FULL CIRCLE: Gillian Anderson
By Ryan Gilbey
It is quite a feat for an actor to be intensely memorable without appearing needy or even demonstrative, but Gillian Anderson has managed it. The plume of scarlet hair she sported in the role that defined her, as the FBI agent Dana Scully in The X-Files, which ran for nine series between 1993 and 2002 and spawned two movies, is gone, replaced by dusky blond locks.
Anderson keeps a low profile and is held in high esteem. She is well-known and yet exudes an aloofness that has prevented her from becoming a national treasure and not only because, divided between Britain (where she spent a chunk of her childhood and where she now lives and works) and the US (which has claimed most of the rest of her years), it would be hard to know which nation would have dibs on doing the treasuring.
But to get a measure of the respect still commanded by the 45-year-old, witness the buzz of excitement generated by announcements of her forthcoming work. This autumn, she will return in the second series of The Fall on BBC2, in which she plays DSI Stella Gibson, still in pursuit of a serial killer (Jamie Dorman).
Her enigmatic but not invulnerable demeanour is especially well suited to this Scandi-style crime drama. Before that arrives, she is appearing as Blanche DuBois at London’s Young Vic in A Streetcar Named Desire. “I auditioned for Blanche at drama college,” she said in 2011. “I thought I could have played her then, but didn’t it’s tragic. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do before I die.”
She has long displayed in interviews the sort of lacerating self-deprecation that will be ideal for Blanche. “I had a moment not long ago when my age hit me for the first time,” she said last year. “There’s a lot about getting older that I’m still very much looking forward to. But there was a moment more than a moment, a couple of days of proper, full-fledged grieving over my youth and loss. Years lost and time wasted.”
Hers was, as she tells it, a difficult upbringing. By the time she arrived with her family in Crouch End, north London, at the age of two, she had already lived in Chicago and Puerto Rico. She stayed in London until she was 11, but found herself a perpetual outsider. It would be better, she convinced herself, when they returned to the US, but it wasn’t.
Her accent crisply English and her cultural reference points out of sync with her American contemporaries, she was a misfit all over again. She got into trouble vandalism, underage drinking and was in therapy at 14.
She acted on stage but had logged only one TV role when she went up for The X-Files. Opposite David Duchovny as Mulder, whose belief in alien life forms was absolute and vindicated every week, she injected valuable levels of scepticism. Her character name even graduated into a verb (as in “Don’t Scully me!”) to describe a person trying to deny some unpalatable truth.
The show became a phenomenon. But the most uncomfortable truth was that she was suffering. A year into the run, she married Clyde Klotz, an assistant art director she had met on the programme. The following year, she gave birth to her first child, Piper Maru. (She has since had two more.) She missed one episode — Scully was kidnapped by aliens to cover for her absence — and was back on set only 10 days later. Postnatal depression didn’t take long to announce itself. “Except there was no time for it, which made it worse,” she said. “I shed a lot of silent tears. At times, all I wanted to do was quit and be with my baby.”
She and Klotz didn’t last much longer. “There were times, especially during the divorce, when I was just in tears constantly,” Anderson said. She was accompanied on the set of The X-Files by a team of make-up artists devoted to disguising the fact that she had been crying.
To appreciate the schism in Anderson’s life, it is worth remembering what else was going on in the same period. She was the co-lead in one of the most popular series in TV history, a show to which she felt increasing ambivalence. “I’m exhausted by the series,” she said in the late 1990s. “I would like to do different characters.”
With The X-Files behind her, there has been a genuine sense of liberty to Anderson’s work. Her post-X-Files performances have been carefully chosen and doggedly unstarry. She was an affecting Miss Havisham (and, at 43, the youngest screen incarnation) in a BBC Great Expectations.
She was Clive Owen’s MI5 boss in the 1970s-set thriller Shadow Dancer, giving a quick run around the block to the flawless Northern Irish accent she would later use in The Fall. She was Lady Deadlock in the BBC’s Bleak House, adapted by Andrew Davies, and was well-reviewed on stage at the Donmar in A Doll’s House. As if to prove she had not abandoned US television entirely in favour of the highfalutin’ and literary, she took a recurring role as Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist in the current TV series Hannibal.
She has been a celebrity in fact, she still is but her evident distaste for that world has only had the effect of making her look more serious about acting. Twelve years after the end of The X-Files, Anderson has not had a pop-culture hit to match it. Quite splendidly, she shows no sign of giving a hoot. — Guardian News & Media
Radcliffe spotted
in Spidey apparel
Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe was recently spotted dressed up as Spider-Man at the ongoing San Diego Comic-Con.
The 25-year-old is promoting his new movie Horns at the annual gathering and since it was his first time there he came up with a novel way of exploring his surroundings without causing a fan frenzy, reports femalefirst.co.uk. “You don’t go to Comic-Con without going down on the floor and seeing it all. And the way I came up with doing it was Spider-Man,” said Radcliffe. Explaining his reasons for choosing that particular comic book character, he said: “It’s a great superhero and covers the face, so it was perfect.” — IANS
Megan Fox gave up
bread to shed weight
Actress Megan Fox had to stick to a low-carb diet following the birth of her second child to get back to her pre-pregnancy weight. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles star, 28, has bounced back into shape after giving birth to her second child Bodhi five months ago, but she admits getting her pre-baby figure back was a lot harder this time around.
“Well, let me tell you, the first time I didn’t do anything, I was just lucky and I was younger, and then the second time it wasn’t coming off the same way and I had to eliminate bread from my diet. It’s typical but I’m on that high-protein, low-carbohydrate, very low-sugar diet,” contactmusic.com quoted Megan as saying. “It’s kind of awful but it’s what I’m doing,” she added. — IANS
