Sarah Polley

Sarah Polley (born January 8, 1979, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian actor, director, writer, and producer who first won acclaim as a child actor, noted for her natural and unaffected performances in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997), among other credits. She later moved behind the camera for a series of acclaimed dramas, including Women Talking (2022), for which she won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

The daughter of casting director and actress Diane Polley and British-born actor-turned-insurance-salesman Michael Polley, Sarah Polley was the youngest of five children. She began acting at age four and made her film debut in Philip Borsos’s One Magic Christmas (1985). She then appeared in several films and television series before scoring leading roles in Terry Gilliam’s epic fantasy The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and the PBS children’s series Ramona (1988).

Polley won the starring role of Sara Stanley in the CBC TV series Road to Avonlea (1990–96), and her performance possessed a maturity and intelligence that belied her young age. When not being tutored on the set, she attended the Claude Watson Arts Program at Earl Haig Secondary School in Toronto. During that time she began to become politically active. After delivering memorable performances in Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) and an episode of the children’s series Straight Up (1996), at age 17 she left school and quit acting to devote herself to left-wing political activism, a period that lasted several years.

Polley worked as part of New Democratic Party candidate Mel Watkins’s unsuccessful 1997 federal election campaign. She also volunteered for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and the anti-nuclear organizations Canadian Peace Alliance and Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament.

She accepted a key role in Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997) as a break from her activist work. She expected that working with Egoyan would make a good coda to her acting career, but instead the film began a new era for her as an artist. In addition to bringing her international attention and Genie Award nominations for best actress and best original song, the Oscar-nominated film made Polley realize that acting could be significant and socially relevant, and it marked a clear transition for her from child actor to adult star.

Polley contributed supporting performances to a number of significant films by prominent Canadian directors, such as Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden (1997), Clement Virgo’s The Planet of Junior Brown (1997), Don McKellar’s Last Night (1998), and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999). She seemed poised for stardom in the United States after her work in Doug Liman’s Go (1999) and Audrey Wells’s Guinevere (1999) earned her rave reviews and major industry buzz. Yet she eschewed mainstream fame and gave her allegiance instead to the Canadian film industry, backing out of the star-making role of Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s Oscar-winning Almost Famous (2000) to star in John Greyson’s cryptic The Law of Enclosures (2000).

She continued to work in unconventional and independent films, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s The Weight of Water (2000), Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim (2000), and Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing (2001). After starring in Zack Snyder’s hit zombie movie Dawn of the Dead (2004) and Wim Wenders’s Don’t Come Knocking (2005), she costarred with Gerard Butler and Stellan Skarsgård in Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf & Grendel (2006). She also worked in television, appearing with her father in the critically acclaimed Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows (2006) and with Paul Giamatti in the award-winning HBO mini-series John Adams (2008). Although her political work had slowed after her return to acting in the late 1990s, in 2003 Toronto Mayor David Miller appointed her to his transition advisory team.

At age 20 Polley wrote and directed her first short film, Don’t Think Twice (1999), a black comedy about a man (Tom McCamus) who is forced to choose between his lover and his family. In 2001 she attended the Canadian Film Centre’s Director’s Lab. Her second short, I Shout Love (2001), won a Genie Award for Best Live Action Short Drama. She then wrote and directed Away from Her (2006), her adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Went over the Mountain,” for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay. Starring Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie as a married couple coping with Alzheimer disease and a lingering history of infidelity, the film won six major Genie Awards, including those for best motion picture, adapted screenplay, and achievement in direction. Away from Her also earned Polley the prestigious Claude Jutra Award for best feature film by a first-time director and picked up dozens of international honours.

Her 2011 feature film, Take This Waltz, which she wrote and directed, was named one of Canada’s Top Ten features of the year by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), as was her next film, the highly personal documentary Stories We Tell (2012), which explored the nuances of her family’s history. In addition to winning the Genie Award for Best Feature Length Documentary, it was named best documentary of the year by numerous critics and organizations. Polley later cowrote the TV miniseries Alias Grace (2017), which was based on the novel by Margaret Atwood. She then codirected Hey Lady! (2020– ), a digital comedy series centring on a senior citizen who challenges societal norms and sometimes even the law; each episode was just five minutes long. In 2022 she earned praise for Women Talking, an adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel, which was inspired by a true story. The drama centres on female members of a cloistered religious community who contemplate leaving after a number of sexual assaults. For her adapted screenplay, Polley won her first Oscar.

In 2015 Polley was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. About this time she suffered a severe concussion that required a lengthy recovery. As part of her treatment, Polley was encouraged to pursue activities that brought discomfort. That advice, in part, led her to write the essay collection Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory (2022), in which she explores difficult incidents from her life.

The original version of this entry was published by The Canadian Encyclopedia.