Tilda Swinton, whose earliest London memory was of being denied an ice cream by her nanny in Kensington Gardens, was living out of a suitcase in Chelsea when I met her in late 1987.

"I'm a sponger, I'm afraid," she claimed over coffee and biscuits. She had three films out and her "one-man play" at Edinburgh had been a hit. She had long lustrous red hair and almost neon green eyes. The muse of Derek Jarman, that year she'd performed the final scene for his The Last of England, which "after a light lunch in Docklands", involved dancing beside a bonfire in a wedding dress. She'd then cut it apart with shears, torn off its rosebud and tried to eat it.

Swinton had also been in Jarman's section of the 10-director operatic movie Aria. "We felt guilty about having a meal, in a pub in Mousehole, on the arthouse budget," she said. "Then we heard Jean-Luc Godard and others had champagne on their sets."

In Friendship's Death, she followed her hero Bowie and portrayed – despite a cold – an alien with no digestive system. "She can only dream of succulence," said Swinton, "so I had to keep my mouth completely dry of saliva while acting, as she didn't contain any liquids."

It was a different case with the play Man to Man. She'd been swigging "six cans of Pilsner" per show while portraying a widow who adopted her dead husband's male identity. But it was a theatrical penis placed inside red Y-fronts that she found empowering on stage. "As soon as I first put the package down there," she explained, snapping a biscuit, "I wasn't scared any more and everything changed."