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Sarah Polley Biography - Sarah Polley Pictures
Sarah Polley Biography
Sarah Polley is an actress and director
renowned in her native Canada for her political activism. Blessed with
an extremely expressive face that enables directors to minimize dialogue
due to her uncanny ability to suggest a character's thoughts, Polley has
become a favorite of critics for her sensitive portraits of wounded and
conflicted young women in independent films. |
Sarah Polley Biography |
Sarah Polley Pictures
Sarah Polly
Canadian Actress Sarah Polley
Sarah Polley Info |
She was born into a show
business family: her father, Michael Polley, appeared with her in the
movie The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and on the television
series "Road to Avonlea" (1989) and her mother, Diane Polley,
was an actress and casting director. It was her mother's connections
that launched Sarah, at her own insistence, on an acting career at the
age of four, following in the footsteps of her older brother Mark Polley
(a second brother, John Buchan, is a casting director and producer).
Her career as a child actress shifted into high gear when she was cast
as the Cockney waif Jody Turner in Lantern Hill (1990) (TV), for which
she won a Gemini Award, the Canadian equivalent of the Emmy, in 1992.
Produced by Kevin Sullivan, the film was based on the book by Lucy Maud
Montgomery, author of "Anne of the Green Gables". When
Sullivan created a television series based on Montgomery's work, he cast
Polley in the lead role of Sara Stanley in "Road to Avonlea"
(1989). The series propelled Polley into the first rank of Canadian TV
stars and made her independently wealthy by the age of 14.
Her personal life was deeply affected by the death of her mother Diane
from cancer shortly after her 11th birthday, a development that
ironically paralleled the fictional life of her character Sara. Highly
intelligent and politically progressive at a young age, Polley
eventually rebelled against what she felt was the Americanization of the
series after it was picked up by the Disney Channel for distribution in
the U.S. She eventually dropped out of the show. Though she does not
blame her parents, she remains publicly disenchanted over the loss of
her childhood and, in October 2003, said she is working on a script
about a 12-year old girl on a TV show.
Polley, who picked up a second Gemini Award for her performance in the
TV series "Straight Up" (1996), subsequently quit acting and
high school to turn her attention to politics, positioning herself on
the extreme left of Canada's left-of-center New Democratic Party. The
publicity ensuing from her losing some teeth after being slugged by an
Ontario policeman during a protest against the Conservative provincial
government, plus the stinging cynicism from some other activists
unimpressed by her "celebrity", led her to temporarily lower
her political profile and return to acting in Atom Egoyan's film The
Sweet Hereafter (1997). It was her appearance as Nicole, the teenage
girl injured in a school bus accident who serves as the conscience of
the small town rent by the tragedy, that first brought her to the
attention of critics in the U.S. In Canada, the role was heralded by
critics as her successful breakthrough to adult roles. It was her second
film with Egoyan, who wrote the part with her in mind when he adapted
Russell Banks' novel. Predictions of an Academy Award nomination and
future stardom were part of the critical consensus, and she received her
first Best Actress Genie nomination from Canada's Academy of Canadian
Cinema & Television and the Best Supporting Actress award from the
Boston Society of Film Critics. The buzz created at the Sundance
Festival, where her starring role in the film Guinevere (1999) was
showcased, when the entertainment media crowned her the "It
Girl" of 1999. Intensely private, and extremely ambivalent about
the personal cost of celebrity and the Hollywood ethos "Fame is the
Name of the Game", Polley could be seen as rebelling against the
expectations of mainstream cinema when she embarked on a career path
that took her out of the spotlight thrown by the harsh lights of the
Hollywood hype/publicity machine after shooting the film Go (1999). She
dropped out of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous (2000), the $60-million
mega-hyped vehicle that was supposed to make her a mainstream star in
the U.S., choosing to return to Canada to make the $1.5 million The Law
of Enclosures (2000) for Genie Award-winner John Greyson, a director she
greatly admires. The film grossed poorly in Canada and was not released
in the U.S., but it did garner Polley her second Genie nomination for
Best Actress. While her replacement in Almost Famous (2000) went on to
win an Oscar nomination and a career above the title in glossy Hollywood
films, she took a wide variety of parts, large and small, in independent
films, including significant roles in the ensemble pieces The Claim
(2000) and The Weight of Water (2000), bit parts in eXistenZ (1999) and
_Love Come Down' (2000)_ , and the lead in No Such Thing (2001). Her
choice of projects showed her to be a questing spirit more focused on
learning the art of her craft than on stardom.
She has said that her choice of film roles, eschewing mainstream
Hollywood movies for chancier, non-commercial independent fare, was the
result of an ethical decision on her part to make films with social
import. A less observant viewer might think that the rebel Polley played
in her political life and that had previously manifested itself in her
profession was now driving her to the verge of career suicide in terms
of popularity, marketability and choice of future roles. However, that
interpretation does not recognize the extraordinary talent that will
always keep her in demand by directors, if not casting agents with an
eye on the opening weekend box office. One must understand Polley's
career progression in light of her attendance at the Canadian Film
Centre's directors program and her production of short films, including
"Don't Think Twice" (1999) and the highly praised "I
Shout Love" (2001). Polley is a cinema artist. This woman wants to,
and will make films. Thus, we can understand her career choices as a
desire to work with and understand the technique of some of the best
directors in film, including David Cronenberg, Michael Winterbottom and
Hal Hartley. Polley is as renowned for her intelligence as for her
remarkable talent. The problem of the intelligent person in the acting
field is that the actor, as artist, in not ultimately in control of
their medium, and it is artistic control that is the hallmark of the
great artist. The controlling intelligence on a movie set is the
director, and her attendance at the Canadian Film Centre has given her a
new perspective on acting. The actor, she says, should not try to give a
complete performance for the camera (that is, control the representation
on film) but must remember that the function of the actor is to give the
director as much coverage as possible as a film, as well as a
performance, is made in the editing room. According to Polley, this
realization, that the film actor exists to serve the director, has given
her new enthusiasm for acting. Thus, her career, and her career choices,
can be seen as a quest for knowledge about the art of cinema, a journey
whose fruition we will see in her future feature work as both actor and
director.
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