style_savy said:
I love that she's brainy. She's got alot of confidence and is a leader it's kinda rare to see a take charge young woman in hollywood alot of them these days are kinda passive IMO.
I agree. I was reading a few interviews w/ her on efanguide.com/clairedanes, and I found some interview where she talks about making decisions about the films she does:
From the Nov 7,1996 Toronto Sun promoting Romeo and Juliet
-Meanwhile, next year there's college. "My list includes Yale, Sarah Lawrence, Brown, Harvard, Vassar... I really like Yale, although it's intimidating. When I visited it, I was, like, hiding behind trees, I felt so unworthy."
"You have such acclaim and everybody loves you and everything you say is brilliant and blah blah. It's like 'Why should I go to school when I'm a genius already?' It's so silly.
"I value my education. I know I'm far away from knowing it all. I know I never will."
From the Calagary Sun November 17, 1997 promoting The Rainmaker
-Next year Danes takes on what she considers one of the most important roles of her life. She has enrolled in philosophy and art history at Yale University.
"Jodie Foster said if I didn't go to Yale on my own she'd kidnap me and drag me to classes. It's her alma mater.
"She said it's essential that I share ideas and time with people my own age. I've spent most of my youth with adults and I'm realizing that it's not healthy."
This does not mean Danes plans to put her career on hold. She's quick to point out that "Jodie made five movies while she was at Yale. I'm going to try to fit in a movie each semester."
Danes has also realized that she must make a clear distinction between her family and her career. Her mother has acted as her manager and her siblings have been involved in her publicity machine.
"It was like Team Claire. My family is no longer involved in the business of my career. No one is holding my hand any more. I'm out there on my own.
"My career has meant that my family has enjoyed a much better life than they would have, but it's time I separated family and business."
From premiere magazine in August '98, talking about Brokedown Palace:
-"Amid the difficult working conditions, Danes discovered her power on the set, and how to use it. she says she knew the experience would be her own Outward Bound-style rude awakening. "I totally tested myself," she says. "I wanted to see if I could survive the worst, and I did. I didn't have to do it in such a harsh way, but I was being very dramatic."
what attracted her to the role was the complex friendship between her character, Alice, and Darlene, Alice's high school best friend. What she didn't expect was that she'd take such a hands-on role in shaping the final film. When the original director, Carl Frankin (Devil in a Blue Dress), dropped out because the studio was insisting he case a known actress (namely Liv Tyler) in the best-friend role, Danes became the only tentpole holding up the production. At that point she involved herself in the search for a new director and costar. They settled on Jonathan Kaplan -- the man who directed Jodie Foster to her first Oscar, in The Accused -- because of his widely acknowledged ability to get good performances out of women and his hippie-backpacker street cred. "He totally got that title from a Grateful Dead song," says producer Adam Fields (Great Balls of Fire), who came up with the idea for the film while travelling in thailand. "No one else was ever asked; no one ever questioned it."
Still, not all was mellow when it came to dealing with Fox. There were battles over the phone from Manila. "I knew what story I wanted to tell, and I knew the best way to tell it," Danes recalls. "I didn't want it to be about two hot chicks in Thailand wearing tank tops in prison. It very well could have been like that."
The other major point of contention was how the movie should end. There was disagreement over whether to keep the end as scripted -- not entirely heartwarming. "Power was just up for grabs on the other side of the world, so I was like, 'Oh, all right, I'll take it,' " says Danes. "I was on the phone with the studio about script changes. I was like, 'Wow! This is not acting.' But nobody else was an eighteen-year-old girl, so that really gives you the upper hand."
In reality, the power structure on the set was dictated by Hollywood convention -- the top-billed star tends to get the juiciest role. "I was the fiery, sexy, cool character, and [Kate] was the bookworm, and that was no fun," says Danes. "She's complicated. She's prickly. She's a good writer, too, and if there was a problem with the script, I could really work with her to make it better."
Danes has a girlish admiration for the 25-year-old Beckinsale, and she went into the project hoping they would become good friends. "That was wrong," she says, still visibly wounded. "We didn't." (Beckinsale declined to be interview for this story.) "
From Girl.com.au July 2003 promoting T3
-I had made three quite sensitive, progressive, experimental movies that were on a smaller scale so I suppose I felt prepared to blow some stuff up, literally and figuratively," she says, laughingly. "My decision wasn't THAT impulsive. I have a lot of reverence for the first two Terminator movies which I think are really sophisticated, innovative and fun, and I was an admirer of Jonathon Mostow' s work, so I trusted that he would not embarrass us with this." Of course, she hastens to add, "There's something really thrilling about knowing lots of people are going to see me scream for hours." But Danes didn't have much time to give the whole thing a lot of thought.
Though Danes had met with director Mostow months before, he ended up casting another actress, who was fired after a week of work, because Mostow felt she was too young for the role. While the production was scrambling for a replacement, Danes was returning to Los Angeles from Australia, where she had been travelling with her boyfriend, musician Ben Lee. "I just happened to arrive in LA the same afternoon that my agent called me in a panic saying that there is a crisis on the Terminator set, they need to recast the role of Kate Brewster and they would like you to step in immediately. I was so jet lagged and disoriented that I just said yes." Danes said she had no time to think of what it's like going from small, more literary projects such as The Hours, to a gargantuan, adrenalin-charged actioner such as T3. "My character was kidnapped by the Terminator and I was kidnapped by the Terminator production," she says laughingly. "I was just hurled into this alternate reality just had to rally, cope, make some sense of it and use it, as we actresses say."
From Arrive Magazine in Soptember 2003
-But Danes maintains that she doesn't cling to a preordained agenda when choosing roles. "To me, the script, the director and the other actors are most important," she insists. "I love film of all kinds. I'm not an intellectual snob, just so long as the film is clever and culturally relevant." Constantly composed, she approaches her choices with a compassionate intellect. "I don't want to debase myself. If the character has to suffer, as dramatic characters tend to, she should find redemption of some kind. I don't want to be raped and tied to a pole. I don't want to beat my psyche up or challenge my art in that way
From Elle Magazine in October 2004 promoting Stage Beauty
-Sometimes you'd forget she had this whole other career," says Danes' best friend, Maya Goldsmith, "because she took [school] so seriously." And when Danes got particularly stirred up by a new subject she was studying, Goldsmith adds, she was given to impassioned speeches. "My name for it was a 'hear ye'--like, 'Hear ye, hear ye, people of the town!'" Goldsmith says. "I'd just picture her, like, ringing a little bell."
I think she'sa great role model for young girls. She's near the same age as Kate Bosworth, Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton, Haley Duff, Mischa Barton and others, but she's so different in terms of personality and the choices she makes. I really think she's underrated.
So depressing. 
