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The Ottawa Citizen
January 22, 2001 Monday FINAL EDITION
ARTS, Pg. D10
Anderson wins praise for period role: Movie based on Wharton novel
BY Ivor Davis
Citizen Special



NEW YORK - As Li'l Abner used to say, "Who'd of thunk it?" Not long ago, Gillian Anderson was known to audiences only as Dana Scully of The X-Files, an FBI agent with a medical degree whose most complicated emotion is a glazed puzzlement. Now, she has turned in a bravura big-screen performance in an American literary classic, generating serious Oscar talk.

In the new adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel, The House of Mirth -- it opens in Canada this month -- Anderson's performance as Lily Bart, a turn-of-the-century New Yorker with breeding but no money, is nuanced, subtle and deeply felt. In turn, Anderson fends off all Oscar talk, diverting the credit to Wharton and her novel.

"The novel spells it all out psychologically, emotionally and on all levels, beat by beat by beat," she says. "So I felt this was the easiest possible role I could have chosen."

Lily's tragic story -- she has to find herself a wealthy husband, and fast, to stay on the social A-list, but is too moral to play the venal games required to do so -- is heavyweight stuff. It requires acting chops not called upon for The X-Files.

But Anderson says she understood Lily's situation on an instinctual level. "Lily's plight is about choices we make in our life," she says, "whether we're making a choice of the heart or a choice of money, social standing or whatever. Being alive today, and particularly in this business, there are a great deal of parallels to that.

"The easiest parallel for myself as an actor is choosing to do films that move me and are socially conscious -- as opposed to those that could make me more money, which I don't need because of The X-Files."

Lily, dependent on a tiny income and the sufferance of a rich relative, realizes making the right choice is virtually a question of life and death.

"She can't bring herself to go ahead and marry someone she doesn't love for money," Anderson says, "or to marry the person she truly loves, Laurence Selden (Eric Stoltz). She's not choosing either, and that's the tragedy in this."

The role demanded a style of acting, not to mention a wardrobe, far removed from the world of Agent Scully and her shadowy enemies. Actually, Anderson says, the wardrobe and the acting reinforced one another in her mind.

"In Lily's world, everything happens behind a mask of congeniality and social graces. You couldn't say what was on your mind -- everything was restricted and restrained. And the corsets do that for you. You even have to breathe in a particular way to be heard."

House of Mirth writer-director Terence Davies had never seen The X-Files, so when Anderson's picture turned up on his desk he judged her purely by her face: "I'd been looking at a lot of John Singer Sargent's portraits of the Belle Epoque period. I looked at her picture and said, 'That's a Singer Sargent face.' She had that period look."

In her "Gibson girl" costumes with extravagant hats and uttering Lily's breathless short spurts of dialogue -- blame it on those corsets -- Anderson looks as if she had never worn a skirt higher than her ankles, let alone battled space vampires.

It's an impressive transformation for a Chicago-born, London-raised girl who, upon returning to the United States as a teenager, decided that the way to overcome her peers' discomfort with her English accent was to punk it up.

Anderson was voted "Most Bizarre Girl" and "Most Likely to Go Bald" in her high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, because of her facial piercings and spiky, multicoloured hairdos. She once sang backup for a boyfriend's punk band wearing a costume made of bandages.

Chicago's famous Goodman Theater School at DePaul University channelled her rebellion and exhibitionism into the study of formal theatrics and a degree in fine arts. A stint in New York brought work in Off-Broadway plays and a few low-budget features, but little to distinguish her from the herd.

Things changed when she moved to Los Angeles. Practically the first thing she did in town was to audition for a new Fox series. She got the part and, virtually overnight, became a star as Agent Scully, the grim, skeptical Fed who relaxes by doing autopsies.

THE END

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