A 'Bleak' return

Dickens classic entices Anderson back to small screen

By Steve Hedgpeth
THE STAR-LEDGER OF NEWARK, N.J
Sunday, January 22, 2006

Gillian Anderson played FBI agent Dana Scully on the Fox sci-fi series "The X-Files" from 1993 to 2002. And after nearly a decade of that show's UFOs and extraterrestrials and other such phenomena, the thing that Anderson found most alien or alienating was television itself.

"When I finished the series, I wasn't going to do television again," says Anderson, 37. "I never wanted to do television to begin with, and I was so exhausted by the process that I was wary of being in front of the camera again."

And for several years, Anderson — who married for a second time in 2004 and moved to England — did indeed avoid the television camera like a plague from outer space.

"I did two plays and traveled to about 25 different countries and got involved in charity work, especially concerning Africa," she says.

But she and TV eventually did reconcile when the superb "Bleak House" came her way. A six-part, British-filmed "Masterpiece Theatre" adaptation of one of Charles Dickens' most plot-dense and character-rich works, "Bleak House" premieres today at 8 p.m. on PBS, KLRU Channel 18, and runs Sundays through Feb. 26.

Anderson plays Lady Honoria Dedlock, an unhappy, even repressed woman with a dark secret who becomes entangled with a slew of other characters involved in a complicated court case.

The large cast also includes Charles Dance, Alun Armstrong, Nathaniel Parker, Phil Davis, Pauline Collins, Ian Richardson, John Lynch, Anna Maxwell Martin and Richard Griffiths, among many others.

Anderson was won over originally by the script, the work of Andrew Davies, whose credits include the "Bridget Jones" films and the acclaimed 1995 "Masterpiece Theatre" production of "Pride and Prejudice."

"I had turned down a lot of other television offers," Anderson says, "but I fell in love with the script (for 'Bleak House'). And I kept being influenced by people who kept telling me that it would be a very good project to be involved with, that it would be a load of fun and high quality and highly respected.

"Plus, the character of Lady Dedlock is very different than anything I've done before, so I did it."

As Lady Dedlock, she speaks in a British accent, but that isn't foreign to her. On the phone from India, where she spent her Christmas holiday, Anderson sounds mildly British, an echo, she says, of having grown up in England and having moved back there in recent years.

"The accent was not an issue," she says. "The complexity of the character I was playing was the real challenge. I didn't want to make her too dark, too dire, too cold. I wanted her to have many, many layers. For an audience to have some compassion for her, one has to understand where she's come from and be sympathetic to her in order to follow her story line."

The experience of making "Bleak House," she says, was anything but bleak.

"Dickens' novel has such a rich and poignant mood and the script translated that very well," she says. "And being in the midst of so many quality actors, it asks one to raise your game."