(Sort of) British Actresses You Should Know: Gillian Anderson

You're not mistaken if you think you've been seeing a lot of actress Gillian Anderson on your screens over the past few years. Viewers have watched her portray a wide range of characters,  transforming from contemporary figures like a sex therapist to historical ones such as the first female Prime Minister of the U.K. Yet, despite the variety of roles on her resume, most of her roles have one specific thing in common: A British accent. But how is it that an actress automatically recognized as the star of an American TV cult classic has been snagging so many British roles?

After all, Anderson first achieved pop-culture fame as skeptical FBI agent Dana Scully in the popular 1990's science-fiction drama series, The X-Files. She brought home an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her performance in that role, and it's what she's probably most frequently remembered for.

But Anderson is also bidialectal, which means she’s able to fluently switch between two dialects of the same language. The Chicago-born actress spent almost a decade living in Britain with her family when she was young, before returning to the U.S. at the age of eleven.  Spending ample time in both countries has allowed her to transition seamlessly between the two accents when needed. London has also been the actress’s home for the past twenty years - over half of her credits during that time have been in British productions. (Does that make her an honorary Brit? Yes, at least for the purposes of this list.) And it’s an assortment of those roles that we’ll focus on in this profile

Bleak House

In this 2005 BBC TV adaptation of the classic Charles Dickens novel, Anderson plays Lady Honoria Deadlock, a wealthy woman with a secret past she had kept from everyone, including her baronet husband.

Her performance as a disgraced aristocrat was recognized with both an Emmy for Best Actress in Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television and a BAFTA nomination.