Gillian Anderson

She has a book out about women's sexual fantasies.

Do you think she was a good Margaret Thatcher?

She WAS Margaret Thatcher!

Sublime!

I had the biggest crush on her in the nineties.

Cannot act worth a shit, and draws nasty posters to her threads.

She makes my skin crawl and she's a terrible terrible actress.

She was very good in The Fall, Bleak House, and Hannibal. + Sex Education

I loved her as Lily Bart and in the X-Files.

Boo on you Gillian haters.

I like her. Did she have an actual relationship with David Duchovny?

She was terrible as Thatcher. Only one actress gave the definitive Thatcher and it wasn’t some TV actress from a glorified sci-fi show.

Her voice is unfortunate.

I agree with you, rescue-chick. She seems fake to me in every role. I once said here that her accent when she's playing British sounded phony to me, too, and was dressed down by someone claiming to be English who said it was authentic and she came by it naturally due to her dual British-American life. I stand by my opinion; doesn't matter how long she's lived in London. However, I admit that it might read that way to me because I don't believe her overall as an actress. The accent sounds very generic and studied to me. I wonder if that person will come after me here again.

Love her in The Mighty.

Her Lily Bart was heartbreaking. Was good as Scully.

She is bisexual, isn't she?

She was terrible as Lily Bart, but that was the fault of the director, a Brit who managed to get every single thing about the novel wrong.

Lily Bart is nothing if not stoical and Anderson spends the whole film blubbing away.

Amazingly talented, IMO.

She puts on a fake accent now. She lived in London for 5 years as a child. She’s known for having borderline personality disorder and for treating everyone around her like crap. She’s a very disturbed woman.

She played Margaret Thatcher like she had a stroke. It was a laughable performance. No wonder her creator husband dumped her.

A beauty.

Lady Dedlock in Bleak House...superb.

Also a pretty fearless stage actress.

r18 Details please.

I think of her as the t.v. version of Kate Winslet.

She would have made a great Joan Crawford.

R18 She has said she struggles with depression and addiction.

Gillian Anderson is not a great actor but she's always entertaining and that's why I love her.

I think she's at her best when she has the freedom to be really flamboyant and weird. She was excellent as Media in season 1 of American Gods. I also enjoyed her as Dr. Bedelia de Maurier, Hannibal Lecter's friend/therapist in Hannibal.

I enjoy a lot of her work and I think she's a good actress, but like R18, I don't buy her dual accent thing.

If you watch any interview with her done in the UK she'll have an English accent, but when she goes to America for interviews magically her American accent returns. I know some will say it's due to living in both countries, but while I can understand maybe certain aspects of another accent creeping in, it's not common to completely change your accent based on location like that.

She's on a sofa TV advert here in the UK at the moment and, as her last line, she says "has anyone got a duvet?!" in an annoying tone and it sounds just like an American trying to imitate an English accent. There's definitely something inauthentic about it.

R28 It is actually quite common. It's a form of code-switching. I've known some Americans who came to the UK and their accent changed within months. Anderson came here as a child so her British accent isn't fake. My dad is Irish and despite living in the UK since his early twenties, the second he arrives on Irish soil, his accent changes completely. It happens.

I thought she was good as Thatcher

R29 I just don't really buy it. She lived in the US from age 11 to 34 and always had an American accent. When she came to England to promote The X-Files in interviews here she had an American accent then, too. She claims now her accent changes to English whenever she's in the UK, but if that's the case, why didn't it happen when she came here in the 90s for said promo?

I think it's a part of wanting to "fit in".

I've known plenty of people who've moved here from other countries and never changed their original accent. For example, my Irish grandmother moved here to the UK when she was 17. She lived here the rest of her life but never once lost her Irish accent even slightly.

I've known people get a slight English twang to their accent (mostly because they start pronouncing words like we do) but never a complete change. The way she speaks just sounds a bit phony.

[quote] Anderson came here as a child so her British accent isn't fake.

It is. She was in Britain for two seconds a million years ago. She’s American through and through. As I said, it is well-known that she’s borderline. Her hometown has a million stories about her.

R30, you obviously didn’t grow up with Thatcher. Thatcher never acted nor spoke like that.

Loved her in Sex Ed. Aging extremely well.

She was entertaining as Thatcher, r33. The purpose of a TV show is to provide entertainment. You're free to watch YouTube videos of Thatcher if you want 100% accuracy.

Ony the list of "I can't believe they are not 100% gay" she will always take the number one spot. Not even a bisexual with the preference for women? How?

I never liked her face. Something about it seems wrong.

David Duchovnay, now he was sexy.

She can be good in some parts and terrible in others. Thank you , r16, first time i read here some criticism of her as Lily Bart, which I didn’t like at all. She was miscast.

Personality wise she sounds very fake.

As for her state acting, judge by yourself

I’d love to see her perform live.

She and David D. have a lot of chemistry. They didn’t get along for years.

Her performances as Margaret Thatcher, Lily Bart and (perhaps worst of all) Blanche du Bois are false as false can be.

I saw her play Nora in A Doll's House at the Donmar and she was wonderful.

r36, there's rumors about her being a predatory bisexual

R42 Yeah I thought it was accepted fact she's bisexual and was in a relationship with a woman at some point. I could've sworn she said it in an interview.

She was apparently insufferable when she was young.

Her Lily Bart moved me!!

Great in the Great!

Her voice, inflections and speech cadences register like a higher rent Ashley Judd who over enunciates and speaks very affected and unnatural.

Theatres put all these performances up on YouTube for free for a limited time during the pandemic to raise some money, and I downloaded her Young Vic performance of A Streetcar Named Desire. Have watched it at least ten times since, I love it so much.

r46 Yeah, she was awesome in that. I hate how short her stay was, though her exit was too comical to complain about it too much. Short and sweet.

I must say I like the older version better.

I am completely captivated by this DVD cover, she looks like Salome deciding to go back to the cistern and torment John the Baptist some more. Is the movie worth checking out, or will I be shortchanged?

She was Eleanor Roosevelt in the series First Lady.

WHET Dan Ackroyd?

I prefer her Miss Havisham to Olivia Colman's, despite Colman's probably taking the edge from a purely technical perspective. She was so wonderfully ethereal. I might watch it again next week, it's the perfect Christmas show.

Women of a certain set of tastes seem to go for her brittle, vague, mannered, unconvincing type of presentation.

Another one, Dorothy?

Didn't she die at 37?

R50, it is a terrible adaptation. Eric Stolz manages to maintain a level of elegant cool, Laura Linnery clearly read the book and is wonderful as Bertha Dorset and Gillian herself is clearly doing what the director wants, but the movie throws away Wharton's terrifying moral and ethical trap for a blinkered critique of capitalism that we can see coming a mile away. The conflation of the toxic Grace Stepney character with that of the gentle Gerty Farish is fatal (the director removes the only positive female character in the book). And although Eleanor Bron is a great actress the reinterpretation of the trivial, mild-mannered and aristocratic snob Julia Peniston as a glacial battleax is equally destructive.

Wharton's point was that people can destroy each other without necessarily meaning to do so - or even being aware of it - if they live in a false and selfish culture. The film is simply a collection of psychotic assholes.

R42 Well, she's openly bi and admitted to having relationships with women when she was young. What I meant, she comes across as totally gay to me. Or at least bi with preference for women. But she's neither of those things.

I don't know what you mean by predatory

Like others here, she's always given me the icks. She's ruined many otherwise beloved shows for me including X-Files and The Crown because I just couldn't take one more moment of her phony, mannered hamming. The whole time she was in the X-Files she [badly] appropriated Jodie Foster's characteristic deep, lispy-lez voice which suddenly disappeared when she decided to become a Proper English Lady.

She just has this dark, pretentious, deeply personality-disordered energy which she can never fully cloak in any of her roles.

I find her excellent. She’s also very good in the series “The Fall”.

Her facial expression always reads like someone who smells shit

Did she have a relationship with Cate Blanchett?

She’s so batshit crazy it’s actually funny to watch her and see what ridiculous shit she’ll pull next. Her performances are dreadful.

Scully doesn't sound like Clarice Starling, r58. You must be high.

No thoughts on her

R61 No

Gillian had a long list of likely hookups early on in her career: Jodie Foster, Helen Hunt, Gina Gershon. She was the vortex of the lesbian/bisexual sewing circle back in the day. Cate, among many, many others, was rumoured to be on that list as well.

R66 Making stuff up is fun.

Will watch h her in anything. The best Lady Deadlock ever.

R66 Jodie was with her partner from 1993 to 2008. So when exactly did these likely hookups occur?

Because rich, powerful dykes never fuck around behind the wife's back, eh?

She known for putting her foot on they neck when a bitch give her problems

Bitch is mad ratchet irl

Did she fuck the baroness too? Since we’re just making shit up at this point….

I would love to see her Blanche DuBois R48

R70 And your proof that Jodie cheated on her partner is where? Let me guess, in your head