Scully is latest West End star

The X-Files star Gillian Anderson is to become the latest American star to take to the West End stage. Anderson, 33, is to star in Michael Weller's new play, What The Night Is For.

Speaking last night at a benefit for the Neurofibromatosis Association at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the actress said: "It's going to be in the West End though no theatre has been finalised."

Anderson made her name as Agent Dana Scully on the supernatural crime series The X-Files, for which she earns more than £200,000 an episode. However, after a decade on the programme she wants to return to her first love - theatre.

The star first developed a taste for West End theatre when she lived in London as a child. She attended a summer school for budding actors run by the National Theatre when she was at Cornell University, and went on to make a series of performances on and off-Broadway.

Anderson, who lived in Crouch End before her parents moved back to the States when she was 11, made a brief appearance at a gala performance in London three years ago, but her new play will be her full stage debut in the city that sparked her thespian ambition. Anderson's London show may coincide with Glenn Close's run in autumn at the National in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Anderson has been planning her escape from The X-Files for two years, and last summer said she would be interested in treading the boards at The Royal Court, the Almeida or the Donmar Warehouse - three of London's finest theatres.

Anderson said last year her London stage debut would be "as far from Scully as humanly possible". She has now left the programme to spend time with Piper, seven, her daughter by former husband Clyde Klotz - a set designer she met on the show.

Despite leaving Britain more than 20 years ago, she insists she is still an Anglophile: "I imagine myself when I am 60 sculpting in a cottage in Sussex."

Unlike the stars of the recent West End show The Graduate, Anderson said she will not be stripping off. "No nakedness - just straight-forward acting."