Claire Danes
Claire Danes was born on April 12, 1979 in New York, New York. Her mother, Carla, is a day-care provider, painter, and textile designer who later served as her daughter’s manager, and her father, Christopher Danes, is a computer consultant and former architectural photographer. Danes has described her background as being “as WASPy as you can get”; her paternal grandfather, Gibson Andrew Danes, (1910-1992 in Litchfield, Connecticut was the dean of the art and architecture school at Yale University. She has an older brother, Asa, who graduated from Oberlin College and works as a litigation attorney for the law firm of Paul Hastings.
Danes attended the Dalton School in New York City, the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies, the Professional Performing Arts School, and the Lycée Français de Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California. In 1998, Danes went to Yale Universit, her father’s alma mater. Oliver Stone wrote her letter of recommendation to Yale. After studying for two years as a psychology major, she dropped out of Yale to focus on her film career.
Danes had her first onscreen kiss in an episode of My So-Called Life before she had one in real life. After meeting at her birthday party, she and Australian singer Ben Lee dated for almost six years, their relationship ending in 2003. She has dated Andrew Dorff, actor Stephen Dorff’s younger brother, and Matt Damon. Beginning in 2004, she dated her Stage Beauty and Princess Mononoke co-star Billy Crudup, which generated negative publicity due to rumors that their relationship caused the end of Crudup’s relationship to then-pregnant Mary-Louise Parker. 
Both denied that they were involved prior to the end of Crudup’s relationship with Parker. Danes’s relationship with Crudup ended in December 2006, amid rumors of an affair by Danes with Hugh Dancy, her co-star in Evening. Danes confirmed on the June 27, 2007 episode of Late Show with David Letterman that she was dating Dancy. Danes, 30, and Dancy, 34, tied the knot in a quiet ceremony in France in 2009.
In 1998, just after the filming of Brokedown Palace in Manila, she was quoted in Vogue as saying that Manila was a “ghastly and weird city.” She further remarked in Premiere that the city “smelled of cockroaches, with rats all over and that there is no sewage system and the people do not have anything — no arms, no legs, no eyes.” Kim Atienza, son of then-Mayor of Manila, Lito Atienza, responded to the comments by saying that, “those are irresponsible, bigoted and sweeping statements that we cannot accept.” Her films were subsequently banned from being screened in the Philippines. Joseph Estrada, then-President of the Philippines, condemned her publicly, and she was declared persona non grata. Shortly after the incident, Danes issued an apology in Entertainment Weekly to the City of Manila.
