

Jarman’s entertaining account of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life and ideas contains one of the earliest of Swinton’s personal gallery of grotesque poshos. She plays society aesthete Lady Ottoline Morrell. Most of her scenes are actually with Michael Gough’s Bertrand Russell; swathed in feathers, with an acid, cut-glass accent, she is, as ever, quite a sight.

44. Isle of Dogs (2018)

In recent years, Wes Anderson films have turned into cameo fests: his beautifully realised, Japan-set canine fable was no different. Swinton has a minor voice role, a wisdom-dispensing pug called Sage.

43. Strange Culture (2007)

A directly activist intervention: Swinton participated in Hershman Leeson’s film about the bizarre case of Steve Kurtz, the food-science artist who was arrested for bioterrorism after his wife Hope was found dead. Swinton plays Hope in re-enactments of past events, as well as stepping out of character, in Leeson’s enterprising treatment of issues including artistic expression and abuse of power.

42. Possible Worlds (2000)

Another multi-character showcase in an interestingly cerebral thriller from theatre director Robert Lepage. As cops are tracking down a brain-stealing killer, she plays a woman who may or may not be the figment of a mathematician’s imagination.

41. Constantine (2005)

Swinton channelled a mid-70s Bowie look – tailored double-breasted jacket, asymmetrical droopy fringe – as the archangel Gabriel in this authentically berserk satanic horror-thriller. In a film stuffed with scenery-chewers and screen-demolishing special effects, Swinton actually comes across as poised and restrained. As restrained as you can be when unleashing hell on the world.

40. The Garden (1990)

Swinton gets one big scene in Jarman’s impressionist parable filmed around his real-life home in Dungeness: she is a crimp-haired, green-gowned version of the Madonna, tormented by paparazzi-as-terrorists.

39. Man to Man (1992)

Having made a splash in Manfred Karge’s stage play about a woman disguising herself as a man to get through the second world war, Swinton was a natural pick for the screen version. Maybury directs, and Swinton got to play with androgyny in a virtual rehearsal for Orlando.

Never trust a hippy … with a young Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach. Photograph: Allstar/20th Century Fox

38. The Beach (2000)

Not the blockbuster everyone was hoping for, this adaptation of Alex Garland’s gap-year-adventure novel cast Swinton as the manipulative leader of a colony of hippies living in secret on a Thai island. She gives it her usual amount of welly, but the film suffers a bit from heat exhaustion.

37. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Swinton went dowdy for a vivid cameo in this reverse-spool romance-fable directed by David Fincher; she’s the “plain as paper” diplomat’s wife who has a brief, intense affair with Button (Pitt in Marlon Brando-ish grey wig). As is often the case, she is not in the film for long, but makes every second count.

36. Love is the Devil (1998)

Swinton is almost unrecognisable in Maybury’s Francis Bacon biopic, propping up the bar as the raddled Muriel Belcher, owner of the Colony Room and a key Soho face. Lots of drunk shrieking and cigarette sucking ensues.

35. Blue (1993)

No acting was required for Jarman’s last completed feature, not long before his death, when he had lost much of his sight. Swinton provides one of the voices for a sound collage over an unchanging International Klein Blue screen.

34. The War Zone (1999)

You do not often get rock-hard realism from Swinton, but that is what she does here in Tim Roth’s unutterably bleak study of intra-family sex abuse. She plays the wife of a monstrous Ray Winstone, closing her mind to the damage going on around her.

Cutting edge … Swinton in The Dead Don’t Die. Photograph: Lifestyle pictures/Alamy Stock Photo

33. The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

Jarmusch’s deadpan hipster zombie comedy contains one of Swinton’s most bizarre characters: a Scottish samurai sword-wielding undertaker who turns out to be an alien. Somehow you believe her when she says: “I’m quite confident of my ability to defend myself against the undead.”

32 Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Out and out comedy here, as twin-sister gossip columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (a play on the Louella Parsons-Hedda Hopper rivalry). Swinton leavens the laughs with a blast of neurotic intensity.

31. The Protagonists (1999)

Swinton heads the cast of this singular mix of documentary and re-enactment directed by the then-unknown Luca Guadagnino – an amazing illustration of Swinton’s ability to sniff out future brilliance. It is a mediation-cum-investigation of the brutal murder of chef Mohamed el-Sayed, killed randomly in London in 1994. Admittedly Guadagnino throws a little too much into the directorial kitchen sink, but what could have been tasteless and exploitative emerges instead as intelligent and dignified, held together by Swinton’s seriousness of purpose.

30. Stephanie Daley (2006)

A conventional-looking issue film about teenage pregnancy, anchored by Swinton’s performance. She plays a pregnant psychologist interviewing a 16-year-old who has been arrested for murder after her newborn baby is found dead in a toilet. Although this is Lifetime channel material on some level (it was actually shown there under the title What She Knew), Swinton’s customary commitment to the role keeps things honest.

29. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

A pantomime-villain role here, as the caped-and-hatted “Social Services” in Wes Anderson’s whimsical runaway-kids comedy. As good as ever, but she is a bit adrift in a sea of cameos.

28. The Man from London (2007)

Who else but Swinton would agree to star in a two-and-a-half hour adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel in black and white by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, Hungarian geniuses of the slow crawl? She plays the wife of a harbourmaster who finds a bag of (unspendable) British money. Thrilling this is not, but it scores molto points for agonising existential crises.

27. The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2011)

Swinton was personally invested in this four-section documentary about her old friend, the writer and critical theorist she crossed paths with on Play Me Something. Part of the film records her conversation with Berger in his French farmhouse; and in another (which she directs herself) she brings her children to visit.

26. Burn After Reading (2008)

On perfectly poised form as John Malkovich’s vengeful wife, Swinton does not actually get many of the funnies in the Coen brothers’ absurdist spy comedy. It is a key role though, considerably bigger than many of her comedy or villain walk-ons.

25. Adaptation (2002)

A memorable cameo here, as the smooth but slightly sinister studio executive who commissions The Orchid Thief script from Nicolas Cage’s “Charlie Kaufman”. Apart from anything else, it was confirmation of Swinton’s unexpected elevation to hipster status in boutique-produced US cinema.

Witch report … Swinton in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Photograph: Phil Bray/Ronald Grant

24. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

Inspirational casting: Swinton’s legendary froideur channelled into a superbly nasty ice-witch character. The franchise never really took off (its mythology a little arcane, perhaps, for post-Harry Potter audiences) but Swinton was great in the role.

23. The Last of England (1987)

Possibly through natural presence alone, Swinton became the star turn of Jarman’s ensemble, even in its most abstract and diaristic modes. She had one especially memorable sequence here: as a bride mourning her executed husband, tearing at her clothes as fire burns all around. Strong stuff.

22. Doctor Strange (2016)

Swinton walked into a whitewashing row after her casting as the Ancient One, sensei and guru to Benedict Cumberbatch’s miracle-seeking surgeon. It is a shame: with her de-haired scalp, Swinton brought an unashamedly brainy dimension to the role, in one of Marvel’s more entertaining recent efforts.

21. Caravaggio (1986)

Swinton’s first film role came in – arguably – Jarman’s most accessible and successful feature. She was cast as the Gypsy-ish Lena, girlfriend of Sean Bean’s Ranuccio, and whose corpse Caravaggio copies for his masterpiece, Death of the Virgin. A highly impressive start.

Turning the tables … with her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne in The Souvenir. Photograph: BBC Films/Allstar

20. The Souvenir (2019)

As the mother of the lead performer, Honor Swinton Byrne, it was only natural that Swinton – an old friend of writer-director Joanna Hogg – should play the mother. Her role is small but perfectly formed, although she does get to announce the most Hogg death ever – spoiler alert! – a drug overdose in the Wallace Collection toilets.

19. The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

Providing what the Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw describes as a “thermonuclear star turn”, Swinton appears as Betsey Trotwood, the donkey-whacking “widow” who provides a haven for Dev Patel’s David.

18. Michael Clayton (2007)

Swinton won her Oscar for this corporate-shark role in a twisty, clotted legal corruption thriller – one of her more conventional outings, if truth be told. She is excellent at articulating the neurosis underlying the executivespeak, while the final breakdown scene probably won the statuette on its own.

17. Edward II (1991)

Swinton showed off her top-notch classical acting chops in Jarman’s adaptation of Christopher Marlowe. She is Edward’s wife Isabella, alternately desperate and vengeful as Gaveston threatens her marriage and her kingdom.

16. Suspiria (2018)

A bit of a tour de force in her fourth film with Guadagnino, a remake of Dario Argento’s classic Italian horror. Swinton is at her most sinister as dance instructor Madame Blanc and witchy coven member; and also at her most pranksterish, swathed in layers of latex as the elderly psychotherapist Dr Klemperer.

15. Broken Flowers (2005)

Swinton was in pretty heady company here – Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Frances Conroy – as one of the string of exes Bill Murray visits to try and track down his son. Bitter and vengeful (again) but she does it so well.

14. Thumbsucker (2005)

One of the wave of quirky indie-coms that infested the mid-00s, this is actually pretty good. Directed by Mike Mills, Swinton plays the mother of the teen with the oral fixation who is a little too keen on hunky actor Matt Schramm.

Vampire weekend … Swinton as Eva in Only Lovers Left Alive. Photograph: Allstar/Soda Pictures/Sportsphoto Ltd.

13. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

The pick of the films Swinton has made with Jarmusch (so far), a genuinely funny vampire comedy which opts for a gothicky, absurd tone rather than Jarmusch’s usual affectless deadpan. Tom Hiddleston is great, too: there’s something winning about the film’s mix of shabby-rocker chic, spoiled-brat petulance and melodramatic attitudinising.

12. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

A small but fantastically memorable role: as the ancient Madame D, hotel owner and paramour of Ralph Fiennes’s major domo, whose death sets events rolling. An absolute tour de force of latex acting, with Swinton perfectly calibrating voice and posture to match.

11. Derek (2008)

A love letter to her mentor, Jarman; written and read by Swinton as a voiceover for a documentary tribute directed by Isaac Julien and Bernad Rose, and co-exec-produced by Swinton herself. You can feel the emotion pouring out of it.

10. Julia (2008)

A rare out-and-out lead, for French director Erick Zonca. Swinton likes to play characters on the edge, and this is one of the edgiest: so whacked-out she frequently wakes up with no memory of the night before. Before long, she is involved in a convoluted kidnap and blackmail plot in US-Mexico border country; as you’d guess, things do not go to plan.

Hold the front page … Swinton as a magazine editor in Trainwreck. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

9. Trainwreck (2015)

Contains probably the funniest of all Swinton’s makeover-transformations, as the estuary-accented magazine editor Dianna, boss of Amy Schumer’s self-hating flake. Slathered in bronzer, surmounted by a blow-wave wig and caked with mascara, Dianna is a frighteningly plausible figure (apparently inspired, visually, by Carine Roitfeld), and is supplied with a string of killer lines in Schumer’s script (“I once fucked three quarters of Pink Floyd … dark side of all their moons”).

8. Snowpiercer (2013)

This bizarrely brilliant train-based sci-fi parable from the Korean director Bong Joon-ho got caught up in a distribution powerplay, and never quite got the airing it deserved. But everything about it is extraordinary: Swinton (in Rose West-style glasses and hair) is the rabble-rousing lieutenant of the boss-class, attempting to stem an uprising of the peasant-passengers in the back half of the train as it speeds through an icebound future-ruin landscape.

Argy bargey … Swinton and Ewan McGregor in Young Adam. Photograph: Allstar/Hanway Films/Sportsphoto

7. Young Adam (2003)

Swinton plumbs the depths of coldness as iron-hard barge owner Ella in David Mackenzie’s superlative adaptation of Alexander Trocchi’s novel. She brilliantly traces Ella’s path from tough haulier to trusting, betrayable housewife; the look of intense covetous hunger she gives Ewan McGregor’s Joe is amazing.

6. Okja (2017)

Once again, a corporate-shill character is mined for unexpected depths. Her Lucy Mirando is a sort of James Murdoch figure: a company chief burdened with inconvenient feelings of liberal guilt, which she channels into the development of a strain of super-pigs. Although Mirando is conceived as something of a grotesque, Swinton paints her with a wide range of colours, from empathy to rapacity – and gets to paint with a few more in the role of Miranda’s flint-hearted twin, Nancy.

Italians do it better … Swinton as Emma Recchi in I Am Love.

5. I Am Love (2009)

Guadagnino announced himself with this gloriously operatic romance: Swinton plays Emma Recchi, wife of a well-off Italian executive, who unexpectedly falls in love with a friend of her son, and effectively abandons her privileged life for him. Not only does she act in Italian (although her character is Russian-born, presumably to gloss over any awkwardness of accent), she carries the full emotional charge of this impassioned film.

4. The Deep End (2001)

The film that made Swinton’s name in the US, and introduced her to a new generation of up-and-coming indie directors. It has the lineaments of a quite conventional thriller: Swinton is a well-organised, well-off woman whose attempts to stop her son getting involved in an ill-advised relationship with an older man end up in blackmail and death. Suggesting the frailties and anxiety behind a high-gloss facade has become a specialty of Swinton’s, and this is one of her first and best versions of it.

3. A Bigger Splash (2015)

At her most Bowie-esque, Swinton’s portrayal of a singer who has lost her voice is an extraordinary, exotic creation. Guadagnino’s remake of the late-1960s four-hander La Piscine is brilliantly transferred to the deep-south Italian island of Pantelleria, a blood-heat emotional thriller in which cross-currents of jealousy, possessiveness and desire play themselves out. Swinton’s effortless charisma underpins everything she does here.

2. Orlando (1992)

Films rarely improve with age as impressively as this. Sally Potter’s spectacular adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel exploited all of Swinton’s androgynous qualities. Her character starts out male, transitions to female and moves through the centuries largely untouched by the ravages of time. Swinton handles it all with effortless ease; it deservedly turned her into a major name and showed a career trajectory outside the Jarman films that had been her preoccupation to date.

Child’s play … Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin.

1. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

Swinton was perhaps not natural casting for this authentic nightmare of a story: an American wife and mother whose attempts to bond with her son fall foul of his resolute commitment to sadistic, manipulative cruelty. But she pulls it off brilliantly, suggesting all the uncertainty, frustration and panic that life brings her. In this, she is aided by director Lynne Ramsay’s distinctively oblique visual style, going against the grain and dwelling on unexpected, revelatory moments. This is, and remains, a monumental film, and should have won every award going.