Tilda Swinton attended 43 ‘Aids-related’ funerals in one year as she compares herself to It’s A Sin’s Jill

Tilda Swinton has compared to herself to Jill from It’s A Sin as she revealed that she attended 43 “Aids-related” funerals in 1994.

Russell T Davies’s Channel 4 drama, released last year, followed a group of young gay men living in London at the height of the Aids crisis.

In a new interview with The Guardian, We Need to Talk About Kevin star Swinton discussed living in a “queer community” in London during the early stages of her career in the 1980s and 1990s.

One of her earliest collaborators, the film director and activist Derek Jarman, died of Aids-related complications, with Swinton recalling: “Derek died in 1994 and that year I went to 43 funerals, all Aids-related deaths.

“The one person who really understood what I was going through was my grandmother, who lived through two world wars, and she said, ‘This is your generation’s war.’”

Swinton then compared herself to the character of Jill (played by Lydia West) in Davies’s drama. Jill would visit hospital wards where people with HIV were dying when their own families had often abandoned them out of fear or shame.

“I was that girl,” Swinton said. “That was very much my experience. That was the atmosphere of my late twenties and early thirties.

“What was so tragic was the breakdown of the blood family support. Lots of people couldn’t go home so they stayed with us and we looked after everyone as best we could.”

The character of Jill in It’s A Sin was based on Davies’s own friend Jill Nalder, who said that she went on “endless hospital visits” during the period.

“You’re taking a place, in a way, of a family member because you become that family together and you just be there in a loving way,” Nalder said.

“It’s not an exceptional thing to do. But it was hidden. Because you feel like, ‘Ok, I’ve got to go but not tell anyone I’m going.’”