So now, the truth about Gillian Anderson is out there
While she was playing the clinically cool Agent Scully on “The X Files,” Gillian Anderson was fleeing her own demons.
Anderson says she suffered severe panic attacks when she was pregnant with her daughter, Piper, now 11. It was, and still is, part of the fear of being trapped.
“Sometimes that can happen on stage and sometimes that can happen on a film when there is a scene that has to do with special effects or has to do with something where you’re trapped in a situation you can’t get out of – like having to do take after take after take after take – like going up and down a hill or doing something like that,” says Anderson. “It makes me want to scream.”
That abiding threat may be why she is so good in “Bleak House,” the Dickens classic premiering tonight on PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” (8 p.m., KSPS-7).
She plays the tragic Lady Deadlock, an aristocrat entrapped by her past.
From her placid exterior and flawless face, it’s hard to imagine the 37-year-old Anderson as anything but collected, especially when she was playing the dark-suited, button-down Scully.
“I had a very difficult and challenging pregnancy and started to have panic attacks, and they lasted about a year,” she says. “I’d have them one or two times a day and they lasted for hours. …
“They were so terrifying. I thought I was going insane! … It made me have to ground myself at that time in a completely different way. It made me more sympathetic to other human beings. It’s slowed everything down in a way.”
At age 15, Anderson dug deeply into the punk ethos and was constantly in trouble. But a role in the community theater changed all that.
“When I did this play and experienced the stage experience with an audience it transformed me, and all of a sudden my grades went up. … It was like a piece of the puzzle had been put in,” she says.
“The X-Files” proved to be life-altering as well.
“I’d hardly done anything and I had no money and I was living with a boyfriend at the time and had just received my last unemployment check,” Anderson says.
“And all of a sudden, within a week, I was transported up to another country, paid money I’d never seen before. And that started the path of living in Canada, meeting my (first) husband, getting pregnant, being on a hit series, divorce, fame, everything.”
She has since married her long-time sweetheart, Kenyan-born documentarian Julian Ozanne, and lives in London.
One would think that nine years on one of the most successful TV shows in history would make her a hot commodity in Hollywood. But she says that’s not so.
While she’s been offered film roles in England, Anderson says, “I don’t get offers in America. People don’t know what to do with me in America. … I think perhaps there’s a slight perception that I was a temporary television celebrity who disappeared off the face of the planet.”
The birthday bunch
Actress Piper Laurie is 74. Actor John Hurt is 66. Actress Linda Blair is 47. Actress Diane Lane is 41. Rap DJ/actor Jazzy Jeff is 41. Actress Olivia d’Abo is 39. Actor Balthazar Getty is 31. Actor Christopher Kennedy Masterson (“Malcolm in the Middle”) is 26. Singer Willa Ford is 25.