GILLIAN ANDERSON SHUNS HOLLYWOOD FOR LONDON

In order to find substantial roles in films and TV, Gillian Anderson says that she has focused her career on the U.K. In an interview with the BBC magazine Radio Times, the former X-Files star said that in Britain, “There’s a broader understanding of my capability,” whereas in Hollywood, she said, she had sometimes thought “of throwing in the towel when I’m doing a crock of s***.” In fact, she disclosed, she got her role on The X Files against the wishes of Fox network executives who wanted a big-breasted blonde. “That’s the only way they knew how to market television. … No one expected The X-Files to be popular.” Since 2005 she has appeared in such productions as a BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a comedy about the London art scene called Boogie Woogie, a four-part Channel 4 miniseries, Any Human Heart, in which she played Wallace Simpson, for whom King Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry, and The Crimson Petal and the White (to air next week), in which she plays a brothel owner in Victorian England. “They don’t know what to do with me in the States because they don’t realize I’m a character actress,” Anderson said. “They wouldn’t for a second imagine I could play Wallis Simpson.”