Star of the week: Sex bomb with a short fuse
by Sean Macaulay

Gillian Anderson had spent her life as a misfit. Then Hollywood cast her as one. Profile by Sean Macaulay

There are now more than 9,000 websites devoted to the sceptical, unsmiling, unlaughing siren of supernatural investigation that is Gillian Anderson. After six years of coping with unanswered questions as Agent Dana Scully in television's most smoke-filled, rained-drenched series, The X-Files, the actress can boast such devoted fan clubs as the Church of the Immaculate Gillian, the Genuine Admirers Of Gillian Anderson (Gaga) and the Gillian Anderson Testosterone Brigade. The latter association boasts the motto: Gillian Anderson is Intellectually Drop Dead Gorgeous, which offers a first step in unraveling her phenomenal appeal.

The raw material is not immediately promising. She may be red-headed — the new blonde in the glamour stakes — but she is also small (5ft 3in) and, by her own admission, an unglamorous frump off-camera in her sweatpants and granny glasses.

As a youth she had a taste for self-desecration, clomping around angrily in combat boots with a 2ft-high mohican sprouting from the top of her head. As an adult, she dressed like a SoHo Boho and fretted over her weight until a ten-day cleansing changed her life and gave her a stable body image.

After off-Broadway plays and a year of fruitless auditions, she landed up cutting and dying her hair until she wailed: I look like my mother.

By the second season of The X-Files she was a cult pin-up, the cool-headed voice of reason to plank-like David Duchovny's Agent Fox Mulder, a sullen inveterate conspiracy theorist (he thinks his sister was abducted by aliens). Each of Mulder's outlandish theories is greeted with an indulgently raised plucked eyebrow: Mulder, not everything is a labyrinth of dark conspiracy, and not everybody is plotting to deceive, inveigle and obfuscate.

Or an impatient slapdown: Well, if it's that simple, why don't you put out an APB for someone riding a broom and wearing a tall black hat.

Scully's trademark scepticism — immortalised in Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the phrase Don't Scully me — goes a long way to explaining why the sexual tension between her and Mulder remains famously unconsummated. The expedient reason is that as soon as it is the show will falter, just as Moonlighting stumbled after Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd finally entwined.

But Anderson seems to embrace Scully's aloofness from Mulder's charms (a froideur remarked upon offscreen too). The character is strong (unlike Mulder, she kills villains without hesitation), smart and not given to revealing her emotions too often. In other words, she's the thinking man's crumpet.

This genre of sex symbol can be traced directly back to the handsome female news presenters of the 1970s, but an influence can be detected in the cool Hitchcock blonde of the 1950s. Basically put, it is the appeal of fire beneath the ice, that beneath the refined businesslike veneer lurks the promise of untold depravity.

Anderson's beestung lips and blue eyes are the signposts to this sexual El Dorado, along with the Rubensesque tension of her physique (she looks like she's going to run to fat at any second). She finally broke loose of all this shimmering implication two years ago when she posed for a photo-spread sporting a selection of brothelly lingerie. X-Philes were ecstatic, but her grandmother dispatched a letter saying: I am going to plant a couple of fig trees so we will have plenty of leaves in future if you ever run out of clothing again.

Curiously, her skimpily clad tableau revealed nothing that approximated a latent vixenism. If anything, the pictures only reinforced her innate wholesomeness. This is a woman, after all, who says her path is work and family and honesty.

She tried expanding her sexy image further when she released the Web nerds' version of Je t'aime mon non plus, a technopop single called Extremis featuring Anderson's breathy voice-over and a video in which she played a voyeur watching two robots having cybersex.

But somehow one couldn't help feeling the integrity of the brand, so to speak, had been compromised. It is rumoured that in the new series of The X-Files, which airs soon in America, she will be carrying Mulder's child.

Her transition to the big screen has been gradual, despite being inspired to act by seeing Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. (Streep, incidentally, is most definitely not a thinking man's sex symbol, so much as a star women like.) The X-Files's gruelling schedule — ten months filming a year — leaves little time for substantial movie work.

Still, Anderson has accumulated a couple of interesting roles, albeit small ones, on the big screen, along with her star turn in the X-Files movie in 1998. She played an alcoholic in the heartfelt drama The Mighty, a subject she often talks about in typical Hollywood terms — ie if she hadn't given up drinking aged 20, she could well be dead by now. And in 1998 she joined the distinguished roundelay of troubled relationships in Playing by Heart (her daughter Piper made an on-set friend of Sean Connery), but was overshadowed by the veterans in the cast like Gena Rowlands.

And now she makes her most concerted attempt to broaden her range in The House of Mirth (reviewed on page 16), her first lead role away from The X-Files. Director Terence Davies, supposedly unaware of her fame, cast her for her fin de siθcle Singer Sargeant looks. It turned out she was a devoted admirer of his autobiographical work, The Long Day Closes.

What her legion of fans will make of her latest incarnation, safely buttoned up again, this time in period costume, is one question that will be answered soon enough.

Source: The Times, eXpress it! message boards, Gillian Anderson uk, Thanks to Mo!