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Claire Catherine Danes (born on April 12, 1979) is a Golden Globe Award-winning and Emmy Award-nominated American film, television, and theater actress most known for the television series, My So-Called Life, and the films, Romeo + Juliet, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Stardust. To look upon the face of Claire Danes is to discover an exquisitely expressive canvas for all the emotional colorings of life. This remarkably self-possessed young performer brought startling authenticity as well as intelligence and complexity to her starring role in the landmark high school/family drama "My So-Called Life" (ABC, 1994-95). Danes' often heartrending portrayal of a fifteen-year-old coping with the rigors of adolescence contributed to the cult series' avalanche of kudos and won a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy nod for its rising star. The low-rated, short-lived program counted Steven Spielberg and Winona Ryder among its followers. Danes was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York. Her mother, Carla, is a day-care provider, painter, and textile designer who would later serve as her daughter's manager, and her father, Christopher Danes, is a computer consultant and former architectural photographer. Danes has described her background as being "as WASPy as you can get"; her paternal grandfather, Gibson A. Danes, was the dean of the art and architecture school at Yale University. She has a brother, Asa, who graduated from Oberlin College and works as a litigation attorney for the law firm of Paul Hastings. Danes attended the Dalton School in New York City, the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies, the Professional Performing Arts School, and the Lycée Français de Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California. In 1998, Danes went to Yale University (her father's alma mater). After studying for two years as a psychology major, she dropped out of Yale to focus on her film career. A native New Yorker, Danes was encouraged to pursue her interest in acting by artistic parents and began studying modern dance at age six. By age nine, she was taking weekend acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, later starting her performing career on the off-off-Broadway stage with supporting roles in "Happiness", "Punk Ballet" and "Kids on Stage," even choreographing a solo dance piece for the latter. At age 11, Danes made her film acting debut portraying a molested child in "Dreams of Love" (released 1992), a student short from director Jeffrey Mueller and executive producer Milos Forman. The precocious actress arrived on the small screen in a memorable 1992 guest shot on the NBC crime drama series "Law & Order", playing a volatile teen who, with her mother, was involved with a sleazy photographer. She also auditioned for "My So-Called Life" in 1992, at age 13, and filmed the pilot in early 1993. (It did not air until August 1994.) An early role for Danes was that of Angela Chase in the 1994 television drama series, My So-Called Life, for which she won a Golden Globe Award and received an Emmy nomination. She played Elizabeth ("Beth") March in the 1994 movie adaption of Little Women. She also appeared as Holly Hunter's daughter in Home for the Holidays, which was directed by Jodie Foster. This was followed by her role as Juliet Capulet in Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Later that year she turned down the lead role of Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic because she had been exhausted by working on Romeo + Juliet. In 1999, she made her first appearance in an animated feature with the English version of Princess Mononoke, and took the lead role in Brokedown Palace, alongside Kate Beckinsale and Bill Pullman. Danes won strong notices for her feature debut as the doomed Beth in a well-received remake of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel "Little Women" (1994), with Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder. (The latter had lobbied for Danes to get the role.) Indeed, Spielberg hailed her as "one of the most exciting actresses to debut in ten years" and offered her a role in his Holocaust drama "Schindler's List" (1993) which Danes declined for a variety of reasons. When "My So-Called Life" ended prematurely, though, the young thespian was quickly deluged with feature offers. Danes next popped up in a flashback sequence playing a younger version of Anne Bancroft's character in the Ryder vehicle "How to Make an American Quilt" and followed up with a small role as the wise-beyond-her-years daughter of Holly Hunter (and granddaughter of Bancroft!) in Jodie Foster's "Home for the Holidays" (both 1995). Reportedly, Foster's endorsement helped Danes win the plum role of Juliet opposite Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo in "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" (1996), a highly stylized and purposefully anachronistic retelling of the classic story. By the time of that highly touted release, she had two other features in the can. Danes played leads in "To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday" (1996) as the daughter helping her father (Peter Gallagher) cope with the death of her mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) and "I Love You, I Love You Not" (1997), as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor (Jeanne Moreau). Positive advance word about the professional deportment of the ascendant star spurred more offers for work with such respected filmmakers as Oliver Stone, who cast her as a white trash princess in the odd "U-Turn" (1997), Francis Ford Coppola, who hired her to play an abused wife who falls for young lawyer Matt Damon in "John Grisham's 'The Rainmaker'" (1997), and Bille August, whose adaptation of "Les Miserables" (1998) appropriately featured the young actress as Cosette. Danes went on to play an appealingly strong-willed, unmarried and pregnant Polish-American alongside Gabriel Byrne and Lena Olin in the charming family saga "Polish Wedding" later that year. To look upon the face of Claire Danes is to discover an exquisitely expressive canvas for all the emotional colorings of life. This remarkably self-possessed young performer brought startling authenticity as well as intelligence and complexity to her starring role in the landmark high school/family drama "My So-Called Life" (ABC, 1994-95). Danes' often heartrending portrayal of a fifteen-year-old coping with the rigors of adolescence contributed to the cult series' avalanche of kudos and won a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy nod for its rising star. The low-rated, short-lived program counted Steven Spielberg and Winona Ryder among its followers. A native New Yorker, Danes was encouraged to pursue her interest in acting by artistic parents and began studying modern dance at age six. By age nine, she was taking weekend acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, later starting her performing career on the off-off-Broadway stage with supporting roles in "Happiness", "Punk Ballet" and "Kids on Stage," even choreographing a solo dance piece for the latter. At age 11, Danes made her film acting debut portraying a molested child in "Dreams of Love" (released 1992), a student short from director Jeffrey Mueller and executive producer Milos Forman. The precocious actress arrived on the small screen in a memorable 1992 guest shot on the NBC crime drama series "Law & Order", playing a volatile teen who, with her mother, was involved with a sleazy photographer. She also auditioned for "My So-Called Life" in 1992, at age 13, and filmed the pilot in early 1993. (It did not air until August 1994.) Danes won strong notices for her feature debut as the doomed Beth in a well-received remake of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel "Little Women" (1994), with Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder. (The latter had lobbied for Danes to get the role.) Indeed, Spielberg hailed her as "one of the most exciting actresses to debut in ten years" and offered her a role in his Holocaust drama "Schindler's List" (1993) which Danes declined for a variety of reasons. When "My So-Called Life" ended prematurely, though, the young thespian was quickly deluged with feature offers. Danes next popped up in a flashback sequence playing a younger version of Anne Bancroft's character in the Ryder vehicle "How to Make an American Quilt" and followed up with a small role as the wise-beyond-her-years daughter of Holly Hunter (and granddaughter of Bancroft!) in Jodie Foster's "Home for the Holidays" (both 1995). Reportedly, Foster's endorsement helped Danes win the plum role of Juliet opposite Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo in "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" (1996), a highly stylized and purposefully anachronistic retelling of the classic story. By the time of that highly touted release, she had two other features in the can. Danes played leads in "To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday" (1996) as the daughter helping her father (Peter Gallagher) cope with the death of her mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) and "I Love You, I Love You Not" (1997), as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor (Jeanne Moreau). Positive advance word about the professional deportment of the ascendant star spurred more offers for work with such respected filmmakers as Oliver Stone, who cast her as a white trash princess in the odd "U-Turn" (1997), Francis Ford Coppola, who hired her to play an abused wife who falls for young lawyer Matt Damon in "John Grisham's 'The Rainmaker'" (1997), and Bille August, whose adaptation of "Les Miserables" (1998) appropriately featured the young actress as Cosette. Danes went on to play an appealingly strong-willed, unmarried and pregnant Polish-American alongside Gabriel Byrne and Lena Olin in the charming family saga "Polish Wedding" later that year. In 1999, Danes began taking on vastly different roles than what audiences had come to expect, starting with a turn as a drug offender turned crime fighter in Scott Silver's uninspired feature update of the hit 1960s TV series "The Mod Squad.” While Danes performed well in the action genre, the film was critically panned, and saw little box office business. Similarly, her impressive turn in "Brokedown Palace" went largely unseen. Not unlike a feminized, updated "Midnight Express", the harrowing film starred Danes as the more daring and gregarious of two recent high school graduates duped into importing drugs into Thailand. Alongside Kate Beckinsale, the actress proved her mettle with the edgy role, but the film would probably be best remembered for Danes' candidly negative comments about the Manila filming conditions, which won her few fans in the Philippines. She next contributed her vocal talents to the English dubbing of Hayao Miyazaki's acclaimed Japanese anime "Princess Mononoke". Perhaps something was lost in the translation, but her lackluster performance in this capacity proved the actress' talents lie before the camera, where her proven skills and appeal would ensure her a long and illustrious career. In 2002, Danes starred opposite Susan Sarandon and Kieran Culkin in Igby Goes Down. She later co-starred as Meryl Streep's daughter in the Oscar-nominated, The Hours, with Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Ed Harris. In 2002, she co-starred in the indie comedy feature "Igby Goes Down," playing a prep school girl caught between two drastically different brothers; and portrayed Meryl Streep's daughter Julia in "The Hours," before doing a career about-face in 2003 by starring opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in the action-packed sequel "Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines," playing Kate Brewster, the love interest for humanity's emerging messiah in its war against the machines, John Conner (Nick Stahl). After filming "Stage Beauty" (2004), in which she played a 17th Century stage dresser who becomes an actress after England's king overrules the long tradition of men playing female roles in plays and becomes entangled with a displaced actor (Billy Cruddup) who specialized in portraying women, Danes got her first taste of tabloid celebrity when Cruddup left his several-months-pregnant girlfriend, actress Mary-Louise Parker, for a romance with her in 2003. The following year, she was cast in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, followed by Stage Beauty in 2004. She earned critical acclaim in 2005 when she starred in Steve Martin's Shopgirl alongside Martin and Jason Schwartzman, and in The Family Stone opposite Sarah Jessica Parker and Diane Keaton. In 2007, Danes appeared in the fantasy epic Stardust, which she described as a "classic model of romantic comedy", opposite Charlie Cox, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, and Sienna Miller, and will appear in The Flock, opposite Richard Gere. Danes appeared in Off-Broadway plays including Happiness, Punk Ballet, and Kids On Stage, in which she choreographed her own solo dance. She also wrote the introduction to Neil Gaiman's Death: The Time of Your Life. Danes auditioned for the role of Lois Lane in Superman Returns before the role went to Kate Bosworth. In March 2007, Danes appeared with Patrick Wilson in a television commercial for Gap in which the pair dances to the song "Anything You Can Do" from the musical Annie Get Your Gun. Danes has recently appeared onstage at Manhattan's PS122, an avant-garde performance space, in a series of dance pieces by choreographer Tamar Rogoff. Danes made her stage debut at PS122 as a child. On October 19, 2007, Danes made her Broadway debut in the revival of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, starring as Eliza Doolittle. Danes had her first onscreen kiss in an episode of My So-Called Life before she had one in real life. After meeting at her birthday party, she and Australian singer Ben Lee dated for almost six years, their relationship ending in 2003. Beginning in 2004, she dated her Stage Beauty and Princess Mononoke co-star Billy Crudup, which generated negative publicity due to rumors that their relationship caused the end of Crudup's relationship to then-pregnant Mary-Louise Parker. Both denied that they were involved prior to the end of Crudup's relationship with Parker. Danes' relationship with Crudup ended in December 2006, amid rumors of an affair by Danes with Hugh Dancy, her co-star in Evening. Danes confirmed on the June 27, 2007 episode of Late Show with David Letterman that she is dating Dancy. Additionally, she has dated Andrew Dorff, actor Stephen Dorff's younger brother, and Matt Damon. |
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