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CLAIRE DANES BIOGRAPHY |
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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. 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 + 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) and "I
Love You, I Love You Not" (1997). Respected filmmakers as Oliver
Stone, cast her as a white trash princess in the odd "U-Turn"
(1997), Francis Ford Coppola, 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. 1999 saw her take on a vastly different role than
audiences had come to expect, with a starring turn as a drug
offender turned crime fighter in Scott Silver's uninspired
feature update of the hit 1960s TV series "The Mod Squad". Danes
performed well in the action genre. 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.
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,
she co-starred in the 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."
Danes put her acting career on hold to enter Yale as a freshman
in 1998, but as her academic career comes to a close, she has
returned to the silver screen with a vengeance. In 2003, Danes
appeared in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the latest
edition of the popular Terminator series. The actress is also
set to star in the period drama Compleat Female Stage Beauty
with Rupert Everett and Billy Crudup. In 2004, Danes will join
Steve Martin in the adaptations of Martin's bestselling fiction
novella, Shopgirl. Danes has been romantically linked with the
likes of musicians Andrew Dorff and Australian rocker Ben Lee
and actors such as Matt Damon and more recently Billy Crudup. |
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