Acting hero Gillian Anderson has spoken out about her past relationships with women, and being a punk rocker in a conservative American town. Ms Anderson, who first came to prominence playing Agent Scully in the 1990's cult programme The X Files, has previously mentioned her bisexual history and support for LGBTQIA rights in the gay magazine Out in 2012, but her recent interview for the London Times is the first time the straight media has spoken to her on the topic.

Gillian Anderson has spoken candidly to The Times about her childhood, including a rebellious anti-establishment period that began after she left England for America as a teenager and which featured a high-school relationship with an older girl.

The X-Files actor and Golden Globe winner recalled feeling like an outsider in every sense. “Not only did I not fit in, I didn’t want to fit in,” she told the newspaper. “I was a punk in a conservative town. There wasn’t a single other person who had a nose ring and a mohawk. I was very self-conscious, with low self-esteem.”

Anderson said that one of her earliest romantic attachments was with an older schoolgirl. Although it was not her first relationship, it carried a sense of danger and secrecy. “It felt secretive and illicit and wrong, and we had to hide,” she explained. Later, when a boyfriend learned of the affair, he ended the relationship.

Despite that early involvement with a woman, the actress was adamant that she never identified as gay at the time, largely because she had also dated boys. “I didn’t, because I’d had a couple of boyfriends. But I definitely felt I didn’t have the language for it,” she said. “Even later on, when I had other relationships [with women], I’m not sure I ever thought of them as being potentially for ever.”

Now, though she is married to a man, Anderson said she is far more comfortable with the possibility of a queer partnership. “The person I consider my life partner happens to be male, but I think I would feel the same way if it were a woman. I’d feel, ‘This is my life partner.’ When I was younger, there were parts of my brain that thought [women] were temporary.”

She also reflected on whether her school-age romance might have felt more significant had she believed she was exclusively attracted to women. “If I had thought I was 100% gay, would it have been a different experience for me? Would it have been a bigger deal if shame had been attached to it and all those things that become huge life-altering issues for youngsters in that situation? It’s possible that my attitude around it came, on some level, from knowing that I still liked boys.”

The actor previously told Out magazine in 2012 that she had also had further relationships with women. Over the years, she has attracted a large lesbian following, much of which grew out of her role as the sceptical FBI agent and doctor Dana Scully in The X-Files.

Anderson is currently starring in Jane Schoenbrun’s latest queer horror thriller, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a project that further reinforces her standing within queer cinema.