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People generally treat me like I'm very intelligent and really, I'm much less intelligent than she is. Scully is insanely intelligent. - Gillian Anderson |
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As a teenager, Gillian Anderson kept busy by shocking her middle-American hometown with her outrageous dress and spiked hair of varying colors. Like many angry young girls of the '80s, she could best be described as a cross between Madonna and Cyndi Lauper; Anderson swore at pedestrians who looked at her funny and sported the occasional safety pin through her cheek. Anderson was raised in London from the age of two, but her family decided to move back to the States just as she was entering those formative teen years. They landed in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where her English accent immediately made her the subject of ridicule. Either out of anger at the move or just general teenage angst, Anderson rebelled. At the age of fourteen, she hooked up with a twenty-one-year-old Sid Vicious wanna-be, winning his loyalty by buying him "Big Gulps and cigarettes" and sometimes singing back-up in his punk band wearing nothing but bandages. The rebellion spilled over to high school, where she was a notorious hellcat; she was even arrested while trying to glue the school's doors shut just days before her graduation. Anderson got a hint of her fame to come in her high school's hall of fame when she was voted Class Clown, Most Bizarre Girl, and Most Likely To Go Bald. But even before the glue dried, Anderson had begun a
transformation. She had
found an outlet While Anderson may have thought landing a plum role on a new series was a
piece of cake,
Anderson has made a 180-degree turn from her adolescent
days. Nowadays, her
life consists of The Emmy-winning actress has also essayed a handful of movie roles: She
appeared alongside Sharon
Stone, Gena Rowlands, and Harry Dean Stanton in the family drama The
Mighty; she shot a cameo in the forthcoming Hellcab, which also stars
John
Cusack and fellow carrottop Julianne
Moore; and certainly most exciting of her big- |
for her frustration in community theatre?
there was a great deal of behind-the-scenes controversy about her
being cast. The paranormal show's creator, Chris Carter, lobbied hard for the
less-bodacious-than-usual actress. (Executives wanted Pamela
Lee with a brain, but Carter flat-out refused.) Her agent fudged her age a
bit by adding a few years so the twenty-four-year-old Anderson would seem
credible playing an F.B.I. agent with a medical degree. To exacerbate the
situation, during the first season, when the show was still trying to find its
audience, Anderson found out she was pregnant by her then-husband, Clyde Klotz,
the show's art director. Anderson feared she would be replaced, but Carter
championed her cause once again and worked around it (in fact, some of that
season's best episodes came from Carter having to write around her pregnancy).
The show experienced
exploding popularity the next two seasons, and Anderson and
her co-star, David
Duchovny, have
motherhood and grueling television work: the only wildness in
her life is caused by her rabid fans. Her daughter, Piper, has become something
of a mascot on the set (when Piper was cutting her first teeth, she even wore a
shirt emblazoned with the phrase, "The tooth is out there," a play on
the show's popular message, "The truth is out there") and any off time
Anderson can grab is spent with her. By now, her various piercings have closed
up, and her hair didn't fall out from excessive dye. It seems that the former
punk rocker, who says that she "feels like I'm going nuts" when she
listens to the music of her youth, turned out downright regular.