At 16, Claire Danes was hailed the Meryl Streep of her generation
Baz Luhrmann gave Claire Danes that label after casting her as Juliet in 1996, and she reportedly turned down the female lead in Titanic the same year. Then, having made 13 films in five years, she paused everything to study psychology at Yale before returning to win three Emmys.
Danes was born in Manhattan on April 12, 1979, to a sculptor and printmaker mother and a photographer father who also ran a building firm. She grew up in an artists' loft on Crosby Street in SoHo, where her mother ran a toddler day care. Dance classes began at six, acting classes at ten, and an audition with Miloš Forman at eleven led to student films. She has been in therapy since age six and calls it a luxury that brings insight.
Her first big break was Angela Chase in My So-Called Life. The pilot was shot in March 1993, almost eighteen months before it aired, and ABC cancelled the series after 19 episodes. Yet Danes won a Golden Globe for it, and the show built a devoted cult audience. Her family moved to Santa Monica for the job, arriving two days after the Northridge earthquake.
Films came quickly: Beth in Little Women, Juliet opposite Luhrmann's camera, an abused wife in Coppola's The Rainmaker, Cosette in Les Misérables, and the English voice for Princess Mononoke. Comments she made about Manila after filming Brokedown Palace there led Philippine officials to declare her persona non grata in 1998 and bar her films, and her apology did not reverse it. After two years at Yale she returned in 2002, playing Meryl Streep's daughter in The Hours.
Television gave her the most acclaim. As the autistic animal scientist in HBO's Temple Grandin in 2010 she won an Emmy, and Grandin herself praised the portrayal. From 2011 to 2020 she played Carrie Mathison, a CIA officer with bipolar disorder, in Homeland, taking consecutive Emmys and Golden Globes. She also won a 2013 Audie Award for narrating The Handmaid's Tale and made her Broadway debut as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion.
Source: Claire Danes
