Gillian to star in "A Doll's House"
Posted at 5:05 PM (PDT) on Thursday, June 26, 2008

26th June 2008
By Baz Bamigboye
The Daily Mail, UK

Gillian Anderson will take on one of the most controversial roles an actress can play on the stage.

She will star as Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, which opens at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre in Covent Garden next spring.

A new version of the drama has been written by Zinnie Harris and will be directed by Kfir Yefet. More than a century after Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll's House, where Nora famously, walks out on her husband and children, that defiant act still has the capacity to shock.

'How does a woman... how can a woman... abandon her children like that?' Gillian wondered, when we discussed A Doll's House on Wednesday in London.

The actress, who has two children and is pregnant with her third, added: 'To some of us, it just feels absolutely shocking. I couldn't imagine it, and yet it happens all the time for one reason or another.'

And in between preparing for A Doll's House and her new baby, Gillian is waiting for the release, in August, of X Files: I Want To Believe, a big-screen movie in which, after a break of several years, she reprises her role as agent Dana Scully. 'They've all matured, which is such a funny word to use because of course we've matured - we're ten years older in X Files, and look it,' she said.

The part of Scully made her a star, but she has more than proved her acting abilities in other work, particularly the film House Of Mirth and her spectacular performance as Lady Dedlock in the award-winning BBC TV serial of Bleak House.

But she likes to return to the stage even though, she says, it terrifies her. 'Every time I put up my hand (to go on stage again), it's the other arm trying to pull my hand down,' she said, laughing. 'It's like: "What do you think you're doing?" But it's so rewarding when I do theatre.'

Certainly not in monetary terms, and not at the Donmar, where she'll be on the Equity union minimum of around £400-£500 a week. 'I still choose to get involved in theatre. It's important enough to me in my life, that I think I'd choose it regardless of whether I could feed my children,' she joked.