In case you’re curious, Sarah Polley is the sort of person who is the reason for the age limit on this column. Up until 2010, you’d be writing about her as an actress. So okay, the column isn’t that old, but you get the idea. You could have written a column detailing her career going back to 1985, when she was a mere six-year-old. You could continue on a line through The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Road to Avonlea. The Sweet Hereafter and Go and into her adult work including of course Slings & Arrows, more on which anon. And you could have said, you know, doubtless we’ll be seeing more fine acting from her over the years, not knowing that it’s been fourteen years since Trigger and she’s shown no signs of ever acting again.
Polley is from the delightfully insular world of Canadian acting. Her mother was an actress. Her father was an actor, more on which anon. Polley began acting very young. She and her mother have one credit together, on an episode of Ramona, and then her mother died two days after Polley’s eleventh birthday. The timeline is a little vague on Our Usual Sources, but it seems that, following an operation for her scoliosis, Polley dropped out of school and left home at age fifteen. She quit Road to Avonlea at about the same time.
The reason there is no Canadian equivalent of the Kevin Bacon game is that all Canadian actors are the Canadian equivalent of Kevin Bacon for the purposes of the Kevin Bacon game. Before she even started on Ramona, she had been credited with Loreena McKennitt, Andromeda’s Gordon Michael Woolvett, Kevin McDonald, and the cast of SCTV. And that’s just the Canadians. Road to Avonlea would become one of those shows where they seemed by the end to being door to door through the country, asking people to appear on it. I’m genuinely shocked the only credit she shares with Graham Greene is Slings & Arrows, and they don’t even appear on the same season.
She does, on the other hand, have several shared credits with Michael Polley, whom she grew up believing was her father—including, as it happens, Slings & Arrows, on which he was a minor but vital character. The only shared credit she has with Harry Gulkin is on Stories We Tell, the documentary Polley made about her own family history and discovering that Gulkin is her biological father. She remains close to her stepfather, but it seems likely that Polley wishes she could hear her mother’s version of the whole thing, all things considered.
Stories We Tell is one of ten directorial credits from Polley. It’s clear that this is where her career is headed now. She won an Oscar for the screenplay of Women Talking and, if you ask me, has deserved several others over the years, ones she was nominated for and ones she wasn’t. (Also, that Gordon Pinsent deserved an Oscar nomination for Away From Her is a hill I will die on.) In the Year of Our Lord 2024, it seems likely that Sarah Polley will be one of the great directors of the twenty-first century, but who’s to say what her career will look like in 2038?