Five Things You Don't Know About Claire Danes
She got her break in the '90s TV series My So-Called Life and then appeared in a diverse slate of movies until returning to series TV last year in Showtime's critically acclaimed Homeland -- in which she plays a CIA agent who suffers from bipolar disorder. Here are five things you may not know about Claire Danes.
1. Said she knew as a child that she wanted to be a performer when she saw Madonna on TV. "I understood that performing could be one's vocation and I thought, yeah!" Danes once told the New York Times.
2. Completed two years at Yale University, her father's alma mater, studying psychology. Her letter of recommendation was written by director Oliver Stone, her director on the 1997 film U Turn.
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3. Auditioned for the role of Lisa in 1999's Girl, Interrupted, the part ended up going to Angelina Jolie.
4. Responding to critical remarks made in magazine articles by Danes about his country, the president of the Philippines declared in 2009 that "she should not be allowed to set foot here." Among her comments about the Philippine capital Manila -- where she filmed some scenes for the 1999 movie Brokedown Palace -- were that it was a "ghastly and weird city" that "smelled of cockroaches, with rats all over, and no sewerage system."
5. Both she and her husband, Hugh Dancy, have played characters living with forms of autism -- Danes in HBO's Temple Grandin (2010) and Dancy in the film Adam (2009).
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