Gillian talks about what inspired her
Posted at 7:20 AM (PST) on Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Creativity: Different stars talk about what inspired them
by Luaine Lee
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
11 December 2007

Creativity seems to be an indefinable something that separates the artist from the rest of the world. You never know just what’s going to trigger it. For Jim Carrey it was a teacher, for Gillian Anderson it was failing an audition, for Tim Burton it was digging in his heels.

Gillian Anderson says, "I don’t remember there being a moment when I knew. My mother seems to remember, as mothers do, that it was something I was interested in from very early on. I don’t remember that at all. I do know that when we were living in Michigan there wasn’t any theater at the school I was in but I went for an audition at the community theater for 'Alice in Wonderland.'

"It was for the role of Alice and there were probably 200 girls there. And I remember not getting cast and thinking, 'This isn’t for me' ... Years later while I was in high school I got an internship at a theater and made friends with the guy who was the theater director and I told him that story.

"He said, 'Hang on a second, were you that British girl?' I said, 'I had a British accent.' He said, 'We came this close to casting you but we didn’t because we’d never seen you before we didn’t know if you’d be able to pull it off. You hadn't done anything in your life and we went with a girl who'd done productions in this community.'

"I'd also auditioned for another community play just before that and was cast and it changed something in me. I'd always been very rebellious, not a good student, very much into the underground punk scene and stuff like that. And when I did this play and experienced the stage with an audience it transformed me. And all of a sudden, my grades went up, I started to study it was like a piece of the puzzle had been put in."