Biography
Gillian Anderson was born in Chicago to Edward and
Rosemary Anderson; soon after her birth her family moved
to Puerto Rico for fifteen months and then to Crouch End
in London. When she was eleven, her family moved again,
this time to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she attended
City Middle/High School, a program for gifted students
with a strong emphasis on the humanities. With her
English accent and background, she felt out of place in
the American Midwest, and developed a reputation as a
strong-willed and rebellious teenager. She had her nose
pierced in the early 1980s, dyed her hair various
colors, and was once arrested for gluing the locks of
the school closed.
Gillian Anderson found an outlet for her talents when
she began acting in high school and community theater
productions. She attended Goodman Theater School of
Drama at DePaul University in Chicago, where she earned
a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1990.
Following some professional stage work, she "broke into"
television. In 1993, she had a guest appearance on the
collegiate drama Class of '96 on the fledgling Fox
Network, and auditioned for the role of Dana Scully on
The X-Files. There she met assistant art director Clyde
Klotz, whom she married and with whom she had a
daughter, Piper Maru, in 1994. (An alien-abduction
storyline explained her brief absence from the series
for delivery.) Anderson and Klotz later divorced. She
had roles in a handful of films during the run of The
X-Files and starred in The House of Mirth, an adaptation
of the Edith Wharton novel of the same name.
Since The X-Files ended, Gillian Anderson has performed
in several stage productions and worked on various film
projects. She has also done narrative work for
documentaries on scientific topics, in which the voice
listeners recognize as "Agent Scully" lends an air of
credible authority to the material. In 2005 she appeared
as Lady Dedlock in a BBC television adaptation of
Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House and she recently
completed work on a film version of the novel Tristram
Shandy, due to be released In the United Kingdom on
January 20, 2006 and the United States (on limited
release) a week later.
In December 2004, Gillian Anderson married longtime partner
Julian Ozanne, a documentary filmmaker, on Lamu's island
of Shella, off the coast of Africa.
Film List
- Anderson as "Lily Bart" in The House of Mirth (2000)The Last King of Scotland (Filming; to be released 2006), as "Sara Zach"
- Straightheads (Announced - unknown release date)
- Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life (Announced - unknown release date)
- Bleak House as "Lady Honoria Dedlock"
- Tristram Shandy: A C--- and Bull Story (2005)
- The Mighty Celt (2005), as "Kate"
- The House of Mirth (2000), as "Lily Bart"
- Mononoke Hime (1997), aka Princess Mononoke (English language version, 1999), voice, as "Moro"
- Playing by Heart (1998), as "Meredith"
- The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998), as "Dana Scully"
- The Mighty (1998), as "Loretta Lee"
- Chicago Cab, aka Hellcab (1998), as "Southside Girl" (or "Brenda")
- The Turning (1992), as "April Cavanaugh"
- A Matter of Choice (1988), B&W student production
- Three at Once (1986), B&W student production, as
"Woman 1"