People
April 28, 1997

Pre-fab stars. (details about celebrities before they were famous)

Gillian Anderson
After a visit to London in the early '80s, Gillian Anderson returned to Grand Rapids, Mich., where she was a student at City High School. Only now the former preppie, perhaps under the influence of the country that gave the world the Sex Pistols, was a punk. "She had cut all her brown hair off and dyed it red," recalls classmate Michael Kritschgau, an AIDS studies coordinator in Chicago. "Gillian has always been ahead of other people." Eventually voted Most Bizarre, Anderson, 28, also pierced her nose and wore thrift-shop designs. The X-Files star wasn't creative in appearance alone. Prose about her pet iguana appeared in the school paper. "As he spreads himself unenthusiastically on his hot rock, a hint of sorrow spurts from beneath his lidded eyes," she wrote in a creative fever. "He is no longer the plump reptile I once knew and loved."