Sarah Polley is featured in He's So Mean To Josephine, which opens Friday. -- Greig Reekie, Toronto SUN
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S a r a h P o l l e y
True Sarah strong and free
Polley unaffected by her journey on the road to stardom in Canada
Sarah Polley is a star - Canadian style.
Which means she is busy, talented, attractive and amusingly modest about her status as an exciting young actress, an arc that soared with The Road To Avonlea and her kid role in Terry Gilliam's underrated comic epic, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen. She is the offspring of actors.
"I really feel it's a Canadian thing," the 18-year-old Polley muses. "People really criticize that there is no star system in Canada and that people move (to Hollywood) for that reason and blah, blah, blah. That's the adopted mantra about Canada for actors. But it's my favorite thing about Canada because it makes people like Atom Egoyan."
The similarly unpretentious Egoyan is the gifted Toronto filmmaker who made The Sweet Hereafter, Thursday's opening gala of the Toronto International Film Festival.
Polley, who is so radiant and quietly powerful on screen that Egoyan shot her in extreme closeups to enhance the magic, plays one of the film's central characters. She is a teenager who has entered into an incestuous relationship with her father, who is played sympathetically by Tom McCamus.
"I don't think that's unreasonable," Polley reflects, "in that there are good people who have made huge errors in their lives, even ones that probably ruin other people's lives."
That's complicated enough, yet her character finds herself traumatized when she is criticially injured in a schoolbus accident that kills many of her fellow students.
Egoyan was so impressed by the light in Polley's eyes and the obvious brilliance of her performance that he changed his filmmaking style. "I realized I could go closer and closer into her so, by the end of the film, we're right in her face."
If it wasn't enough that Polley is the heart of The Sweet Hereafter, she also plays key supporting roles in two other major homegrown films in the Film Festival's Perspective Canada series. She is a panhandler working Toronto's mean streets in Clement Virgo's surrealistic drama, The Planet Of Junior Brown. She is the teen version of Kerry Fox's sister role in flashbacks in The Hanging Garden, a Maritime drama about family dysfunction and gender orientation.
Although she has, in the past, indicated she doesn't dream of being an adult actress and may pursue politics, Polley is now at work on a controversial CBC-TV drama, White Heat, a `secret' project reportedly dealing with skinheads.
In every case, you find Polley working with real people on gritty issue-oriented films, with Egoyan being her immediate example. "He never places his art or his reputation above the people he is working with and he has a sense of reality," she says in admiration. "This is a cultural thing, just a humility that is natural here but lacking in Hollywood."
You find that humility in Polley's sense of self, at least as a star. Although she has no problem hitting the barricades to protest against the Mike Harris government in Ontario - a 1996 incident led to a furor about her choice of words in the protest - Polley is aw shucks about movie stuff.
She was a featured red-carpet guest at Cannes when The Sweet Hereafter made its debut. "It seemed ludicrous to me," she says of the pomp and circumstance, "but when I was walking up I felt kind of tingly."
Yet she had been plagued by doubts. "I had a recurring nightmare for a week that I would trip and fall flat on my face. As I was walking up, I actually felt the tip of my dress going under my foot and blurted out: `Oh my God, it's happening!' Then I caught myself." And now it's a big joke.
December 13, 1996
Sarah Polley helps celebrate childhood
Calgary Sun
One of Canada's most famous young adults helps honor UNICEF on its 50th anniversary.
Road To Avonlea's Sarah Polley, 17, hosts Children First, a special featuring six award-winning animated shorts from the National Film Board. It airs Sunday at CBC.
Polley and a panel of children discuss the impact of these films.
Highlights in this stylish piece include the shorts To See the World, TV Tango and Dinner For Two.
Two chameleons fight over a big juicy fly in Dinner For Two. The dispute disrupts the jungle but a resolution is found.
TV Tango demonstrates the effect of television violence on children in a non-preachy way.
The best is To See The World, in which a young boy sees the ugliness children around the world must endure through a train window. He deals with the sadness of it by correcting the wrongs in his art book -- he draws food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, moms and dads for parentless and toys for child laborers.
November 13, 1996
Sarah Polley's not acting her age
Toronto Sun
Sarah Polley is all grown up now.
Just in case you hadn't noticed, the child star of CBC-TV's long-running hit, Road To Avonlea, has graduated to adult roles -- and that includes the lead in Joe's So Mean To Josephine, an intense love story that opens here Friday.
In Joe's So Mean, Polley co-stars with Eric Thall as a mismatched couple engaged in a brief relationship. She plays a bright young student, a middle-class young woman just nudging the edge of adult life.
Thall plays the brooding, handsome, older guy who captures her fancy. He's a bit of a thug -- but he falls for her. What follows is a study in the dynamics of love and power.
Though playing an adult, Polley was in fact just 16 when Joe's So Mean To Josephine was filmed.
In moviedom, where everybody hopes to play 18 until she's 35, playing 'up' in age is rare.
Emotionally, this role was a biggie for Polley. During an interview, she says, "I had to grow up fast in a lot of ways."
That proves to be a bit of an understatement.
"Inside, though," she adds, "I think I'm younger than 17. I've just made myself seem as if I belong to the world of adults."
Polley says she has had a couple of adult relationships to draw from for her role, but explains, with typical simplicity and characteristic honesty, "I was really immature in those relationships and so were they, but I guess I know the dynamics."
Anyway, playing grown-up wasn't so tough. "To let go of being a kid, that was the hardest part," says the actress. "I was worried about seeming 16."
To let go of being a kid is something Polley has had to do in real life, too. It wasn't really a letting go, either -- it was more like having her childhood snatched away.
She says she's gone through a lot of changes in the last few years, and talks at length about her involvement in politics, about coping with her mother's death, about the rigors of having to grow up in the public eye.
For all her luminous beauty -- and it is awesome -- Polley's obvious intellect is probably her most attractive feature.
She is passionate about her political beliefs, though she concedes that the more she reads, the less her ideas become clear-cut. Her wry summary: "I'm still pretty sure there shouldn't be people starving to death on the streets."
Meantime, she's beginning to like her own acting career, and maybe it's about time, since she's been at it almost since infancy.
"When people ask me what I do, acting is usually the furthest thing from my mind," she says. "It's a lack of confidence, in a way -- I've hidden my insecurities for so long, and I had to bring all that out to play Josephine.
"Still," she continues cheerfully, "for the first time I"m really enjoying acting. It seems not such a bogus thing to do with your life."