Claire Danes ‘rescued’ by ‘My So-Called Life’

Claire Danes gushed over Winnie Holzman at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts annual gala after having worked with her when she was young on My So-Called Life.

Being thrown into fame after starring in the show, she reflected, “Oh my God, how lucky was I? I was 13 when I shot that pilot. When I met this genius woman, this Cyrano, who wrote one perfect diary entry after another for me, who rescued me from the punishing halls of actual high school and transported me to the halls of self-reflection and art, of poetry and music."

“Who allowed me to be exactly as I felt I was not, who I was supposed to be, who I was supposed to see on TV,” she added.

Praising Holzman for being "so overwhelmingly intentional and coherent" so that "no actor would have dared to riff on anything that was scripted."

“The very fact that we spent an hour every week peeking out at the world from the sensitive, probing eyes of a freshman girl at a public high school in Pittsburgh is in itself revolutionary,” the actress added, “It was in 1994. Maddeningly, it would be over 30 years later today."

Continuing, she remarked, “Back then, it was literally the first of its kind, the first show to revolve around a girl, played by an actual girl, to explore the contours of female friendship, to expose the frailties of the marriage and Angela's midlife parents.”

Danes revealed, “The network wasn't psyched about Ricky applying eyeliner in the girls' bathroom with Rayanne, but Winnie won them over. She does that."

“She wins us over with her wit, her warmth, and then subtly subverts our understanding of the status quo, the human experience, and shares the multitudinous layers of very real life in a so-called teenage girl,” she concluded.

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