Gillian Anderson

Info

Full Name: Gillian Leigh Anderson
Date of birth: August 9, 1968 (58 years old)
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Country: USA

Gillian Anderson has been active for 33 years, participating in 28 movies that average a 6.4/10 score.

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Biography

Television studies has a name for it: the Scully effect. Researchers use it to explain why, through the 1990s, the number of young American women going into science, medicine and law enforcement went up. The cause was an FBI pathologist played by Gillian Anderson, hired at 24 by a network that had wanted somebody prettier and less serious.

Thirty years on she has two Emmys, two Golden Globes, four Screen Actors Guild awards, three Olivier nominations, four books and a career that has got stranger with age rather than safer.

Chicago, Crouch End and a punk adolescence in Michigan

She was born in Chicago on 9 August 1968 but grew up in London: her father was studying at the London Film School and the family settled in Crouch End, where she went to primary school until she was eleven. Then they moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the English accent made her the odd one out.

She responded by going punk: dyed hair, nose ring, an older boyfriend, and an arrest on the night of her graduation for breaking into her school to glue the locks shut. Her classmates voted her most bizarre girl in the year and the one most likely to be arrested.

She took a degree in acting at DePaul University in Chicago in 1990, moved to New York, waited tables, and within months won the Theatre World Award for her debut in Alan Ayckbourn's 'Absent Friends'. She had sworn she would never do television.

Scully

She had been out of work for a year when she auditioned for 'The X-Files'. The network wanted someone else and it was Chris Carter who insisted on her. Dana Scully, the sceptical doctor who spends nine seasons contradicting David Duchovny, became one of the most influential characters on nineties television.

The show ran from 1993 to 2002 and came back in 2016 and 2018. It won her the Emmy for lead actress in a drama in 1997, a Golden Globe and two SAG awards, and she was the first actress to take all three in the same year. She also wrote and directed an episode, 'all things', in 2000.

There was a less glamorous fight behind it. She was paid considerably less than her co-star at the start and had to negotiate her way to parity; when the show returned in 2016 she was offered half his fee again, and she said so publicly until it was put right.

Between seasons she made the two films, 'The X Files' (1998) and 'The X Files: I Want to Believe' (2008), voiced the wolf Moro in the English version of Hayao Miyazaki's 'Princess Mononoke', and appeared in 'Playing by Heart' (1999).

London, the stage and a lot of corsets

When 'The X-Files' finished in 2002 she packed up and moved back to London, where she still lives. The first thing she did there was theatre, and the stage is where she has given her best performances: Nora in 'A Doll's House' at the Donmar Warehouse (2009), Blanche DuBois in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' at the Young Vic (2014), the fastest selling show in that theatre's history and broadcast to more than two thousand cinemas, and Margo Channing in 'All About Eve' (2019). Three Olivier nominations, no wins.

On screen she spent a stretch in period costume. She was Lady Dedlock in the BBC's 'Bleak House' (2005), which brought Emmy and BAFTA nominations, then Miss Havisham in 'Great Expectations' (2011), the Duchess of Windsor in 'Any Human Heart' (2010) and Edwina Mountbatten in Gurinder Chadha's 'Viceroy's House' (2017).

Her best film of those years is 'The House of Mirth' (2000), Terence Davies's adaptation of Edith Wharton, which won her the British Independent Film Award for best actress. She was also in 'The Last King of Scotland' (2006) with James McAvoy and Forest Whitaker, and in comedies including 'How to Lose Friends & Alienate People' (2008) and 'Johnny English Returns' (2011).

Stella Gibson, Thatcher and the mother in 'Sex Education'

British television gave her the big parts back. In 'The Fall' (2013-2016) she is Stella Gibson, the senior officer hunting Jamie Dornan's serial killer across Belfast without raising her voice or apologising for anything. From the second series she was an executive producer on it.

Alongside that she played Hannibal Lecter's psychiatrist in 'Hannibal' (2013-2015) opposite Mads Mikkelsen, the goddess Media in the first season of 'American Gods' (2017), and turned up in 'The Great' (2021).

In 2020 she played Margaret Thatcher in the fourth season of 'The Crown', the series created by Peter Morgan, her partner. She got the voice and the stiffness without tipping into impersonation, and it brought her a second Emmy, a Golden Globe and a SAG award.

At the same time she was Jean Milburn, the sex therapist who can't talk to her own teenage son, in 'Sex Education' (2019-2023), with Asa Butterfield, Emma Mackey and Ncuti Gatwa. Along with Scully, it's the part younger audiences stop her about.

Cannes, Netflix and a London stage

Recent years have been a mixture of everything. She played Emily Maitlis, the journalist who interviewed Prince Andrew, in 'Scoop' (2024); walked the South West Coast Path with Jason Isaacs in 'The Salt Path'; worked with Christian Bale on 'The Pale Blue Eye' (2022); and went into the grid in 'Tron: Ares' (2025). In December 2025 she was a silver mine owner in 'The Abandons', the Netflix western with Lena Headey that was cancelled after one season.

The best thing she has done in years came out this summer. In Jane Schoenbrun's 'Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma' she is a reclusive former actress whom an obsessive young director, played by Hannah Einbinder, wants for the remake of the slasher that made her name. It opened Un Certain Regard at Cannes, won the Queer Palm and the reviews for her were extraordinary.

Today, 9 October 2026, 'Animals' arrives, the kidnapping thriller Ben Affleck directs and stars in with Kerry Washington, and the notices have been poor. She, meanwhile, is on stage in London in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at @sohoplace with Billy Crudup, until December.

She writes as well. There were three science fiction novels with Jeff Rovin, a feminist manifesto in 2017 and then 'Want' in 2024, a book built from anonymous letters women sent her about their sexual fantasies. It sold heavily and got a sequel, 'More', in September 2026.

She has lived in London since 2002 with her three children: Piper, born in 1994 during her marriage to Clyde Klotz, and two sons with the businessman Mark Griffiths. She was also married to the documentary maker Julian Ozanne between 2004 and 2006, and since 2016 her partner has been Peter Morgan. She was made an honorary OBE that same year for services to drama.

One cause has stayed with her since the nineties. Her brother Aaron had neurofibromatosis and died of a brain tumour in 2011 at 30; she is a spokeswoman for the American network that funds research into it, and addressed Congress in 1996 asking for money. In 2008 she also co-founded SAYes, a South African charity that mentors young people leaving care into work, study and housing of their own.