The weirdness of Anderson’s professional life found a mirror on the personal front. During the first year of the series, she met and married assistant art director Clyde Kotz after a nanosecond’s courtship, had an unplanned pregnancy that nearly got her canned for imposing such inconvenience on the fledgling series, and gave birth to a daughter, Piper Maru. While motherhood took, the marriage didn’t, and she and Klotz separated. More weirdness kicked in. The once relatively low-profile, circumspect, and, one senses, insecure Anderson—now the wet dream of the pocketprotector set—abruptly emerged, as if from a chrysalis, a chic beauty ready for her dose-up. A Leger-sheathed vamp one night, an Armani-dad knockout on another, Anderson suddenly reeked of self-confidence. She stared down cameramen with the ferocity of a seasoned diva.
Anderson’s fashion transformation was not the sum total of her Cinderella act. After separation from her husband, a British tabloid reported that she jetted to London to spend New Year’s weekend with actor Adrian Hughes, whom she met when he did a bit part on the series. Shortly thereafter she reportediy dumped Hughes upon learning of charges pending against him on grounds of sexual assault. Several months later, she appeared at a Gucci-sponsored AIDS Project Los Angeles benefit squired by Rodney Rowland, another “X-Files” guest acting vet, with whom, magazines reported, she was seen “passionately kissing.” Then at the MTV Awards, she and Rowland were all over each other like the high school swim-team captain and the head cheerleader. (Rowland was once again at Anderson’s side as she won her Emmy, but on this occasion decorum reigned.)
All in all, Gillian Anderson today is so far from Gillian Anderson of five years ago that she might just as well have been abducted by aliens.
More strangeness probably looms ahead if Anderson finds in films a fraction of the success she’s had on TV. Until recently, her only celluloid exposure was a tiny role in a way ofi Hollywood indie now advertised in video stores with a photo of her unbuttoning her blouse. But this season, Anderson hits the big screen in The Mighty, an offbeat tale of a special kid who stops growing at age six, which costars Sharon Stone and Gena Rowlands, and the darkly funny Hell cab, in which she’s along for the ride with John Cusack and julianne Moore. The big news, of course, the project that has fans salivating, is the film she’s been shooting with David Duchovny, the big-budget, big-screen, big special effects "X-Files" epic, unofficially known as Blackwood.
I’ve been curious about Anderson since I first caught her on the show years ago. What fires are banked under that coolly impassive, I-dare-you-to-make-me-smile surface? Is she smart for real or just really good at acting that way? And how many of the great-looking guys she’s been photographed with are even semi-significant?
