Paradoxes of a beautiful life

At four, Sarah Polley began her career as a child star, at 11 tragedy struck, at 14 she left home, and by 19 she was firmly embedded in Toronto's radical politics. It is a life, she tells Craig Taylor, that has made her a reluctant conscript to Hollywood, but it has also given a powerful quality to the unusual roles she plays
Sarah Polley
She may only be 24, but bringing pain to the surface of her roles is Polley's speciality

There's a small coffee stain on the tabletop in the restaurant where I am to meet Sarah Polley. Surprising, because Toronto, Polley's hometown, prides itself on being prodigiously, almost maniacally tidy, so tabletops tend to be spotless if not lickable. Caught in this particular stain is a fly that has landed amid the stickiness. Its back legs won't move, and when it tries desperately to right itself, it loses the struggle and tips over. Its wings crinkle; its proboscis presses frantically against the table. The fly looks doomed, which, thematically at least, suits the occasion.

  1. My Life Without Me
  2. Production year: 2003
  3. Country: Rest of the world
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 106 mins
  6. Directors: Isabel Coixet
  7. Cast: Deborah Harry, Mark Ruffalo, Sarah Polley, Scott Speedman
  8. More on this film

Polley is here to talk about death, and about what it's like to play a young mother who is given the news that she has only three months to live, truly live, and test the boundaries of her unmemorable existence before terminal cancer catches up with her. The film, My Life Without Me, is the latest in a series of smaller, well-assembled, thoughtful, independent movies in which Polley has chosen to appear. Already, she is a veteran of films in which terrible things happen to vulnerable people, and it's her characters that bear the brunt.

Polley survives a bus crash in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997), a plane crash and a confrontation with a fire-breathing monster in Hal Hartley's No Such Thing (2001), a father's abandonment in Michael Winterbottom's The Claim (2000) and, perhaps most frighteningly, an affair with an older man in Guinevere (1999). In Go, director Doug Liman's 1999 follow-up to his hit Swingers, Polley escapes from a drug deal gone awry but is still hit by a car and deposited in a ditch. In My Life Without Me, the dangers are within.

Ann, a young mother of two who lives in a trailer in her mother's backyard and works as a janitor at the local university, sits down with her doctor to talk about what she worries is another pregnancy. Instead, she's told she has ovarian cancer which has spread, become inoperable, and will soon kill her. The scene is quietly devastating - an example of Polley doing what she has perfected in her other roles, with the expressive face, the big eyes, taking in the prospect of unmentionable suffering. Polley's talent is coming up with new and unexpected ways of expressing this kind of pain.

If the conversation is to be about death, the afternoon is not half as morbid as it should be. Summer and relentless sun have extended into October, and for a city recently plagued by disease and disaster - Sars, West Nile virus, blackouts - Toronto feels rejuvenated. Even the fly in the coffee stain has unlodged itself, bent wing and all, and flown off. When Polley arrives, she is looking as summery as the city. She is very small, smiling, with dishevelled hair and an air of resilience. I ask her why she has played so many victims. "I'm interested in internalising pain," she says, "but I don't want to think that's what I'll always do. I like to think I'll be able to play different kinds of characters that aren't so ... " she searches for a word " ... repressed in some way." As proof, she's just finished filming the remake of the horror classic Dawn Of The Dead.

Polley is the youngest of five children, born into an entertainment family. Her father, Michael, was an actor and her mother, Diane, worked as a casting agent. Scripts were always lying around the house and Polley learned to read at a young age. Her brother Mark made television appearances and she was soon asking her parents if she could do the same. Although they professed an interest in giving Polley a "normal" childhood, she made her feature film debut at the age of four, in a Disney production called One Magic Christmas. More roles followed, including a tough slog through Terry Gilliam's The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen when she was seven.

In 1990, Polley began her six-year stint in Road To Avonlea, a chirpy, feel-good historical television series based on a story by Lucy Maud Montgomery and aimed at the Anne Of Green Gables following. It was, according to Polley, "the most sugar-coated, unrealistic depiction of Canadian history ever. It was like the white man's fantasy of what it was like at the turn of the century on Prince Edward Island." Polley's character, Sara Stanley, was a cute do-gooder, hermetically sealed away in a past era. Polley herself was having a more painful time, undergoing surgery to correct a spinal problem brought on by scoliosis. Avonlea became a huge success and a childhood ritual for millions of viewers. "You know a good way of describing how big it was for people who don't live here?" she says. "The ratings were even higher than Hockey Night In Canada."

Because it was so popular, Polley saw Road To Avonlea as an opportunity to deal with what she considered to be real issues, such as the history of immigration in Canada and the treatment of native people. That was, until a certain multinational began financing the show. "In the first couple of seasons we did things like an episode on a strike," she says. "Then as soon as the Disney Channel got really involved, all that went away and it became, literally, a show about family values." Even at 12, it wasn't hard to see how much the tone of the series had shifted. Polley wasn't particularly politicised then, but the Disneyfication marked the beginning of her awareness. In 1991, circa the first Gulf War, she attended an awards ceremony for children's television in Washington and supplemented her outfit with a peace symbol. Disney officials at her table asked her to remove it. Polley refused. Disney, she says, never asked her to do another audition.

While child stars like Drew Barrymore plunged into drug addiction and alcohol abuse, Polley went for political activism. She moved out of her home when she was 14, set up on her own - she had the income to do it - and dropped out of school. Her father was accepting of her independence, so he said in 1997, feeling "she was at her best when she was out of kilter with society in some way". Politics mattered, and Polley surrounded herself with activists she could learn from. She got involved with local campaigns, including the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and Toronto Health Coalition, and famously tussled with police in one protest, resulting in a few blows to the face. She organised a concert to raise awareness of a local cancer-care clinic, but her figurehead status made her uneasy.

At one point, the province's health minister, Tony Clement, challenged Polley to a debate on healthcare. "I just thought, what a fucking stupid thing. Every Canadian network was calling because they wanted to televise the debate. Here was the health minister, with all the resources of the government behind him, and me, a concerned citizen who cares about healthcare. Who do you think is going to win?" Instead, she put forward five health professionals, people who could challenge Clement publicly. There was no response. "They wanted the freakshow. The saddest thing was that I had all these doctors and radiologists saying, 'Go. You have to do it.' To have a health minister who will debate an actor but not a healthcare professional? I don't want to participate in that. I think it's gross."

Instead of returning to television after Avonlea, Polley began to work in the world of independent film, where Disney family values were thankfully absent. When the director Atom Egoyan needed to round out the cast of Exotica, a film about strip clubs, grief and denial, he chose Polley to play a young babysitter. She saw it as a clever reference to her Avonlea innocence. "He cast this person who was so supposed to be the sugary sweet pure thing in a role where, at the beginning of the movie, it's ambiguous as to whether or not I might be a prostitute," she says. "That's the sort of stupid fluke on which my career was based."

Her role in Exotica led Egoyan to cast her again in what came to be Polley's most nuanced performance to date. The Sweet Hereafter's central tragedy comes when a school bus crashes into a frozen lake, killing 14 children from a nearby small town. A big-city lawyer, played by Ian Holm, appears to build interest in a class-action lawsuit and during his interviews with the grieving parents the more disturbing elements of the town begin to emerge, including adultery and Polley's character's incestuous relationship with her father. The story hinges on her performance as a survivor, and Polley is focused and compassionate, believable even when she's lying, and miles away from Avonlea.

This is when Polley is at her strongest - odd, tender, moments of vulnerability. In My Life Without Me, she doesn't play a survivor. The scenario is bleak but the film never approaches death straight on; it nudges up against it. It's a warning to live each day. The highly practical Ann decides not to tell anyone about her cancer and instead makes a list of things to do before she dies. It includes finding a new wife for her husband, the first man she ever kissed, played by Scott Speedman. It includes smoking and drinking, being better to her mother (Blondie's Debbie Harry in a remarkably unglamorous role).

Her decision to "sleep with another man, just to see what it's like" leads her to an encounter with the shambling, poetic Lee, played with charm by Mark Ruffalo. She also decides to record a series of audio tapes for her daughters to listen to on each birthday until they reach 18, so they'll be able to construct an image of who their young mother was and remember the tones of her voice. In the film's best scene, Polley sits alone in a car trying to speak clearly into her tape recorder. "Now you're five," she says, before kissing the microphone. A few tapes later she says to her other daughter: "If you get a new mum, try and love her, OK?"

For years now, Polley has been engaged in the same process her fictional daughters will have to go through - piecing together the identity of an absent parent. When her mother, Diane, died of cancer, Polley was 11 - old enough to have gathered memories of who her mother was as a parent, but not as a person. "What my character does with those audio tapes is what makes this movie useful in a practical way," she says. "Anyone who lost a parent young fantasises about having something like that."

There are reminders of her own mother out there, including footage of her in a small role on a Canadian television series about lawyers. Otherwise, it's a process of gathering remembrances and layering them. "The good thing is that it's done without the complications of actually having a parent who's bugging you at the same time," she says. "I'll run into someone who will say, 'I knew your mom' and I'll be able to drill them about her. From the two sentences they tell me, I'll get a completely new part of her that I can tag on to this thing I'm building all the time."

Polley was still working on Road To Avonlea at the time of her mother's death and has said before that she didn't get to experience a "standard grief". At the memorial service, she scampered about playing practical jokes. "I remember everyone humouring me and being aware that they were going along with something they didn't think was natural," she says. "You'd hear people saying things like, 'You're taking this too well.' Everyone's used to a little girl crying at her mother's funeral. I'm sure it happens a lot of the time but it doesn't happen every time.

There's a certain expectation placed on people. And the reason is because they're sure there is this specific way people are supposed to react in situations. Movies contribute to this feeling because there's a particular way to react to death that happens in movies. It makes for a good trailer, it makes a good Academy Award nomination clip and it acts as a good kind of catharsis, but it's not really representative of the way everyone behaves under duress."

Our notions of grief and the acceptance of death have been tainted, slowly but constantly, Polley says, by the histrionics of death on screen. The death scene is such an entertainment staple that it comes with its own rhythm of gesticulation - clutched hands, tearful goodbyes, glazed eyes, defiant final breaths, a few subsequent howls of grief. We can't all go out big; we can't all go out like Love Story, but rarely does anyone on screen go out with quiet acceptance.

Polley's choices in each film so far have been marked by a tendency to forgo the obvious emotion. A tearjerker without the big tearjerk is an odd proposition, but it can work; at least, Polley seems to think so. "We know all those people cried their guts out," she says. "Why is it necessary to see it? We know that those little kids were devastated and shattered when their mother died. It's much more powerful to assume certain things. It is more interesting watching people in their quiet moments."

When Polley was interviewed by the Japanese press, no one questioned the reserved way Ann receives the news of her impending death and her decision not to tell anyone. "I actually started asking journalists about it and they said it was a cultural thing. There, it's a quieter way to live a life." It's reminiscent of a passage in Will The Circle Be Unbroken?, a book on death by oral historian Studs Terkel, who interviews a survivor of Hiroshima on the quietness of grief. "Calling out with one's discomfort - that was frowned upon. So you persevere, and virtue is to try to cope with whatever comes along. You're not supposed to cry out with pain. Some people who just couldn't help it would say something, but for the most part people were very silent."

Ann's silence on the subject is what makes the film a satisfying aberration for some and frustrating for others. After learning of her illness, Ann goes out to fulfil her life the way she wants to, and it's this decision that has brought criticism from (mostly male) American film reviewers. To the New York Times, it "seemed cruel and more than a bit passive-aggressive". Charles Taylor, in Salon, writes: " ... instead of being about a woman who wants to fade gracefully away from the people she loves ... the film becomes about someone who is egocentric enough to ensure that they never forget her". "Ask yourself how you would feel if you discovered your significant other was dying and decided not to tell you?" demands a reviewer at "And why doesn't some form of religious faith cross her mind?" asks the Christian Science Monitor.

The thing about terminal illness is no one knows what they'll do till they get the news, and Ann, being practical, does what she has to - and, playing her, Polley avoids melodrama.

It's this talent that brings Polley attention. She doesn't court it, but she's not as viciously opposed to it as she once was. Until recently, Polley used interviews to unleash a litany of hatred on the world of celebrity. One Canadian newspaper's entertainment writers were "bottom-feeders". The Oscars: "ludicrous". Posing for Vanity Fair: "gross". Hollywood: "I hate it." Fame: "so thin". Still, it was impossible to disentangle completely from the Hollywood machine. For a few years, Polley was poised to be crowned with that nebulous laurel, The Next Big Thing. When it didn't happen one year, she was set to be The Next Big Thing the next, then the year after that.

"Capital-S stardom seems imminent," wrote Chatelaine magazine in 1998. "Sarah Polley is on the verge," wrote Saturday Night magazine in 1999. Polley was "Hot Actress" in Rolling Stone's summer Hot issue later that year and then there was the Vanity Fair cover on which she posed with 14 other up-and-comers. Now it's clear that Polley will never be The Next Big Thing, but she has taken her place among young actors such as Scarlet Johansson, Thora Birch and Julia Stiles, who are each capturing aspects of disaffected, awkward young womanhood. None has portrayed pain as well as Polley, especially the internalised hurt that surfaces in My Life Without Me and The Sweet Hereafter. But this might come from life experience.

At 24, her politics remain the same, but she is less dogmatic and less ready to join up to causes than she once was. Her love life - formerly a series of "life-sucking nightmares" - has settled since she got married last month to a fellow worker in film, and she has recently come to the conclusion that the job of acting might not be as bad as she thought. Her prickly self-awareness helped her through the time when she could have ended up a forgotten ex-child star.

"I look at myself when I was 17, 18 and I'm amazed at how together I was. I already feel far away from that. As you get older, it gets harder to make those kinds of statements and to be so committed to what you believe in. You start to realise there are consequences to it. It's very easy when you're 17 and 18 to say, 'No, I'm not going to do this, I'm staying here in Canada, I'm not wearing designer clothes, I'm not having my make-up and hair done.' You have nothing to lose. It takes a few years until you realise this is limiting in a certain way. But I'm constantly making the decision. No one's immune to those kinds of pressures. It's something you have to struggle with constantly and fight yourself on. But living a perfectly comfortable life and doing movies you want to do - how can you feel bad about that?"

What if some day her old dream of anonymity in a northern country came true? What if there were no more films? "At any other point in my life I would have said, 'Fine, that would be great.' I'd like to think that's the case. The truth is I have no idea. I have a lot of people know who I was from the age of 10. Who the fuck knows how I'd react? Maybe it would be a disaster."

The afternoon wears on and the conversation turns to death again. Polley once said that in her mother's death she found "a kind of hope", and in some way this film, too, casts death as a guideline for living. "It takes terrible things to live well," she says. "One tragedy isn't enough. It'll last us maybe a few months or years but we have to be reminded." Most of the people close to her have experienced some sort of painful event. "I find it hard to relate to people who haven't. There's something less vivid about them. I see these people with both parents alive and think, 'There's so much pain waiting for you.' I'm so afraid for them because everything is waiting. It's not like there's going to be anything familiar about that pain." And for those who have experienced it? "It ends up being a great thing. You live in a more beautiful way."

· My Life Without Me is released on November 14

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