- Claire Danes praised Winnie Holzman at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts annual gala on Monday, April 7
- The actress, 45, recalled being just 13 when she starred in My So-Called Life, as the gala honored the show’s creator
- Danes said the teen drama “rescued me from the punishing halls of actual high school”
Claire Danes feels indebted to Winnie Holzman after they worked together on My So-Called Life.
The actress, 45, reflected on starring in the ’90s teen drama as she gave a speech at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts annual gala on Monday, April 7. During the ceremony, the 83-year-old, award-winning writer — who is best known for Wicked, ThirtySomething, and My So-Called Life — was honored.
Danes was catapulted to stardom after playing Angela Chase in the show, which centered around a freshman girl’s experiences at school.
“Oh my God, how lucky was I? I was 13 when I shot that pilot,” Danes said. “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.
Danes praised Holzman’s writing for being “so overwhelmingly intentional and coherent” that “no actor would have dared to riff on anything that was scripted.”
Noting that there weren’t any similar teen dramas at the time of My So-Called Life’s release, the actress admitted there were a few hurdles to overcome with the network before it debuted.
“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,” she said. “It was in 1994. Maddeningly, it would be over 30 years later today.”
“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,” she continued.
The actress added that “it’s really an astonishing thing” that the show was the first to “feature an explicitly gay character.” She said, “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,” Danes shared.
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Danes said that Holzmann has remained a “deeply meaningful person” to her years after the high school drama concluded.
“I often call Winnie my fairy godmother because she’s played such a pivotal role in my life as an artist and person,” she explained. “But it turns out she’s everyone’s fairy godmother. She basically defined the contemporary iteration of a fairy godmother for an entire generation.”
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