Claire Danes Biography

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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