Gillian Anderson's fan mail recently took on a pleading tone. Dear Gillian, implored the letters and cards from all over the world, when can we see you again on screen or on stage? Where have you been?
The BBC, which wanted the 37-year-old actress badly for a plum role in a blockbuster serial, wasn't even sure where she was. There were 85 parts to cast, pronto, and if Anderson was on another continent, ensconced within an overprotective cordon of publicists and minders, it might take too long to reach her. "We didn't believe for one second we'd be able to get through to her," says Nigel Stafford-Clark, the serial's producer. "I thought she lived in Los Angeles. And it was our casting director, Kate Rhodes James, who said, ÔNo, she lives over here, in Britain.'"
If she accepted the role, it could be her finest part since she became a pan-terrestrial superstar as Agent Dana Scully in The X Files. In common with that generation-defining TV show, this new BBC serial bristles with mystery, conspiracy and suspense. It even includes an instance of spontaneous human combustion, just the sort of spine-chilling case that Scully and her FBI partner Fox Mulder would have fallen over themselves to investigate. It's the radical new adaptation of a 67-chapter epic by one of the greatest novelists of all time: Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. The role on the table was the book's most compelling female protagonist, Lady Dedlock. How could the actress refuse?
The trouble was the T-word. Anderson, who has a reputation for being extremely selective, had been turning down all television work. "I don't want to be pigeonholed as being somebody who does television, quite frankly," she explains now, in a slightly surprising English accent, as she sucks on a self-rolled Golden Virginia cigarette in a west London hotel. Had The X Files put her off TV work? "I think so. But also I'm a big film buff and I love the medium of film, and there's a lot that I would still like to do in film, and people I'd like to work with." She remembers a feisty exchange with her agent over the Bleak House offer: "My first response was, 'Look, we've had this conversation. I'm not interested in doing television.' And then my agent kept saying, 'But hang on, this is the BBC, which is very different from daily television in the States. This is a respectable project, and is actually really good.'"
This might have been a rare example of agent understatement: the script is by the king of period adapters, Andrew Davies; the drama uses exquisite English locations and a unique cast of actors, from Charles Dance to Johnny Vegas; and the format is a refreshing departure from the Sunday-evening bustle-and-carriage slot - the drama will go out twice a week, as 16 pacy half-hour episodes. "So I took a look at it," says Anderson, "and I was in the middle of the first episode and I was thinking, 'Oh, this is really good.'" Still not 100% convinced, little fusspot that she is, she asked some "fellow actors around town" for their opinions of the project. "And the response was so positive that I felt like it was a kind of community decision," she laughs.
Shooting started in February and wrapped in the summer, and Anderson couldn't be more pleased with her decision to revoke her TV ban. "It was just an extraordinary experience. And I got incredibly attached to the character. Sometimes one just falls in love with being another person and who that person is, and the complexities of her life. And I miss Lady Dedlock - I can honestly say it's as if she's a friend that's moved away to another country."
Nigel Stafford-Clark talks about the actress as if she were the brightest ray of sunshine on the Bleak House set. "We don't want her to go, really," he admitted on her last day on the project. "She's been such a wonderful presence. She is a remarkable woman, Gillian - quite apart from the fact that she is the perfect Lady Dedlock."
Without spoiling the plot for those who don't know Bleak House, Honoria Dedlock is a highly respectable married woman - "at the top of the fashionable tree", writes Dickens - whose sedate life is overturned by a terrible discovery at the end of the first episode. "Suddenly this explosion takes place inside her, when she realises the past is not the past," says Stafford-Clark, who adds that Anderson had the perfect pair of assets for the role - her eyes. "Because Lady Dedlock has to remain completely in control on the surface, Gillian had to act with her eyes: they're the only windows through which you can see what's going on inside her. And Gillian's eyes are extraordinary: they can change texture - they can be soft and hard, and pretty much everything in between. They can glitter."
They also change colour - "They're mostly blue but it depends on what I wear," explains Anderson - and when she fixes you with that forensic Scully gaze during an interview, it can feel magical. There is one other chameleonic aspect to her. She admits that her accent changes according to the nationality of the person she is talking to. "It kind of bugs me, actually. I can't help it. If I got a phone call right now from someone in the States," she says in her English voice, "I'd automatically go into speaking the American way. I have noticed that if I'm sitting with an Australian, I'll start to go into an Aus-trayyyy-lee-en accent. If I was doing a television interview in England that aired in the States and they heard me speaking like this, I can just imagine the reaction: ÔWhat the f*** is she doin'?'"
It is a relief to find Anderson so warm and effusive. Other interviewers have found her frosty and stubbornly reticent, particularly in the 1990s, when she had to face legions of journalists wanting to talk about UFOs and to probe her mythical sexual relationship with David Duchovny. For one promotional encounter, Anderson kept her arms defiantly folded throughout the discussion and left irritating pauses in her responses; the writer actually stated that Anderson should never do interviews.
Anderson has admitted that she tends to ramble and is rubbish at soundbites; but she has also complained that she is a "goofy" person and that precious few writers have captured this side of her. People could take "goofy" the wrong way, I remark, remembering that British people often associate the word with protruding teeth - but it seems she isn't quite fully transatlantic enough to understand. "How can they take that the wrong way?" she says, perplexed. "No, tell me!" She says she "can be very childish and very silly", but fails to give me any examples. What was the last really silly thing she did? "I think it was on set... I can't remember..." I do, finally, manage to elicit
a treasurable Gillian Anderson impression of Goofy, the Disney character. She is dying, she says, to do comedy.
Her unstable accent is partly the result of her itinerant upbringing. Born in Chicago on August 9, 1968, she came to London as a baby with her parents - living initially in Clapton Common and then settling in Crouch End - and then returned to the US at the age of 11, to live in the town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. "I always felt I wasn't completely American and I wasn't completely British: there was a feeling of having my feet in both places. And even though I didn't have a particularly magical childhood, it was a European childhood, so there was this kind of garden feeling to it, you know." A garden feeling? "Yes, I remember being in our back yard in Crouch End as a child, picking blackberries and collecting spiders and stuff like that."
Years ago, she says, before she was famous, she revisited her old Crouch End house, at 19 Rosebery Gardens, and couldn't resist knocking. (The locals here must be used to unexpected Americans - legend has it that a Crouch End housewife once opened the door to Bob Dylan.) A woman came to the door and Anderson asked if she could come in and look around, having grown up here. "She let me in and two things happened. One was that she was very disturbed by my presence: it was not a good experience for her to have this stranger in the house. Secondly, it was so different than it was when I was growing up; it was quite disturbing. It smashed all my childhood ideals of what it was like."
