There were times on the set of Homeland, says David Harewood, when he was worried about Claire Danes driving herself home, so drained was she from being Carrie Mathison for the day. Particularly during the scenes where her CIA agent character was experiencing one of her bipolar manic episodes, “she was exhausted most of the time,” says Harewood, who played her boss David Estes in the first two seasons of the US drama.
Its fourth season has just started and Sergeant Brody has gone (questions over the loyalties of the US marine kidnapped by al-Qaida underpinned the previous series, which many critics felt had started to flag). So it’s up to Danes to carry the show, which comes freighted with expectation. Its many millions of fans include Barack Obama who confessed to watching it in the Oval Office while pretending to work.
Judging by the first episode, in which Mathison, now based in Kabul having left her baby back at home, appears much harder-edged than in previous seasons, it looks as if she will succeed. Critics have widely agreed that the show has managed to recapture its form.
Harewood remembers early scenes with Danes. “I thought she was extraordinary. I remember one occasion when you could see how her intensity ramped up from the wide shot, and when it got to the close-up it was incredible. I actually dried, I forgot my lines, I was staring at her, watching it happen in front of me. She has an intensity and complete immersion in the character and I’ve never really encountered that before at that level.”
The part, which has won Danes two Golden Globes and two Emmys, may finally have overtaken her first career-defining role, as angsty high-school student Angela Chase in the 1990s teen drama My So-Called Life – a show that, although cancelled after its first series, will forever be in the hearts of a generation of women around Danes’s age.
Danes was born in New York to liberal, artistic parents. Her father was a photographer, and her mother was an artist who ran a day care service for toddlers from their loft apartment. “A huge emphasis was placed on art and creativity,” Danes told the New Yorker last year.
When she was five or six, she saw Madonna on television. “I understood that performing could be one’s vocation, and I thought, yeah!” she said in another interview.
Danes had dancing lessons, then acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute. When she was 13, she auditioned for My So-Called Life (she had already appeared in an episode of Law & Order). “From the minute she walked in the room, Claire was chilling, astounding, and silent,” Linda Lowy, the show’s casting director, told the New Yorker. “There was so much power coming out of her without her doing much.”
The family moved to California so Danes could work. She has said she was relieved to leave school (she had been bullied), but she was also thrown into an adult working life, with her schoolwork taught by tutors in her trailer.
Interviewed at the time, she was aware of the downside. “Working gives you this new perspective,” she said. “You don’t take everything too seriously and you realise that if you don’t do too well on a history test it’s not the end of the world. But it also gives you this distance from other kids, which is sad, because it’s like a point of no return. Now I feel more different than I already did.”
Her role as Angela Chase won her a Golden Globe and despite the series being cancelled, Danes wasn’t short of work. Baz Lurhman, who cast her in Romeo + Juliet, declared her “the Meryl Streep of her generation”.
Perhaps unusually for a child actor, people speak about Danes’s humility. The British theatre director David Grindley cast her for his 2007 Broadway production of Pygmalion, even though she hadn’t really done any professional stage acting. “The great thing was she realised she was new to this form and she felt very comfortable with the people she was with – two well known and well regarded New York theatre actors, Jefferson Mays and Boyd Gaines. She was willing to learn from them.”
It was striking, he says, “how humble she was and she took as much as she could from everybody who was more experienced than her. She was very open. She didn’t have any airs and graces.”
For the 2007 film Evening, Danes played a young cabaret singer, and was required to sing – again, something she hadn’t really done. “It was difficult for her,” remembers its director Lajos Koltai. “We got a piano for her apartment and she had a lot of lessons. She was unsure whether she could make it or not. Finally we rented a studio in New York, she went to the booth and then she called me in and said ‘tell me how I have to sing’. It was an important question – she wants to know everything, all the details.”
It was on that film that Danes met her husband, British actor Hugh Dancy (they now have a son). “I always feel like I was a little bit of a match-maker,” says Koltai.
Asked in an interview for British Vogue last year whether, given her early start, she felt she had grown up too fast, Danes said: “I think I did, a little bit. That’s why I went to college. I needed to be socialised. I needed to learn how to hang the fuck out.” At 20, she went to Yale where for two years she experienced a more normal life, though she left without completing her degree to move back into acting. “I started really pining for work again,” she said.
There were parts, but mostly forgettable ones – supporting roles in films such as the Hours, and a foray into blockbusters in Terminator 3. It seemed an unsatisfying time and Danes’s career looked as if it was stalling; she became better known, in the tabloids at least, for her personal life.
One project – a performance dance piece created with the choreographer Tamar Rogoff, based on Andrew Wyeth’s painting depicting Anna Christina Olson, who was paralysed by polio – seemed like her own attempt to stretch herself, where the film industry was failing. During the 2005 piece, a video was played of Danes, barely clothed and crawling along East 10th Street and up the steps of the venue.
The British director Mick Jackson remembers watching her work with Rogoff later. “Claire was doing warm-up exercises, balletic in a way, running around the room and doing leaps. I thought ‘how can someone like that play the very earthy Temple Grandin?’” He had persuaded Danes to take the part in his 2010 HBO film about Grandin, the brilliant animal science academic who is autistic, though if he doubted his choice, it was only temporary.
He says Danes invited Grandin to her apartment, and videoed their conversations. “That was the start of her preparation. Every day on the set, she had the ear buds in – she was watching the video, how Temple moved, and listened to the voice. She got so totally into the part of Temple that it was scary.”
There were almost no rehearsals – both Jackson and Danes liked it that way – but he admits to being nervous as time got closer to filming and he still hadn’t a clue how Danes would play the character.
“She didn’t want to show anybody until she was ready to astonish them,” he says. “We shot the first scene of the movie on the first day, where she says ‘My name is Temple Grandin. I’m not like other people’. It was exactly like Temple’s voice, and she walked with Temple’s rolling gait. The hair shot up on everybody’s neck, as it did for many moments in the movie.
“She delighted me so much, with the unexpectedness and rightness of what she did. She was just totally up for everything – walking ankle-deep in cow manure, or rolling in it at one point. Or lying on her back among a herd of cattle. It’s such a great mixture of sensitivity to the part you’re playing and willing to go any physical lengths to do it.”
Despite the reception – playing Grandin won Danes an Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award – she told American Vogue last year the period afterwards was “confusing. I got a lot of plaudits, and it didn’t translate into more work. I was really, really struggling during that time … Two years of not working was brutal.” In another interview, she said no other roles she was being offered came close to Grandin: “It wasn’t until I came across Carrie that I got really excited again.”
The creators of Homeland, Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, had seen Temple Grandin and wrote their lead character with Danes in mind. It is hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Her Carrie is both frighteningly erratic and highly capable, ruthless and vulnerable.
Danes’s unusual, malleable face is conventionally beautiful in one scene and contorted in another (the “Claire Danes Cry Face” became an internet meme and was hilariously parodied by Anne Hathaway in a Saturday Night Live sketch).
“I love to work with actresses who can look so plain that you wouldn’t notice them in a crowd, and then when the emotion comes across their face they look radiant,” says Jackson. “Claire is like that. She isn’t afraid to look silly and unattractive, but then there are moments that just break your heart.”