February 20, 1991:
Ms. Anderson, who was giving her first interview, was pale and looked a bit queasy. When she spoke it was with a vaguely British accent, which comes partly from having lived in London until she was 10 -- her father attended the London Film School, then stayed on -- and partly, she said, from being around Ms. Blethyn. She spoke about herself haltingly, with much of the deadpan quality that her character has in the play.
"When Lynne had my resume in her hand and said, 'Is this all you've done?' I didn't know what she meant," Ms. Anderson said. "I thought I had done a lot. But once I was hired, a big fear of mine was letting Lynne down. She was taking a big risk, and I didn't want her to find out she'd made a mistake." [...]
It's a funny story, but staying employed is every actor's concern. Ms. Anderson says: "There is a slight fear this will be my first and last job for a while, but that's in every actor's mind as long as they live. I tend to have a great deal of faith that wherever my life goes, it's the best thing for me." [...]
Ms. Anderson is quick to compliment her. "It's so wonderful to watch you and Lynne work together," she said to Ms. Blethyn. "The silent understandings they have about the character, and the way they can verbalize what's missing, what they need. The thought-instinct process is so precise." She sighs. "That's one thing that only experience gives you. For me it takes quite a lot longer to come up with what's happening."
"As long as you come up with it, dear," Ms. Blethyn said without missing a beat. And they both laughed.
FOR REFERENCE
(Credit to: gilliananderson.ws)
It couldn't have happened any better for Gillian Anderson if Schwab's Drug Store were still in business. A 1990 graduate of the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago, the young actress moved to New York six months ago, found an apartment in Greenwich Village and, when she wasn't auditioning, worked as a waitress at Dojo, a Japanese health food restaurant on St. Mark's Place. She made barely enough money to cover her rent, and the only theater she saw was a performance of "Lettice and Lovage" with Maggie Smith, where she says she practically got a nosebleed in the back of the balcony.
When Mary Louise Parker dropped out of "Absent Friends" because of illness, Ms. Anderson's agent sent her to audition for the part of Evelyn, a sullen young mother in Alan Ayckbourn's black comedy about a group of friends who console an acquaintance on the death of his fiancee. (The play runs through March 17 at the Manhattan Theater Club.) Ms. Anderson's first reading warranted a callback "to make sure it wasn't a fluke," said the director, Lynne Meadow, and when the second reading went well, the actress was hired on the spot. It was her first job in the theater, and the rest of the cast had started rehearsals a week earlier....
Now, in this dreariest of theater seasons, Ms. Anderson is one of two actresses, both in the same play and both new to New York, whose performances are causing some excitement....
Ms. Meadow said: "I didn't realize we would find someone quite this green. But it is one of those great stories, where someone is cast purely on ability. Gillian's background is improvisational and she took those instincts and put them into the highly technical style Alan Ayckbourn writes in, which is not free-flowing at all. It has to be played the way it's written, so our work was extremely specific, concrete."
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