"The X-Files" star Gillian Anderson is to become the latest American star to take to the West End stage, as reported in the Evening Standard.

Anderson will star in a new play by Michael Weller, What the Night Is For. The actress has said: "It's going to be in the West End though no theatre has been finalized."

Gillian Anderson, who shot to fame as Agent Dana Scully in the hit television series "The X-Files," apparently enjoyed West End theatre when she lived in London as a child, before her parents moved back to America when she was 11. She attended a summer school at the National Theatre during her university years and has appeared in a series of on and Off-Broadway productions.

Anderson made a brief appearance at a gala performance of The Vagina Monologues in London three years ago, but her new play will mark her full West End stage debut.

Last year Anderson said she would be interested in treading the boards at the Royal Court, the Almeida or the Donmar Warehouse in a role "as far from Scully as humanly possible." She has already left "The X-Files" to spend time with her family, a move she was apparently planning for two years.

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."

—By Paul Webb Theatrenow