The actor makes an instant impression at the age of 26

‘Tall and pale with long red-gold hair’, the other-worldly Tilda Swinton was preparing for a suitably alien role when the Observer met her in 1987: ‘An extremely glamorous replica of a human being, a robot from outer space called Friendship.’

At only 26, Swinton already had stints at the RSC, the National and in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio behind her, but although she loved acting, she did not want ‘to become an actor’. It was a profession, she said, that ‘means having low self-esteem and being paranoid… A theatre runs more smoothly when the actors are kept in their place.’ That sat poorly with Swinton who, along with her three brothers, had been ‘brought up to know we could do anything’. That included following her three years at Cambridge with an ‘illegal’ stint in South Africa, working in a Black township, before returning to acting.

Option to make porridge with Josh O’Connor or be serenaded by Olly Alexander also up for grabs in inaugural online auction to support Medical Aid for Palestinians in Gaza

Directors Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Asif Kapadia and Joanna Hogg, as well as the cast of shows including Doctor Who and Downton Abbey, are among British film and TV creatives donating lots to a new auction to crowdfund for humanitarian relief in Gaza.

Leigh has given a signed poster of the original 1977 theatre production of Abigail’s Party, while Loach provides signed copies of the poster and script of his latest film, The Old Oak.

Julio Torres’ whimsical comedy shows promise in its portrayal of the Kafka-esque maze of the US immigration system, but his ideas don’t always come together

As testified by numerous documentaries, many journalistic investigations and countless lived experiences, the United States immigration system is a purgatorial, deliberately confusing, dehumanizing hell. Getting here, let alone staying here, can be a confounding maze of dead-ends and Kafka-esque double binds, an impossible staircase of bureaucracy. The metaphors come easy; the system lends itself well to magical realism, as poignantly realized in the new A24 film Problemista, in which immigration is a literal maze of drab cubicles, an hourglass counts down one’s days till deportation, and applicants are physically disappeared by a bland visa denials.

Problemista, the winsome debut feature from writer/director/actor Julio Torres, is at its best when the erstwhile SNL writer and creator of the HBO show Los Espookys applies his considerable talents and dry whimsy to the experience of being ground down by such a cold, illogical behemoth. Like Torres, Alejandro Martinez is from El Salvador and harbors creative dreams in the US. While his mother (Catalina Saavedra), an artist who whipped up Alejandro’s childhood imagination into fantastical escapades, remains at home, Alejandro ekes it out in Brooklyn (Bushwick, to be exact, and it feels pretty exact).

Tilda Swinton plays both mother and daughter in Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to The Souvenir, in which memories haunt their weekend break to a gothic mansion

The threads that bind this atmospheric drama from Joanna Hogg to her previous two films might not be as tightly woven as those that link the two chapters of The Souvenir , but they are there nonetheless. Tilda Swinton plays two characters. She reprises her role from The Souvenir : Rosalind, the mother of aspiring film-maker Julie (played in The Souvenir by Swinton’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne). She also takes on the role of Julie, now in late middle age and fluttering breathlessly around her frail, elderly mother during a weekend break to a seemingly deserted country house hotel. Swathed in dry ice and surrounded by the bony, pointing fingers of the bare winter tree branches, the gothic mansion looks like a cover illustration on a paperback edition of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. And with an eerie, plaintive woodwind motif in the score and sound design that emphasises every arthritic architectural grumble, Hogg leans into the influence of British supernatural storytelling – it’s two parts Hammer, one part Tales of the Unexpected .

Like The Souvenir , The Eternal Daughter deals with grief and loss. But while the death of Julie’s boyfriend Anthony leaves an aching absence in The Souvenir , here the memories of loved ones become a physical presence. And there are plenty of memories, not all of them happy – the glowering building that is now the hotel was once a family home in which Rosalind spent her wartime childhood.

The Oscar-winning Scottish actor answers questions from Observer readers and famous fans including Pedro Almodóvar, Wes Anderson and Elton John

Tilda Swinton has been posing in different costumes for the Observer’s photographer and, as I arrive, has just changed into tartan trousers, saucy two-tone shoes and is standing perfectly still as a hairdresser attends to a blond quiff that makes her look like an incredible exotic bird – or a dandy hooligan, although her face looks too seraphic to mutate into aggro. What you see almost at once is that Swinton is giving 100% to the task at hand while being obligingly considerate to everyone around her. The mix of professionalism with warmth disarms, especially when you might have expected a superstar loftiness.

For Swinton is a superstar – ranked by the New York Times as one of the greatest actors of the 21st century. Original, distinctive and questing, she has played everything from a distraught mother in Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) to the ancient, querulous Madame D in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and the White Witch in the Narnia series (2005-2010). She was in Almodóvar’s short The Human Voice (2020) and is about to star in his next full-length feature (details still under wraps). She is a chameleon yet always herself. She has won an Academy award, a Bafta, been nominated for three Golden Globes and, having just turned 63, is still seen as a fashion icon of androgynous beauty with an unchanging profile – like a figurehead on the prow of a ship. What a difference there must be, I’m thinking as I watch her in front of the camera, between her “real” life in the Scottish Highlands by the sea and all this London razzmatazz.