At the age of 56, Gillian Anderson has edited a book, Want, in which she has 'curated' more than 100 anonymous erotic fantasies from women across the globe, including one of her own. Photo / Getty Images
Following the launch of her new book detailing women’s fantasies, we look at why Anderson has become the authority on eroticism.
We have long worshipped women celebrities whose sharp intellect more than equals their decided erotic allure. The late humourist Frank Muir coined a phrase for it, decades ago, when speaking of Joan Bakewell: “The thinking man’s crumpet.”
It’s a mantle also worn by Nigella Lawson - and, of course, Gillian Anderson, ever since she first smouldered on to screens in the early 1990s as FBI agent Dr Dana Scully in The X-Files, seeking evidence of alien existence alongside David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder.
Anderson’s geeky, buttoned-up truth-seeker rapidly became the poster girl for men who liked primly clad eroticism. In 1996, lads’ mag FHM deemed her the “sexiest woman in the world” - though Anderson recently said as a hard-toiling, single mum (she split up with her first husband, Clyde Klotz, that year) with an infant in her trailer, she felt anything but sexy at the time.
Almost three decades on, at the age of 56, Anderson is still a pin-up. But there is a vital difference. Now she has edited a book, Want, “curating” more than 100 anonymous erotic fantasies from women across the globe, including one of her own. Today the actress, who has had both straight and gay relationships, has become a sex goddess - for women.
It is as if she has stepped straight from the screen into the heels of Dr Jean Milburn, the glamorous sex therapist she plays in the Netflix series Sex Education. Only now it is us women who long to be on her couch.
That quality of glacial intelligence allied to strong but contained emotion continues to be her hallmark, demonstrating that withholding passion can be far more exciting than exuding it. Everyone will have their favourite Anderson performance, but my own is probably her role as Lady Dedlock in the BBC’s 2005 adaptation of Bleak House, where Mr Tulkinghorn’s (Charles Dance) threats to expose her secret lovechild bring a barely perceptible flutter to her beautiful brow. These are the kind of minutiae of expression that Anderson fans obsess over. Bryan Fuller, the creator of the Hannibal series - where she played the fictional serial killer’s therapist - has said of her: “She has one of those faces that can change its structure and intent.”
The most uncanny metamorphosis, for most viewers, was when Anderson played Margaret Thatcher in The Crown. Her rendering was so uncannily like the Iron Lady that co-star Olivia Colman described it as “freaky”, adding: “She was a little too good.” It reminded viewers that many male contemporaries of Thatcher found her powerfully attractive: witness any YouTube clip of her flirting with Michael Parkinson. For British viewers, it added ballast to Anderson’s therapist roles, turning her into what you might call an honourary dominatrix - bestriding the nation like a sexy Mary Poppins.
Hollywood often misunderstands erotic allure, believing it to be about jacked-up breasts, scarlet lips and tousled blonde hair, like Sydney Sweeney in the Rolling Stones’ video for Angry. But Anderson reminds us it’s just as often about persona and subtle shifts of power. Her deep understanding of this fact is conveyed in her thoughtful introduction to Want and in her shorter prefaces for each separate chapter of fantasies.
Anderson writes: “As an actor, there is an inherent permission at the core of my job to give myself to an alternate reality, which is the very definition of fantasy. The women whom I embody, whose worlds I step into, also have inner lives, desires and fantasies, which are vital to understanding what makes them tick.”
At the heart of it all is her exquisite understanding of the mechanics of control.
She recognises the key element in sexual fantasies “is that we control the action, who does what to whom and how, down to the last elaborate, exquisite, erotic detail. In the safety of your own head, there is no fear of societal judgement or consequence”.
Anderson has long seemed better at traversing her own off-piste path than many other actors, which may partly be due to an itinerant childhood. She was born in Chicago, but went to primary school in London while her father attended film school, before returning with him and her computer analyst mother to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she was one of her school’s “weird” kids, hanging out with a handful of fellow punks.
After that she attended the Goodman Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, moving afterwards to New York City, where she initially supported herself through waitressing before landing serious theatre roles. In recent years, she’s spoken about the relationship she had with an older Italian woman in New York, whom she lived with for a year, and how formative it proved - only talking about it after the woman’s death to preserve her lover’s privacy.
This touching story has only swelled her already sizeable lesbian following. A notable feature of Want is how many of the fantasies come from women who describe themselves as “bisexual/pansexual”. In recent years, a meme circulated on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) featuring the phrase “Gillian Anderson turned me gay” - an acknowledgement of how central Agent Scully was to the “queer awakening” for women coming to terms with their sexuality in the more closeted 1990s.
Despite admitting to this bisexual side, Anderson has been married to two men and had a number of other long-term straight relationships. She’s also the mother of two teenage boys and a 29-year-old daughter. She has said she lives apart-together (meaning keeping separate London homes) with her partner, the British screenwriter Peter Morgan, who she’s been with on and off for the past eight years - which makes her the envy of all women who crave independence while maintaining a passionate attachment.
Although she lives in the UK between filming, she doesn’t hold a British passport - but she was awarded an OBE in 2016 for her services to drama. In 2012, when she gave a public reading from Great Expectations in front of the then-Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall, the Prince remarked it was like having a bedtime story read to him. Anderson replied, “I can tuck you in, too, if you like,” and was met with an enthusiastic, “Yes, please.” The future king - seduced like the rest of us.
Anderson’s ownership of her erotic self has been increasingly evident in the past decade, long before Want was conceived. The turning point was her appearance as Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson in The Fall, where her character’s penchant for silk shirts and pencil skirts, along with her palpable chemistry with Jamie Dornan’s serial killer, was the stuff of highly transgressive fantasy, perturbing some critics of the series who felt it sexualised murder. In Want, Anderson writes of “stepping into my sexual power” in this role because of the character’s effortless confidence “physically, intellectually and sexually”. She says: “It was important to me that we saw her calling the shots in the bedroom.”
The path from Gibson to sex expert Dr Milburn seems obvious now, even though she apparently hesitated before taking on the role - talked into it by Morgan, who saw the strengths of the script. Her Instagram account, with 3.3 million followers, often now incorporates erotic elements - including the “vulva dress” (so-called because of the embroidered motifs) by Gabriela Hearst she wore to this year’s Golden Globes and a crocheted penis made by Tom Daley to mark the final season of Sex Education. She has also started a soft drinks line titled G Spot, which comes with the marketing line: “Need help finding your G-spot? Try our magnificent threesome, twice.”
Directors and critics have applauded Anderson for the “badass” quality she brings to her characters, honed since her punk and Agent Scully days, which allows her to get away with… well, pretty much anything. She could have turned to Hollywood and major studio movies after The X Files, but instead she went more arthouse with Terence Davies’s adaption of The House of Mirth. She doesn’t appear to give a fig about status or A-list people. All of which means she doesn’t get the ridicule Gwyneth Paltrow receives for forays into the erotic sphere. It helps that there’s no ludicrous jargon like “conscious uncoupling”, no steamed vaginas and no sense of taking herself too seriously.
In fact, the thing that comes across most clearly in the publicity for Want is how much Anderson wants to help liberate all women from sexual hang-ups, not just those who can spend a queen’s ransom on a vagina candle from Paltrow’s brand, Goop. In her interview last week with the BBC’s Katie Razzall, Anderson confessed how “surprised” she was at the degree of women’s “shame at sharing sexual fantasies”. I am sure Want will play its part in ironing out that shame; it includes a bewildering range of scenarios, from the vanilla to the torrid. I just hope Anderson’s submission is the one involving alien tentacles, though I expect we will never know. This, above all, is the actress’s great gift: the appearance of candour, while remaining endlessly, tantalisingly enigmatic.
Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous, compiled by Gillian Anderson (Bloomsbury, RRP$34.99), on sale now.
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