Gillian Anderson, icon of the small screen for 30 years

(Cannes) Scientist in X Filessexologist and eccentric mother in Sex Education“Iron Lady” in The Crown… Since her debut as Agent Scully 30 years ago, Gillian Anderson has multiplied the roles of a strong woman on the small screen.

Honored this week at the Canneseries festival, the 53-year-old actress was awarded the Variety Icon Award for her entire rich career, started on the boards and passed through the cinema, but above all emblematic of the television history.

“I have indeed embodied a lot of iconic women”, admitted Gillian Anderson in front of a conquered audience at the Palais des Festivals, after receiving her prize and walking the pink carpet.

The next day, the London-based American was cheered on by hundreds of admirers during a masterclass, in front of fans who grew up with FBI agent Dana Scully’s “fantastic Saturdays” on M6.

When she started her legendary duo in 1993 in X Files with David Duchovny, the interpreter of Fox Mulder, Gillian Anderson is only 24 years old and dreams rather… of cinema.

“I didn’t want to do TV because the sector at the time, and in particular for women, did not make people dream. Movie actors doing television were stigmatized, and I always wanted to do movies, ”she says.

X Files will give him the opportunity to appear in dark rooms, with two feature films taken from the series, in 1998 and 2008, but above all to invest homes for nearly ten years.

A success sometimes too heavy to bear for the young actress, who became a mother at 25, who cannot imagine the impact that her austere heroine will have on her career and on television, where strong female roles are then developed as in buffy the vampire slayer Where Xena, the warrior.

Tour in Canada, X Files attracted “a lot of attention when I did not yet know who I was”, explains Gillian Anderson, also referring to the “abandonment” of the first of her three children “17 hours a day”.

Equal pay

When the series ended in 2002, the Chicago native went into exile in the United Kingdom, “determined to do something completely different” and happy to find people there who had thought, “from the start”, that she could play “something other than Scully”, especially in the theater.

She signed her most notable success in 2006 at the cinema with The Last King of Scotlandbut it’s still a series, The Fallwhich brought it back to the fore in 2013.

She plays Stella Gibson, a London cop sent to Northern Ireland in search of a serial killer. A woman ” badass (“tough guy”) as she likes them, feminist, independent with an assumed sexuality.

“When I read the script, I felt that it was necessary” that we know that “a woman like her can exist”.

She thus participated in the promotion of heroines in their forties in the 2010s, inaugurated by series such as Nurse Jackiestarring Edie Falco.

And also asserts himself off-camera, fighting to obtain the same salary as David Duchovny on the occasion of the resurrection of the series X Files between 2016 and 2018.

In 2019, she created a surprise by trying her hand at comedy in Sex Education through Jean Milburn, mother of a teenager and “morally ambiguous” sex therapist who she hopes will help lift “the taboo surrounding the sexuality of older women”.

In a completely different register, she lent her features to Margaret Thatcher in The Crowna challenge that terrified her, at a time when “everyone gives their opinion every second”.

But, “if you want to survive in this job, you just have to go out there and do your best. If people like it, great! Otherwise, too bad, “explained the one who will also play Eleanor Roosevelt in The First Ladyexpected this month on the American channel Showtime.

It will surely continue to offer strong female roles, thanks to an exclusive contract with Netflix and its production company just announced.