GROUND ZERO TO `X-FILES' : ANDERSON MAKES RAPID RISE TO BECOME FOX HIT'S `IT' GIRL.

Byline: Justine Elias The New York Times

Gillian Anderson's job can be a foul, dirty business: She performs autopsies on otherworldly corpses, wades through rivers as she searches for clues. And all the interesting people she meets end up dead.

Lately her young daughter has been getting into the act, running around the workplace, waving a severed, decomposing hand.

``Now that's scary,'' says Anderson, who shakes the disembodied hand without batting an eye. It's an ordinary day on the set of ``The X-Files,'' and her 2-year-old daughter, Piper, has been exploring the prop truck again.

Anderson plays Dana Scully, an FBI agent and pathologist who investigates bizarre, possibly supernatural phenomena on ``The X-Files,'' the hit Fox television show that recently won five Emmy awards for writing and technical achievements.

For the first time, Anderson herself was an Emmy nominee, for best actress in a dramatic series, a significant event for someone who only five years ago was juggling shifts at a Greenwich Village restaurant and appearances in off-Broadway plays.

As ``The X-Files'' starts its fourth season, at 9 p.m. Friday, Anderson is a full-fledged television star, finally on equal footing with the show's male lead, David Duchovny, who has often been a magazine cover boy but has yet to be an Emmy nominee.

Her character, one of the coolest, most competent professional women ever portrayed on television, believes that there is a scientific explanation for all the strange deaths and visitations she encounters.

And even if Agent Scully's credulous partner, Fox Mulder (Duchovny), could convince her that the culprits were extraterrestrials, vampires and slime monsters, Scully probably would see them as mere slime who broke the law. Lawless, amoral behavior really ticks her off.

``She is way too smart for anybody's good,'' Anderson says of her heavily credentialed character. ``She's also got a medical degree and a graduate degree in physics. There is nothing that this woman doesn't know.''

Focusing on what Scully knows, rather than how she looks, is something that Chris Carter, the show's creator and co-executive producer, had in mind when he first presented his idea for ``The X-Files'' to Fox executives in 1993.

Although Anderson had only one television credit to her name (a guest appearance on the short-lived Fox series ``Class of '96''), she made it through a grueling series of auditions.

Duchovny, who had appeared in the movies ``The Rapture'' and ``Kalifornia,'' was cast first. Fox was willing to take a chance on a less experienced person to play opposite him - provided, Carter recalls, that the new face came with a ``Baywatch'' babe's figure.

``I had to fight for Gillian,'' Carter says. ``Not because of her youth or relative inexperience, but because she didn't fit the network's or the studio's idea of the prime-time tootsie. She didn't have the usual assets they thought of in a TV man-woman relationship.''

Anderson, a slender, red-haired 27-year-old who stands about 5 feet tall, has nevertheless become, as one British reporter put it, ``the thinking man's crumpet.''

Despite this sort of attention, she has managed to keep a low profile living here in Vancouver, where the series is shot. This wasn't the case when she was a teen-ager. Born in Chicago and reared in England and Puerto Rico, Anderson was, as she puts it, an adventurous punk with a Mohawk haircut by the time her family settled in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Her mother, a computer analyst, and her father, a film post-production supervisor, encouraged her interest in theater. By the end of high school, she was writing and directing plays, as well as acting. She then studied at De Paul University's Goodman School of Drama in Chicago.

After graduation, she moved to New York, where an agent had promised to represent her. She did land a couple of commercials (which were never broadcast) and a couple of challenging stage roles, in Alan Ayckbourn's ``Absent Friends'' at the Manhattan Theater Club and Christopher Hampton's ``Philanthropist'' at the Long Wharf in New Haven, Conn. But she supported herself mainly by waitressing at Dojo, a student hangout on St. Marks Place.

In 1991, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue television and film work. One near miss was a central role in ``Murder in the Heartland,'' the controversial television movie about the mass murderer Charles Starkweather. She would have played Caril Ann Fugate, the 14-year-old fugitive.

``It was neat and inspiring, at a time when I wasn't getting much work, to be considered for a role like that,'' she says. ``Then came Scully, a 28-year-old character. I didn't realize how big the series would become. I didn't realize anything.''

David Nutter, who has directed Anderson in 14 episodes of ``The X-Files'' over the last three years, says the actress was under a great deal of pressure to deliver on her promising auditions. The turning point, he says, was a first-season episode in which Scully's father dies while she is far from home, working on a case.

It was a chance for Anderson to establish a better balance with Duchovny, who had been the focus of earlier episodes.

``I was very moved and touched by her ability to be very honest, to tell the truth, in these emotional scenes,'' Nutter says.

On a television series that proclaims ``The truth is out there,'' Anderson's directness has become as much a hallmark as the paranoid characters and offbeat comedy. The next step for her, she says, is feature films.

``The problem, as always, is time,'' she says. ``After the first season, I was pregnant, and after the second, I wanted some time with my family. But now I've got things figured out, and I'm ready.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) `X'-citing

Who would have thoug ht that a cult series would turn Gillian Anderson into a full-fledged star?

(2) With only one television credit to her name, Gillian Anderson won the part of Dana Scully in ``The X-Files.''

(3) ``She is way too smart for anybody's good,'' Anderson says of her ``X-Files'' character. ``She's also got a medical degree and a graduate degree in physics. There is nothing that this woman doesn't know.''