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US Weekly
Jan. 22, 2001
By JD Heyman

Gillian Anderson: Underneath that chilly X-Files facade, the House of Mirth star is a former punk from the Midwest learning to be a great mother

Gillian Anderson is feeling off her game. "I'm sorry, I really am," she says from behind pink-tinted sunglasses that stay on indoors. "I'm in a terrible, negative mood."

The mood has been unleashed by a pounding headache and the election of George W. Bush. "I can't bear looking at that grinning mug of his," she says. Her voice is low and kittenish and vaguely English-sounding, thanks both to a childhood spent in London and a cigarette habit that started around age 8 and intensified during her teenage years in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "The whole thing makes me so sad."

Anderson is also not pleased with the service at New York's Hudson Hotel, where she is staying, 3,000 miles away from her 6-year-old daughter, Piper Maru Anderson, who's at home in Malibu, California. "Never stay here," she says with a toss of amber curls. There have been skirmishes with room service, and there is the matter of the hotel's voguishly dim lighting, which can make it hard to find your way about, particularly with sunglasses on. "It's so dark I feel like I'm in a spaceship," says the woman who, as unflappable FBI agent Dana Scully on The X-Files for the past eight years, has more than a passing familiarity with extraterrestrial craft. Then she realizes what she's saying, and she laughs. "Oh, I must sound awful," she says, her sunglasses sliding down the bridge of her nose to reveal glacial blue eyes. "These sound like movie-star problems."

At 32, Anderson, who currently appears in the film version of Edith Wharton's novel House of Mirth, could not care less about the perks - or problems - of movie stardom. What's more important is being a good mother to Piper, her daughter with former X-Files assistant art director Clyde Klotz, whom Anderson wed in a Buddhist ceremony on the seventeenth hole of a Hawaiian golf course on 1994 but divorced two years later. "She's very protective of her time with Piper," says X-Files creator Chris Carter. "She brings her to work. Piper walks around the cast and crew as if it were her second family. People are dressed in the horrifying makeup, and it doesn't scare her at all."

Anderson relishes their time together. "At 6, Piper is at my favorite age so far," she says. "Four and 5 were hard on both of us. She was traveling a lot; I was working a lot. It wasn't ideal."

For much of Piper's childhood, the little girl has shuttled every three weeks between Anderson's home in Los Angeles and Klotz's in Vancouver, British Columbia, where the X-Files was filmed until 1998. The couple are on amicable terms, and the family shared the recent holidays in Canada. Still, Anderson, who has logged much time in therapy analyzing her own peripatetic childhood, worries about her daughter. "I wonder how all this will effect her," she says. "She seems to be so strong despite all she has had to put up with."

Anderson safeguards Piper's privacy by never taking her to premieres or other public appearances. Since divorcing Klotz, she has been nearly as secretive about her own private life. She was briefly linked in 1997 to Adrian Hughes, a bit player on the X-Files who was later found guilty of a 1992 date rape and is now appealing a two-year jail sentence in Canada. All Anderson has said of the episode is that "it was all very bizarre" and that she and Hughes had "a bond based on friendship." For about a year, she also dated Randy Rowland, who appeared on the show as a man whose tattoo orders him to murder Scully. The pair remain friends but are no longer romantic.

These days, she speaks of being happy in solitude. Mother and daughter live in a sprawling Adirondack-style house that is decorated with modern paintings and photographs by artists such as Brice Marden and Francesco Clemente. The family dog is a Jack Russell terrier named Happy J. Bakhti (Happy to remind herself to be that way; J. for Josie, a favorite name; and Bakhti because it means devotional in Sanskrit), and there is also a pet horse to ride. "I am at such an extraordinarily lucky point in my life," says Anderson. "I'm getting a chance to be a good actress, and, at last, I'm getting a little more time to be a good mom."

This summer, after Mirth wrapped production in Glasgow, Scotland, Anderson took a break to spend a long vacation with Piper in London, where they rode the Tube together unrecognized and visited museums. "It was great to experience the city through her eyes," says Anderson. "The great mix of people of different backgrounds and incomes - she's so insulated in Los Angeles, where it's rare even to see middle-class blacks and whites walking down the street together."

Anderson's summer trip to London with Piper reminder her of her own childhood in Britain. Gillian was born in Chicago in 1968, the eldest of three children of Edward Anderson, a film-production manager, and computer analyst Rosemary Anderson, both now 57. When Gillian was 2, her father moved the family to England so he could take classes at the London School of Film Technique in Covent Garden. Money was scarce, and the family lived in a succession of flats in the working-class neighborhoods of Crouch End, Clapton and Haringay.

"I was a fish out of water - the Yank," she says. Occasionally, local children seized upon the distinction and beat her up. Still, she loved London. "My parents were very liberal, open and nonjudgmental. Their house was always filled with the most diverse array of people."

In 1979, when she was 11, Anderson and her family returned to America, to Grand Rapids. "I remember looking forward to it," she says. "For me it was the land of candy and swimming pools. I thought we were going to the sunshine - but in the end, it was grade school in the Midwest."

Again she found herself the oddball. "The charm of my accent wore pretty thin after a while," she says. In school, she was a strange girl who spent a lot of time by herself. In her mid-teens she found an outlet in punk rock, already dated in England but avant-garde in Reagan-era Michigan. "I guess in many ways other than my accent I looked like a normal suburban kid," Anderson says. "But what was on the outside didn't match what was on the inside. There's only so long you can take that before you start saying 'Screw this' and begin carving out your own place in the world."

Her well-documented punk phase embarrasses her to this day. She dyed her hair pink, then black-and-blue. She got a Mohawk. She pierced her nose, wore a safety pin in her check and began wearing combat boots and 1950s party dresses shoplifted from thrift stores. At 14 she began seeing Len Wallace, a 21-year-old warehouse worker who sang in a local punk band and was known as Grand Rapids' own version of Sid Vicious, stealing cartons of cigarettes and Big Gulps at 7-Eleven for him. "She was a wild kid for a while," says William Knoester, the principal of Grand Rapids City High School, a public magnet school Anderson graduated from in 1986. "The way she dressed and dyed her hair, it wasn't the norm in a conservative community." She was arrested by local police for attempting to glue the doors of her high school shut, and she slam-danced in Chicago clubs to Public Image Ltd., the Clash and Bauhaus. "Punk made me feel nearer to what was churning inside me," she says.

By her own estimation, she was an indifferent student, bright but unable to pay attention. In acting, she found a focus. "I suppose being on the outside, watching everyone, it appealed to me," she says. She landed parts in community theater and at school became a drama geek, staging a version of Edward Albee's A Dog's Story that won an interschool drama prize. Her grades got better, and she was voted most-improved student.

At 17, in 1986, Anderson left home to study drama at the Goodman Theater School at DePaul University in Chicago. She graduated in 1990 and headed for New York, where she waitressed and auditioned. In 1992, she won a bit part in a forgettable movie called The Turning, in which she did a topless love scene that her Internet fan base cherishes. That work led her to Carter, who hired her for The X-Files over the objections of studio executives who worried that the scruffy refugee from New York's East Village wasn't conventionally attractive enough for television. She became Scully on the same day her last unemployment check arrived.

For nearly a decade, the part of Scully has required her to work 13-hour days, but it has also brought her great wealth, a Golden Globe and an Emmy, along with an international following. Nearly 100 Web sites dedicated to Anderson catalog everything from her pierced navel to the tattoos of Tahitian tortoises that adorn her ankles.

Anderson has tried her hand at writing and directing episodes of the series (Carter has said that her "bossy" nature makes her a natural director). Scully has also become a more complex character. Now that David Duchovny - whose offscreen relationship with Anderson was, by her own admission, not the warmest - is appearing in fewer episodes, Carter promises that this will be "Gillian's year and her character's year."

In recent years she has taken more film roles - notably in Playing By Heart (1998) and The Mighty (also in '98). But Mirth is her first starring role, and it has already generated Oscar talk. She was cast by British director Terence Davies (The Neon Bible), who had never seen the X-Files, to play Lily Bart - a free-spirited young woman who is destroyed when she breaks the rules of belle epoque New York society. "She has this luminosity I associate with the great stars of the 1940s" says Davies. "She's like a Greer Garson. Hers is a beauty out of its time."

"This role was a gift," says Anderson. "In a way, Lily is like Scully in that she's this restrained person with all these emotions storming underneath. She lives in a world where nothing real is ever said, nothing is as it seems. But in the end, Lily breaks down because of all she has suffered and cries. Scully never cries."

Scully rarely laughs, either, but Gillian Anderson does, a hoarse and exuberant laugh that bubbles up even though she is tired, cross at room service, missing Piper and not done with Christmas shopping with the holiday only days away. She is laughing more often lately. "There's a certain hunger that I've always had," she ways. "I think some of us are just born with a restlessness. I funneled the restlessness into my work, but lately I'm not feeling so restless anymore." She laughs at her good fortune, laughs at her grown-up self - the doting mother without the safety pin in her cheek, home at last.

THE END

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