What the Dickens!

Gillian Anderson is to star as a ‘sexually charged and alluring’ Miss Havisham in a radical television reworking of Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.


The former X Files beauty is in talks to co-star in the three-part BBC1 drama which The Mail on Sunday can reveal will feature Hollywood hardman Ray Winstone as Magwitch and rising star Douglas Booth as Pip.

The BBC is planning what it calls the most ‘visceral’ adaptation of
the novel yet in an effort to win over a generation of viewers unfamiliar with the original.

Although Anderson, 42, is perhaps best known for playing Special Agent Dana Scully in the Nineties science-fiction series The X Files, she won great acclaim playing Lady Dedlock in the BBC’s 2005 adaptation of Dickens’s Bleak House, one of the finest television series of the past decade in my opinion.

She is one of several actresses in negotiation for the part of Miss Havisham and has yet to sign up, but insiders insist that she is the preferred choice.