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Dana Scully
Background:
"I love it when women come up to me and tell me I'm a
positive influence on their lives and the lives of their young
daughters. That's a great feeling." Gillian Anderson
Golden Globe and Emmy winner Gillian Anderson is widely recognized
as the skeptic FBI Agent Dana Katherine Scully, who teams with David
Duchovny's Fox Mulder, on Fox’ cult classic paranormal series
“The X-Files” (1993-2002). She brought her Dana Scully
character to the film The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998) and
appeared in films like Chicago Cab (1998), The Mighty (1998), Playing
by Heart (1998) and The House of Mirth (2000). Her upcoming films
include Straightheads, The Last King of Scotland, and No One Gets Off
in This Town.
The 5' 3", naturally blonde-haired and blue-eyed actress has
34C-25-35 measurements. In 1997, she was chosen as one of People
magazine’s “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World.”
The wife of documentary filmmaker Julian Ozanne was once linked to
actor Rodney Rowland (born on February 20, 1964; dated in 1997-1998)
and actor Adrian Hughes (January 1997). She was once married to art
director Errol Clyde Klotz and has one daughter.
Most Bizarre
Childhood and Family:
"I was in a relationship with a man 10 years older than me
when I was 14. He was in a punk band and I used to give him cans of
food from our house and buy him Big Gulps and cigarettes. I was
terrible." Gillian Anderson
On August 9, 1968, Gillian Leigh Anderson was born in Chicago,
Illinois, to film post-production manager Edward and computer analyst
Rosemary. The oldest child of the family, Gillian has two younger
siblings: sister Zoe Anderson (actress) and brother Aaron Anderson
(suffers from neurofibromatosis). With her family, Gillian moved to
Puerto Rico and then to Crouch End in London before moving to Grand
Rapids, Michigan, where she attended elementary and then high school.
As a student at City High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
Gillian was voted Class Clown and Most Bizarre Girl for her
reputation as a strong-willed and rebellious teenager (she pierced
her nose, dyed her hair various colors, and was once arrested for
gluing the locks of the school closed). Gillian then moved to
Chicago to study theater at Goodman Theater School of Drama, at
DePaul University. She also studied at a summer program at the
National Theatre of Great Britain at Cornell University of Ithaca, in
New York.
”We kept it very, very small. In fact, it was just the two
of us and a Buddhist priest on the 17th hole of this golf course in
Hawaii.” Gillian Anderson
On New Year's Day, 1994, in a Buddhist ceremony on a Hawaiian golf
course, Gillian tied the knot with Canadian art director Errol Clyde
Klotz (born in 1961; also worked as production designer on “The
X-Files”). The couple welcomed daughter Piper Maru on
September 25, 1994 (her godfather is “The X-Files” writer
Chris Carter). Two years later, in October of 1996, Anderson and
Klotz separated and finally divorced in 1997. On December 29, 2004,
Gillian quietly married longtime boyfriend, former journalist and
documentary filmmaker Julian Ozanne (born in 1963) on Lamu's Shella
Island, off Kenya's Indian Ocean coast. They are currently living in
England (August 2005).
The X-Files
Career:
"I am more spontaneous than my character." Gillian
Anderson
Initially dreaming of becoming a marine Biologist, Gillian
Anderson later switched to acting and got involved in community
theater productions at her high school. In 1983, she performed in a
high school production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” and
later appeared in a production of “A Zoo Story” in 1986.
Her Off-Broadway debut performance was at the Long Wharf Theater,
where she was in Alan Ayckbourne's "Absent Friends," in
1991 and won a Theatre World Award for Best Performance. She
followed it up with another stage breakthrough when she replaced
Mary-Louise Parker in the play "The Philanthropist" in
1992.
Gillian made her feature film debut in the little-seen The Turning
(1992, alongside Michael Dolan), director L.A. Puopolo's drama
thriller adapted from the play "Home Fires Burning." After
a guest spot in the FOX series directed by Peter Horton (of
"thirtysomething" fame), "Class of '96" (1993),
Gillian’s real breakout arrived. She nabbed the female lead
role of the skeptic FBI agent Dana Scully on the Fox-TV cult classic
sci-fi drama series "The X-Files." She played the role
from 1993 to 2002, teaming with David Duchovny's Fox Mulder,
investigating the strange, paranormal, and unexplained phenomena.
Gillian brightly delivered intelligence, restraint and a strong note
of skepticism to her character. She unsurprisingly won numerous
awards, including an Emmy, Screen Actors Guild and a Golden Globe.
''The more I get comfortable with the character, the more she's
becoming like me in some of her mannerisms. I'm not that much of a
skeptic. I do believe in UFO's. I do believe in certain paranormal
phenomena, like ESP and psycho kinesis and all that. I've always
been fascinated with it and I think, on a certain level, I've just
known or assumed it to be reality. In that respect, we're very
different. I think that I have a tendency to get as single-minded
and obsessed with my work as Dana does, but in a different way.
She's a medical doctor and an FBI agent and I'm an actress.''
Gillian Anderson
While working on the long-running paranormal series “The
X-Files,” Gillian also acted on the big screen. She made a
cameo appearance as a big-haired, working-class girl who fights with
her boyfriend, in directors Mary Cybulski and John Tintori's
adaptation of Will Kern's play, the drama comedy Chicago Cab
(starring Paul Dillon) and had a supporting role as an eccentric,
alcoholic biker chick in Peter Chelsom's take on Rodman Philbrick's
novel, the funny and poignant The Mighty (both in 1998, starring
Kieran Culkin and Elden Henson). That same year, Gillian played
overachiever Meredith in writer-director Willard Carroll's ensemble
romantic drama comedy Playing by Heart (with Ellen Burstyn, Sean
Connery, Anthony Edwards and Angelina Jolie). She also brought her
Dana Scully role to the silver screen in The X-Files: Fight the
Future. In the film, helmed by Rob Bowman, Gillian and David
Duchovny's character teams up to fight the government over a
conspiracy and finds the truth about an alien colonization on Earth.
She also returned to stage, performing in “The Vagina
Monologues.”
The new millennium saw Gillian Anderson star as ravishing New York
socialite Lily Bart in Terence Davies' film version of Edith
Wharton's novel, the romantic drama The House of Mirth (alongside Dan
Aykroyd). On stage, Gillian made her West End debut with the play
“What the Night Is For” (2003-2004) at the Comedy Theatre
in London and then performed in “The Sweetest Swing in
Baseball” (2004) at the Royal Court Theatre, in Sloane Square,
London.
More recently, writer-director Pearse Elliott cast Gillian to play
Tyrone McKenna's single mother in the drama The Mighty Celt, and
filmmaker Michael Winterbottom gave her a cameo role in his period
comedy, inspired by Laurence Sterne's novel, A Cock and Bull Story
(starring Steve Coogan). On the small screen, Gillian played Lady
Dedlock in a suspenseful TV series about the injustices of the
19th-century English legal system, "Bleak House" (2005).
As for her upcoming projects, Gillian will star in Kevin Macdonald's
film, based on the events of the brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin's
regime, the period drama The Last King of Scotland (also based on
Giles Foden's novel), writer-director Dan Reed's thriller drama
Straightheads, and Richard Kwietniowski's comedy No One Gets Off in
This Town.
"Fame is complicated and definitely overrated. There are
perks to it that are unfathomable. But the other aspect is there's
little to no privacy at all; being anywhere at any time and knowing
that somebody you cannot see is probably taking a picture of you,
which has happened hundreds of times. I look around and cannot see
anyone and a couple of weeks later, I see a photo of me looking
around." Gillian Anderson
Awards:
Blockbuster Entertainment: Favorite Actress - Sci-Fi,
X-Files, 1999
Quality Television: Best Actress in a Quality Drama Series
for The X-Files, 1999
Aftonbladet TV Prize (Sweden): Best Foreign TV Personality –
Female, 1998
Quality Television: Best Actress in a Quality Drama Series
for The X-Files, 1998
Screen Actors Guild: Outstanding Performance by a Female
Actor in a Drama Series, The X-Files, 1997
Screen Actors Guild: Outstanding Female Actor in a Drama
Series, The X-Files, 1996
Golden Globe: Best Actress in a TV Series (Drama), The
X-Files, 1996
Emmy: Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, The
X-Files, 1997
Screen Actors Guild; Outstanding Female Actor in a Drama
Series, The X-Files, 1995
Theatre World: Absent Friends, 1991
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