Temple Grandin is a 2010 biopic directed by Mick Jackson and starring Claire Danes as Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who revolutionized practices for the humane handling of livestock on cattle ranches and slaughterhouses.

Plot[link]

The film starts off with Temple visiting her aunt for the summer and working on her ranch. She becomes interested in a cattle crush, a device that hugs the cows to "gentle them". One day, while having a panic attack, Temple places herself in the device and it helps to calm her down.

When Temple first attended college, she was very nervous when she moved into her college dorm. Temple had another panic attack in her room, but her mother gave her space by closing the door. Immediately after, her mother had a flashback to when Temple was little and had relentless tantrums. Before that, Temple was diagnosed with classic autism, a severe case of autism in which she seemed aloof, lacked eye contact, had no language, and avoided human affection and touch.

At this time, science classified autism as a form of schizophrenia, blaming mothers as the cause for the disorder and claiming that they were cold and aloof toward their autistic child, naming them "refrigerator mothers". The diagnostician suggested placing Temple in an institution. Temple's mother refused to listen to the diagnostician and helped Temple adapt to the everyday world. Her mother hired a speech therapist, who worked one-on-one with Temple and enabled her to acquire language.

During Temple's college years, she conceptualized the squeeze machine, which was designed for herself because she had a sensory integration dysfunction and disliked physical affection by people. The machine hugs both sides of her to calm her down, as she controls the pressure, and it makes her relaxed whenever she becomes tense.

Even though the machine worked, the school forced Temple to remove it, claiming that it was some kind of sexual device. Later after spring break ended, Temple and her aunt came back to school to persuade the school to let her use the device. Temple later proved through rigorous scientific study that the machine was only a calming device and, as a result, she was allowed to keep it. She uses this machine for self-medicating reasons ever since.

Later on, the movie flashes back to when Temple was just being admitted to Hampshire Country School. She was expelled from her previous high school because a child taunted her and she hit him with a book. There, she meets a supportive teacher, Dr. Carlock, who encourages her to go further into science as a career and to eventually attend college.

Temple does indeed graduate from college and becomes a worker at a ranch. She rebuilds a new dip, and alters a slaughterhouse for cows so that it is much more humane. The film concludes with an autism fair convention, which Temple and her mother attend.

Temple speaks out from the crowd and tells the audience how she overcame her difficulties and was able to achieve academically, as well as how her mother helped her deal with the everyday world. The people become so fascinated that they request Temple to speak in front of the auditorium.

Cast and characters[link]

• Claire Danes as Temple Grandin
• Catherine O'Hara as Aunt Ann, Temple's aunt and sister of Eustacia. As a teenager, Temple often visited her Arizona cattle ranch during the summer.
• Julia Ormond as Eustacia Grandin, Temple's mother. When Temple was younger, Eustacia was in denial over the doctor's diagnosis of Temple's autism. Eustacia was determined to have her daughter receive an education and lead a normal life despite the diagnosis.
• David Strathairn as Dr. Carlock, Temple's boarding school science teacher and mentor. Carlock was aware of Temple's visual skills and was supportive in furthering her education.

Development[link]

The idea for a biopic of Grandin originated with its executive producer Emily Gerson Saines, a successful talent agent and a co-founder of the nonprofit Autism Coalition for Research and Education (now part of Autism Speaks). In the mid-1990s, Gerson Saines was a vice-president at the William Morris Agency when her 2-year-old son was diagnosed with autism. She learned about Grandin soon afterward, when her mother told her about seeing Grandin's book Thinking in Pictures in a bookstore and, around the same time, her grandmother independently sent her an article about Grandin by Oliver Sacks.^[1][2]

Reading about Grandin renewed Gerson Saines' "energy, motivation and spirit" in coping with her son's condition. "Temple's story brought me hope and (her mother)'s story gave me direction and purpose," Gerson Saines said in a later interview. "Parents of a child with autism everywhere need to hear it, functionally and spiritually. I knew this story had to be told and given my access as a talent representative in the entertainment industry, I felt it was my responsibility to make that happen." Through Grandin's agent, Gerson Saines asked to meet Grandin for lunch. "She came in wearing her cowgirl shirt—-in her very Temple way, in her very Temple walk. I realized that there were people staring at her, and in a different lifetime I might have been one of them, but all I could think of was, 'I can't believe how lucky I am to be here. This woman's my hero.'"^[1][2]

Grandin was familiar with Gerson Saines' work with the Autism Coalition and granted her permission to make the film, but the endeavor—first launched in the late 1990s—would take more than ten years to come to fruition.^[1][3] Variety reported in 2002 that David O. Russell was attached to direct the film from a screenplay by Merritt Johnson (adapting from Grandin's memoirs Emergence and Thinking in Pictures).^[4] Russell later dropped out and was replaced by Moises Kaufman, who also left the project. By 2008, director Mick Jackson had taken the helm and Claire Danes was in negotiations to star as Grandin. Johnson's script had been replaced by one from Christopher Monger (both Johnson and Monger are credited as writers of the finished film).^[1][5]

One element Gerson Saines was sure about from the beginning was that she wanted to work with HBO, in part because of her longstanding relationship with the network through her work as an agent. "But I also knew that by going that route, more people will see it," she said. "When you're trying to make a movie like this," it's very rare that it reaches a wide audience." HBO was equally intrigued by the story, and Gerson Saines credits past and present HBO executives with keeping the project alive until it could be properly realized. "I made a commitment to Temple that I was going to make it and make it right...I never pushed to get it made until now, because now we got it right."^[1][5]

Jackson knew early on that Danes was his first choice to portray Grandin, believing that Danes' seriousness and dedication would help her to capture Grandin's mercurial mental and emotional shifts without veering the film into disease-of-the-week melodrama. Danes herself was coming off a string of more lightweight roles (whose "primary job and experience [was] to become gaga over a man," she described) and eager to take on a more demanding part. Although she was only vaguely aware of Grandin at the time, Danes dove into research, including watching documentaries about Grandin and studying Grandin's books and recordings. "It was really daunting, because she's alive and has a great eye for detail," Danes said. The two women spent about six hours together in Danes' apartment, ending with a hug from Grandin ("For her, that's not easy," Danes observed), which Danes was glad to take as validation that Grandin approved of her for the role.^[6]

Production[link]

Temple Grandin began shooting in October 2008 at Austin Studios in Austin, Texas.^[3][7] The film was noted for filming in Texas at a time when TV and film production had grown scarce in the state, and legislators were seeking to expand financial incentives to draw more film crews. Grandin producer Scott Ferguson said that Arizona, New Mexico and Canada had all been considered before producers had chosen Texas, in part because different areas of the state could be used to represent the rural West and New England. Ferguson also credited the abundance of trained film crews in the Austin and Dallas regions as a significant benefit to shooting in the area.^[8]

Gerson Saines brought Grandin to observe the last day of shooting, which was a scene involving a cattle dip tank that Grandin had designed.^[1][6] Although Grandin said that she tried to stay away from Danes to avoid impinging on her performance, she was quite concerned about the proper construction of the tank and about the breed of cattle being used in the scene. "I thought, we can't have a silly thing like that City Slickers movie, where they had Holstein cattle out there," Grandin said. "If you know anything about cattle, you'd know that was stupid." She said watching Danes on the monitors was "like going back in a weird time machine to the '60s."^[6]

Release[link]

Promotion[link]

The film was previewed on January 27 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, in a screening attended by Grandin.^[9] A trailer was previewed for critics during their winter press tour on January 14; critics responded positively to "the film's bright palette and inventive direction."^[10]

HBO and bookstore chain Barnes & Noble partnered to promote both the film and Grandin's books, displaying information about autism and the film in all Barnes & Noble stores and creating a free downloadable coloring book about Grandin, using illustrations by autistic artists. Grandin appeared for a special book signing, discussion and preview of the film at a Manhattan Barnes & Noble on January 25.^[11]

Reception[link]

Upon its February 6, 2010 debut, Temple Grandin received a positive response from critics, including a Metacritic score of 84/100 (averaged from 19 critical reviews).^[12] Entertainment Weekly's Jennifer Armstrong wrote, "The beauty of [the film] is that it makes the title character's autism — and the unique insight it gave her into livestock psychology — relatable to anyone with a heart, and fascinating to anyone with a brain. The fact that it does so with such a singular story only makes the movie that much greater."^[13] Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times called it "a made for-television biopic that avoids the mawkish clichés of the genre without draining the narrative of color and feeling. Ms. Danes is completely at ease in her subject's lumbering gait and unmodulated voice. She makes Temple’s anxiety as immediate and contagious as her rarer bursts of merriment... And as the character ages and learns more social graces, Ms. Danes seamlessly captures Temple's progress."^[14]

Robert Bianco of USA Today wrote that unlike many other HBO productions, "Temple is an incredibly joyous and often humorous film." While praising the direction and the strong supporting cast of Catherine O'Hara, David Strathairn, and Julia Ormond, Bianco declared that "as good as everything is around them, Temple Grandin belongs to two women: the real Temple, who appears to be a spectacular human being, and Danes, who is clearly a spectacular actor."^[15] The AV Club's Noel Murray, himself the father of an autistic son, wrote that "some of the movie's aesthetic choices border on the cliché. The pulsing minimalism of Alex Wurman's score has become as much a shorthand for 'intellectual mystery' as Arabic wailing has for 'Danger! Terrorists!,' and Temple Grandin's illustrative animated sequences run a little too close to A Beautiful Mind for my taste." However, Murray gave the film an A-, in part for Danes' success in portraying Grandin as a full-fledged personality instead of "a checklist of symptoms gleaned from a medical journal."^[16]

NPR's David Bianculli unambiguously named the film "the best tele-movie of the past several years... I can't praise this movie highly enough. It's not maudlin or sentimental, but it is excitingly inspirational. It scores big emotional points with very small touches, the sound of a heartbeat, a tentative touch, a victorious smile. The acting, writing, directing, production values, every sight and every sound in HBO's Temple Grandin is perfect."^[17]

Accolades[link]

Primetime Emmy Awards[link]

Creative Arts Emmy Awards[link]

Golden Globe Awards[link]

Screen Actors Guild Awards[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Temple Grandin at the Internet Movie Database

This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. You can assist by editing it. (May 2012)

Temple Grandin
Born	(1947-08-29) August 29, 1947 (age 64) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Fields	Animal science
Institutions	Colorado State University
Alma mater	Franklin Pierce University Arizona State University University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Known for	Work in the livestock industry

Temple Grandin (born August 29, 1947) is an American doctor of animal science and professor at Colorado State University, bestselling author, and consultant to the livestock industry on animal behavior. As a person with high-functioning autism, Grandin is also noted for her work in autism advocacy and is the inventor of the squeeze machine designed to calm hypersensitive people.

The subject of an award-winning biographical film, Temple Grandin, in 2010 she was listed in the Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world in the "Heroes" category.^[1]

Early life and education[link]

Grandin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Richard Grandin and Eustacia Cutler, and diagnosed with autism at age 2 in 1950. Diagnosed and labeled with brain damage, at that early age she was placed in a structured nursery school with what she considers to have been good teachers. Grandin's mother spoke to a doctor who suggested speech therapy, and she hired a nanny who spent hours playing turn-based games with Grandin and her sister.^{[citation needed]}

At age four, Grandin began talking. She considers herself lucky to have had supportive mentors from primary school onwards. However, Grandin has said that middle and high school were the worst parts of her life. She was the "nerdy kid" whom everyone teased. At times, while she walked down the street, people would taunt her by saying "tape recorder," because she would repeat things over and over again. Grandin states that, "I could laugh about it now, but back then it really hurt."^{[citation needed]}

After graduating from Hampshire Country School, a boarding school for gifted children in Rindge, New Hampshire, in 1966, Grandin went on to earn her bachelor's degree in psychology from Franklin Pierce College in 1970, her master's degree in animal science from Arizona State University in 1975, and her doctoral degree in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.

Grandin received an honorary doctorate degree from the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada at the 2012 Winter Convocation, where she was the keynote speaker.

Career celebrity, advocacy[link]

Grandin is a philosophical leader of both the animal welfare and autism advocacy movements.^[2] Both movements commonly cite her work regarding animal welfare, neurology, and philosophy. She knows the anxiety of feeling threatened by everything in her surroundings, and of being dismissed and feared, which motivates her work in humane livestock handling processes. Her business website promotes improvement of standards in slaughter plants and livestock farms. In 2004 she won a "Proggy" award, in the "visionary" category, from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.^[3]

One of her notable essays about animal welfare is “Animals are not Things”,^[4] in which she posits that animals are technically property in our society, but the law ultimately gives them ethical protections or rights. She compares the properties and rights of owning cows versus owning screwdrivers, enumerating how both can be utilized to serve human purposes in many ways but, when it comes to inflicting pain, there is a vital distinction between such 'properties': a person can legally smash or grind up a screwdriver but cannot legally torture an animal.

Grandin became well known after being described by Oliver Sacks in the title narrative of his book An Anthropologist on Mars (1995); the title is derived from Grandin's description of how she feels around neurotypical people. She first spoke in public about autism in the mid-1980s at the request of Ruth C. Sullivan, one of the founders of the Autism Society of America. Sullivan writes:

I first met Temple in the mid-1980s ...[at the] annual [ASA] conference.... Standing on the periphery of the group was a tall young woman who was obviously interested in the discussions. She seemed shy and pleasant, but mostly she just listened.... I learned her name was Temple Grandin... It wasn't until later in the week that I realized she was someone with autism....I approached her and asked if she'd be willing to speak at the next year's [ASA] conference. She agreed...The next year... Temple first addressed an [ASA] audience.... people were standing at least three deep....The audience couldn't get enough of her. Here, for the first time, was someone who could tell us from her own experience what it was like to be extremely sound sensitive ("like being tied to the rail and the train's coming")... She was asked many questions: "Why does my son do so much spinning?" "Why does he hold his hands to his ears? "Why doesn't he look at me?" She spoke from her own experience, and her insight was impressive. There were tears in more than one set of eyes that day.... Temple quickly became a much sought-after speaker in the autism community.^[5]

Based on personal experience, Grandin advocates early intervention to address autism, and supportive teachers who can direct fixations of the child with autism in fruitful directions. She has described her hypersensitivity to noise and other sensory stimuli. She claims she is a primarily visual thinker^[6] and has said that words are her second language. Temple attributes her success as a humane livestock facility designer to her ability to recall detail, which is a characteristic of her visual memory. Grandin compares her memory to full-length movies in her head that can be replayed at will, allowing her to notice small details. She is also able to view her memories using slightly different contexts by changing the positions of the lighting and shadows. Her insight into the minds of cattle has taught her to value the changes in details to which animals are particularly sensitive, and to use her visualization skills to design thoughtful and humane animal-handling equipment. She was named a fellow of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers in 2009.^[7]

As a partial proponent of neurodiversity, Grandin has expressed that she would not support a cure of the entirety of the autistic spectrum.^[8]

Personal life[link]

Temple Grandin at TED 2010

On May 16, 2010, Grandin also received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Duke University.^[9]

Grandin says, “the part of other people that has emotional relationships is not part of me” and she has neither married nor had children. Beyond her work in animal science and welfare and autism rights, her interests include horse riding, science fiction, movies, and biochemistry. She describes socializing with others as “boring” and has no interest in reading or watching entertainment about emotional issues or relationships.

She has noted in her autobiographical works that autism affects every aspect of her life. She has to wear comfortable clothes to counteract her sensory integration dysfunction and has structured her lifestyle to avoid sensory overload. She regularly takes anti-depressants, but no longer uses a squeeze-box (hug machine) that she invented at the age of 18 as a form of stress relief therapy, stating in February 2010 that: “It broke two years ago, and I never got around to fixing it. I'm into hugging people now.” ^[10]

In popular culture[link]

Grandin has been featured on major media programs, such as Lisa Davis's It's Your Health, ABC's Primetime Live, the Today Show, and Larry King Live, the NPR show, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and written up in Time magazine, People magazine, Discover magazine, Forbes and The New York Times.^[11][12]In 2012, Grandin was interviewed on Thriving Canine Radio to discuss "A Different Perspective on Animal Behavior."

She was the subject of the Horizon documentary “The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow”, first broadcast by the BBC on June 8, 2006, and Nick News in the spring of 2006.^[13] She has also been a subject in the series First Person by Errol Morris.

Grandin is the focus of a semi-biographical HBO film, titled Temple Grandin,^[14][15] starring Claire Danes as Grandin.^[16] The movie was released in 2010, was nominated for 15 Emmys, and received five awards, including Outstanding Made for Television Movie and Best Actress in a Drama.^[17] Grandin was on stage as the award was accepted, and spoke briefly to the audience. Coincidentally, the 2010 Emmy Awards happened on Grandin's birthday. At the 2011 Golden Globes, Claire Danes won a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television.

Grandin was featured in Beautiful Minds: A Voyage Into the Brain, a documentary produced in 2006 by colourFIELD tell-a-vision, a German company. She appeared in a 2011 documentary on Sci Channel, "Ingenious Minds".^{[citation needed]} She was named one of 2010's 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.^[1]

Major publications[link]

• Emergence: Labeled Autistic (with Margaret Scariano, 1986, updated 1991), ISBN 0-446-67182-7
• The Learning Style of People with Autism: An Autobiography (1995). In Teaching Children with Autism : Strategies to Enhance Communication and Socializaion, Kathleen Ann Quill, ISBN 0-8273-6269-2
• Thinking in Pictures: Other Reports from My Life with Autism (1996) ISBN 0-679-77289-8
• Developing Talents: Careers for Individuals with Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism (2004). ISBN 1-931282-56-0
• Animals in Translation : Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (with Catherine Johnson, 2005), ISBN 0-7432-4769-8
• The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspectives of Autism (with Sean Barron, 2005), ISBN 1-932565-06-X
• The Way I See It: A Personal Look At Autism And Aspergers (2009)
• Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best life for Animals (with Catherine Johnson, 2009) ISBN 978-0-15-101489-7

See also[link]

• Controversies in autism
• Wendy Jacob
• Net Koene researching Temple Grandin's ideas regarding linguistics
• Sociological and cultural aspects of autism
• Temple Grandin (film)

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• In Depth with Temple Grandin, interview from November 1, 2009

Claire Danes
Danes at the 2012 Time 100
Born	Claire Catherine Danes (1979-04-12) April 12, 1979 (age 33) Manhattan, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1992–present
Spouse	Hugh Dancy (2009–present)

Claire Catherine Danes (born April 12, 1979) is an American television, stage and film actress. She has appeared in roles as diverse as Angela Chase in My So-Called Life, as Juliet in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, as Kate Brewster in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, as Yvaine in Stardust and as Temple Grandin in the HBO TV film Temple Grandin. She portrays Carrie Mathison in the Showtime series Homeland.

Early life[link]

Danes was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York.^[1] Her mother, Carla (née Hall), is a day-care provider, painter, and textile designer who later served as her daughter's manager, and her father, Christopher Danes (b. May 6, 1944 in Austin, Texas),^[2][3] is a computer consultant and former architectural photographer. Danes has described her background as being "as WASPy as you can get";^[4] her paternal grandfather, Gibson Andrew Danes (1910–1992 in Litchfield, Connecticut), was the dean of the art and architecture school at Yale University.^[5][6] She has an older brother, Asa (b. 1973).

Danes attended the Dalton School in New York City, the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies, the Professional Performing Arts School,^[7] and the Lycée Français de Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California. In 1998, Danes went to Yale University, her father's alma mater. Director Oliver Stone wrote her letter of recommendation to Yale.^[7] After studying for two years as a psychology major, she dropped out of Yale to focus on her film career.

Television[link]

Danes got her start as a guest star on Law & Order in an episode called "Skin Deep". She also appeared in an episode of HBO's Lifestories: Families in Crisis entitled "The Coming out of Heidi Leiter". In March 1993, a pilot episode was shot, when Claire was 13 years old. It would be almost another year and a half before broadcast. Danes starred as the 15-year-old Angela Chase in the television drama series My So-Called Life,^[8] for which she won a Golden Globe Award and received an Emmy^[9] nomination. The show was canceled after only 19 episodes. However, the show has developed a large cult following in the years since it was canceled.^{[citation needed]}

In 2010, Danes starred in the HBO production of Temple Grandin, a biopic about the eponymous autistic woman. She won the 2010 Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie, the 2011 Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film and the 2011 Screen Actors Guild Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries award. The film was well received and Grandin herself praised Danes' performance.^[10]

In 2011 Danes starred in a new Showtime series called Homeland in which she plays an agent of the CIA who, unbeknownst to her employer, is a person with bipolar disorder. Her character believes a United States Marine Corps war hero is planning a terrorist attack while being tapped for high profile government service. The series costars Mandy Patinkin and Damian Lewis.^[11] She won the 2012 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Series for her performance.^[12]

Film[link]

Following the cancellation of My So Called Life, Danes made the transition into film. She played Elizabeth "Beth" March in the 1994 film adaptation of Little Women alongside Winona Ryder, Kirsten Dunst, Samantha Mathis, Trini Alvarado, Christian Bale, Susan Sarandon, and Gabriel Byrne. She also appeared as Holly Hunter's daughter in Home for the Holidays, which was directed by Jodie Foster. Danes appeared opposite French actress Jeanne Moreau, and Jude Law in 1995's I Love You, I Love You Not. She then played the role of Rachel in To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday.

Danes first leading role on the big screen came in 1996. She portrayed Juliet Capulet in Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo Montague. Later that year, it was reported that she turned down the female lead role in Titanic.^[13][14] Danes, however, said that while she may have been considered for the part, she was never offered the role.

In 1997, Claire Danes also worked alongside two acclaimed directors. She played abused wife Kelly Riker in John Grisham's The Rainmaker directed by Francis Ford Coppola, as well as the trashy, dim-witted Jenny in Oliver Stone's noir U Turn. In 1998, she played several very different roles: Cosette in Bille August's film adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, and the pregnant teenage daughter of Polish immigrants (played by Gabriel Byrne and Lena Olin) in Polish Wedding. In 1999, she made her first appearance in an animated feature with the English version of Princess Mononoke. That same year she played the role of Julie Barnes in the big screen adaptation of the 1970s TV show The Mod Squad, and took the lead role in Brokedown Palace, alongside Kate Beckinsale and Bill Pullman. Danes left her career temporarily to pursue her education at Yale.

In 2002, Danes returned to the big screen. She starred alongside Susan Sarandon, Kieran Culkin, and Bill Pullman again, in Igby Goes Down. Later that year she co-starred as Meryl Streep's daughter in the Oscar-nominated, The Hours, with Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Ed Harris. The following year, she was cast in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, followed by Stage Beauty in 2004. She earned critical acclaim in 2005 when she starred in Steve Martin's Shopgirl alongside Martin and Jason Schwartzman, and in The Family Stone opposite Sarah Jessica Parker and Diane Keaton. In 2007, Danes appeared in the fantasy Stardust, which she described as a "classic model of romantic comedy",^[15] with Charlie Cox, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, and Sienna Miller, the drama Evening, and appeared in The Flock, opposite Richard Gere.

Theatre[link]

Danes got her start in New York City theater appearing in performances of Happiness, Punk Ballet, and Kids Onstage for which she choreographed her own dance.

In April 2000, she appeared off Broadway in Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. In November of that same year, she appeared as Emily Webb in a one night only staged reading of Thornton Wilder's Our Town at All Saint's Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. The production was staged by Bess Armstrong who'd played the mother of Danes' character on My So-Called Life. Also featured in the cast were several other My So-Called Life actors including Tom Irwin, Devon Gummersall and Paul Dooley.^[16]

In September 2005, Danes returned to New York's Performance Space 122 where she had performed as a child. She appeared in choreographer Tamar Rogoff's solo dance piece "Christina Olson: American Model" where she portrayed the subject of Andrew Wyeth's famous painting "Christina's World". Olson suffered from muscular deterioration that left her weak and partially paralyzed. "Tamar Rogoff uses her unique body-centric methodology to explore the ideas, spirit and physicality of a woman both rejected and revered."^[17] Danes was praised for her dance skills and the acting talent that she brought to the project.^[18][19]

Danes in Toronto, for a MuchOnDemand promotion of Stardust, 2007

In January 2007, Danes reunited with Rogoff and Rogoff's daughter and Danes' childhood friend Ariel Flavin to perform in Performance Space 122's "Edith and Jenny". In the two person dance performance, Danes and Flavin revisited their film and dance roots: "Danes and Flavin encounter their eleven year-old selves on screen, captured in their respective film debuts, Claire as Edith in Dreams of Love, and Ariel as Jenny in Coyote Mountain. Rites of passage unfold in fragments revealing the complexities of two fictional families. The lines between screen and stage, life and art, are blurred as Edith and Jenny, Danes and Flavin, form an alliance, stepping through and beyond their films and the fates of their families."^[20]

Later in 2007, Danes made her Broadway theatre debut as Eliza Doolittle in the Roundabout Theatre Company revival of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, directed by David Grindley at the American Airlines Theatre.

In January 2012, Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Theatricals announced that they would honor Danes as 2012 Woman of the Year.^[21]

Other work[link]

In 1997, Danes wrote an introduction to Neil Gaiman's Death: The Time of Your Life.^[22]

Personal life[link]

She dated her Stage Beauty and Princess Mononoke co-star Billy Crudup, which generated negative publicity due to rumors that their relationship caused the end of Crudup's relationship to then-pregnant Mary-Louise Parker.^[23]

Danes married her Evening co-star, Hugh Dancy, in a quiet ceremony in France in 2009.^[24]

Filmography[link]

Film[link]

Television[link]

Theater[link]

Awards and nominations[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Claire Danes

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Claire Danes

• Claire Danes at the Internet Movie Database
• Claire Danes at People.com
• Fresh Air interview, October 26, 2005
• Claire Danes at Emmys.com