Gillian Anderson was 11 when she went for her first audition. It was for the part of Alice in a production of Alice in Wonderland at the local theatre in Michigan. 'I don't know where that idea came from,' she says now, lying on a bed in a friend's house in Santa Monica, with her head propped up against a pillow. She has just flown in from London and has been up since 3am because of jet-lag. 'So,' she says grinning, 'if I fall asleep in the middle of a question, don't take it personally.'
The 11-year-old Anderson had no professional acting experience. Her mother was a computer analyst and her father worked in film post-production. She was the oldest of three and the family had just moved back from almost a decade living in London. She didn't fit in. 'There were 150 girls who showed up for Alice on that day and obviously I didn't get it,' she says matter-of-factly. 'And I think I thought, "Oh well then, I'm not supposed to do this," and "I quit."' But then, two years later, she decided to do some acting lessons at the same theatre. The teacher took Anderson aside and told her he remembered her auditioning. 'And he said, "You know, we wanted to cast you, you were our number-one choice, but you came out of nowhere! We had no idea who you were. This was the lead in our Christmas special and we couldn't take the risk."' Anderson laughs. Her laugh is surprising for someone with such elegant, fine- boned features – a highly contagious sound halfway between cackling and bubbling, to which several YouTube montages are devoted. She says the whole Alice experience 'was such a lesson for me in not giving up'.
And it's lucky for us that she didn't. At 48, Anderson is one of the most versatile actresses around, equally at home on stage or screen, in period drama or cult sci-fi, who has played everything from an FBI special agent investigating the paranormal to the icy Lady Dedlock and the ghostly Miss Haversham in the BBC adaptations of Bleak House and Great Expectations. This year alone, she has starred in BBC One's War & Peace, returned as Dana Scully in a revival of The X-Files and reprised her Olivier-nominated turn as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire in New York.
Read the full interview in the October issue of Harper's Bazaar, out now.
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