To update your cookie settings, please visit the Cookie Preference Center for this site. ", Making the film has changed the way Sarah sees her mother. It was at this time that she famously got "roughed up" by riot police protesting at a conservative government cutting welfare benefits and lost two back teeth. I had known this story my whole life about this part she wanted and she didnt get and she thought of it as a pivotal moment in her life, and it really broke her heart, said Polley. . Those reminiscences about an elusive mother turn into a search for clues that will literally explain how this filmmaker came into the world. Sarah grew up with a family joke that she did not look anything like her siblings. [17][18], Polley attended Subway Academy II, then Earl Haig Secondary School, but dropped out at age 15. She suffered headaches and nausea, brought on by everyday levels of light and sound. hide caption. By Nicole Sperling, Los Angeles Times. It was really interesting to have a big drama in your own life, and have this need to make it into narrative.. John Buchan, Polleys brother and an on-camera subject in Stories We Tell, said in an interview that he had some hesitation about entrusting so much family history to her for that film. She made her feature-length film directing debut with Away from Her, which Polley adapted from the Alice Munro short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain. To update your cookie settings, please visit the, Academic & Personal: 24 hour online access, Corporate R&D Professionals: 24 hour online access, https://doi.org/10.1016/S1470-2045(13)70470-4, The Lancet Regional Health Southeast Asia, The Lancet Regional Health Western Pacific, Statement on offensive historical content, For academic or personal research use, select 'Academic and Personal', For corporate R&D use, select 'Corporate R&D Professionals'. I dont think I ever resolved my self-doubt or my feelings of ambiguity about it. The author Margaret Atwood, a longtime friend who also read drafts of Run Towards the Danger, said that she has seen Polley strive for greater honesty in her work and in her life. [42] It premiered at the 49th Telluride Film Festival on September 2, 2022, and went into wide release on December 23, 2022. And as her family secret leaked out, she kept it from the public for another five years, convincing journalists not to report it because this was a story she wanted exclusive rights to. Polley's mom died in 1990 of cancer, and her father remembers bonding then with his youngest daughter. Presenting a Rashomon-like maze of contradictory interviews, Polley puts her entire family on camera, including her four siblings and two dads. Besides, what gives the film its distinction are the questions it raises that reach beyond plot: do we own our own stories or do they own us? It includes many friends all of whom have versions of her. Polley's subsequent role as Nicole Burnell in the 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter brought her considerable attention in the United States; she was a favourite at the Sundance Film Festival. She exposes the filmmaking process by filming set-up shots and voice-over sessions while hiding other details; in particular her personal response to the shocking revelation. [43] [44] It was released to widespread acclaim, with 90% of critics giving it a positive review on Rotten Tomatoes. Polley made her feature film directorial debut with Away from Her (2006), for which she won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Director and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. My dad is very open about this in the film. The revelation sent Polley reeling: If her father was not her father, then who was her mother, and what did that mean about her own identity? The movie, starring Julie Christie (with whom she had played in No Such Thing, 2001, and The Secret Life of Words, 2005), debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2006, as part of the TIFF's Gala showcase. Privacy PolicyTerms and ConditionsAccessibility, To read this article in full you will need to make a payment. I decide it cannot be Sarah. Polley discovered as an adult that her biological father was actually Harry Gulkin, with whom her mother had an affair (as chronicled in Polley's film Stories We Tell). Polley also appeared in 44 episodes of the Canadian drama Street Legal. Yet a few pages later, Polley finds herself regretting that she absolved Gilliam too easily, having bought into the archetype of the out-of-control white male genius: Its so pervasive, this idea that genius cant come without trouble, that it has paved the way for countless abuses, she writes. George Bernard Shaw wrote: "If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." The only thing that somewhat assuaged that anxiety was the support of the National Film Board of Canada, which financed the $1.7-million film. Michael Polley, her British-born father an actor who worked for an insurance company at one dramatic point says he will not try to "guess" what Sarah's thoughts are. [17] She was awarded the CAN$100,000 prize for best Canadian film of the year by the Toronto Film Critics Association. As I fly to Canada to meet Sarah Polley, I think about the glimpses of her in Stories We Tell her first full-length documentary feature, which bowled over critics at Sundance and the Venice film festival and has won Canada's Film of the Year award. Anyone can read what you share. It drew rave reviews from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and the three Toronto dailies, both for the performances of Christie and her co-star, Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, and for Polley's direction. She describes him as "a really great person" but the marriage did not last and, in 2011, she married David Sandomierski, a lawyer with whom she has a 16-month-old daughter named Eve. In a new, extremely intimate documentary five years in the making, Polley searches for her own answers while posing universal and sometimes uncomfortable questions about betrayal, identity and the definition of family. After her death, "suddenly there was myself and this little girl. "I remember Johnny saying [that] your father might be someone that Mum had acted with in a play," one brother observes. Polley burst into the public eye in 1990 as Sara Stanley on the popular CBC television series Road to Avonlea. Every other ramshackle shop seems to be attempting to evolve into an art gallery. This at least afforded her the time to finish the essays in Run Towards the Danger while her three children slept or her husband looked after them. I think to make it your job to think about your family and to dredge up stuff about your family all day, every day would make anybody totally crazy. I dont have this need for secrecy around almost every part of my life.. One section of the film recounts how Diane left her first husband for Michael and in the process lost custody of John and Susy; she made headlines as the first Canadian woman to be denied custody because of her adulterous affair. She jammed cotton balls into her ears to drown out the noise. [64][65], On October 16, 2010, it was announced that she would receive a star on Canada's Walk of Fame. [68] Polley was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada on December 30, 2013.[69]. [7] She was competent and beautiful [unusual to dovetail these adjectives]. In 1996, she gave a nomination speech for Kormos at the ONDP leadership convention which she later referred to as the "proudest moment in [her] life".[48]. This rock star of "Two Tickets to Paradise" fame learned he had esophageal cancer after a routine checkup. Stories We Tell is an intimate documentary that took five years to make. It ran from 1996 to 1998 and she won the Gemini Award for Best Performance in a Children's or Youth Program or Series for her role. He tried hard and, to some extent, rallied. She was cast in the role of Penny Lane in the big-budget 2000 film Almost Famous, but dropped out of the project to return to Canada for the low-budget The Law of Enclosures. And then Sarah tells me at my prompting about her last memory of her mother: "A few days before she died and just before she went into a coma, I remember Dad dancing with her to Blue Spanish Eyes one of her favourite songs. [59], In 2007, Polley discovered that her father, Michael Polley, who had raised her, was not her biological father. Though Polley did not express misgivings about the films she made with him, Egoyan said he still felt guilty for her tenuous relationship to her past acting work. [24], Polley appeared as Lily on the CBC television series Straight Up. I find that really gratifying. She had five kids, commuted to work and yet she slept so little. Before marrying Michael Polley, she was front-page news when she left her first husband and became the first Canadian mother to lose custody of her children (Sarahs half-sister and brother). At nine, her role in the Canadian television series Road to Avonlea made her name and enough money with which, much later, to think about making a film. She was dissuaded by family and friends from coming forward with her experiences, but ultimately chose to do so in her autobiographical essay collection Run Towards the Danger. Sarah then spent five years delving deeply into her family history. [45] Shirley Li of The Atlantic called it "vibrant cinema," while Anna Bogutskaya of Time Out (magazine) said that it "imagines female emancipation as an honest, raging, caring experience. I feel really committed to it. Nevertheless, she followed her mothers footsteps into acting, taking to the Canadian stage as a child and at 18 catching the attention of U.S. audiences after her role in The Sweet Hereafter.. The series premiered in 2017 on CBC Television in Canada; it streams on Netflix globally, outside of Canada. Disney executives asked her to remove it, and she refused. The following year, she starred as part of the ensemble cast in the film Go. She looks like a contemplative Madonna on screen, with long, fair hair. [6] She previously directed the 2012 documentary Stories We Tell, which used interviews with her family members and re-enactments to reveal that her own birth had been the result of her mothers affair with a man who was not the father who raised her. Dame Diana Rigg has died peacefully at her home surrounded by family following a cancer battle. She closely examined the details of Diane Polleys life, from a career perspective and her tumultuous private life. Stories We Tell is released in cinemas on 28 July. With: Michael Polley, Sarah Polley, Diane Polley. That includes Diane's children, Mark, Joanna, Susy and John, as well as her closest friends. Michael Polley and Sarahs biological father also speak at length on camera, each discussing the woman they loved, their relationship with her and even their feelings about the other man. The interviews are remarkably candid, with the main players expressing a wide range of emotions: regret, empathy and self-criticism. In a strange way, I contributed to that, he said. A young Sarah Polley and her actor father, Michael Polley, on a long-ago day; the photo is one of many family memories that surface in Stories We Tell, a superb meditation on dramatizing memory from the director of Away from Her. In fact, there was even speculation that their actress mother Diane, who died of cancer before Polley hit her teen years, had had an affair with an actor who she was appearing with in a play in Montreal. The acclaimed Canadian film-maker talks about the often painful burden of exploring the lives of loved ones and why she thinks marriage is a 'crazy and optimistic' institution, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, Sarah Polley: 'Stories are our way of coping, of creating shape out of mess', Sarah Polley: Stories We Tell Photograph: Roadside Attractions/Rex Features, Stories We Tell review Sarah Polleys complex love letter to her parents, Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell: watch the acclaimed documentary here, Sarah Polley: 'We're all kind of ugly in our relationships', Show us your favourite photo of your parents, Stories We Tell: watch the trailer for Sarah Polley's new film - video, Readers' favourite photos of their parents. His quirky, engagingly self-deprecatory commentary contributes hugely to the film's charm. Its been more than six years since Sarah Polley was struck on the head by a fire extinguisher, one that was unwisely hung over a lost-and-found box at her local community center, leaving her with a debilitating concussion. I sit in the shade and wait. Polley also appeared in stage productions. She made her acting debut aged four and is critical of the way child actors are treated. Subsequently this led to her role as Sara Stanley in the Canadian television series Road to Avonlea (19901996). October 11, 2012, Ken Woroner/National Film Board of Canada, Sarah Polley received the shattering news in the fall of 2006, just after launching Away From Her, her Oscar-nominated feature-directing debut. how long does crab paste last; is gavin hardcastle married; cut myself shaving down there won't stop bleeding And as her youngest daughter processes all these contradictions, an exercise in family navel-gazing becomes something more meta less about the stories themselves than about the often uproarious ways in which people tell stories. The seriesat least in the beginning, before Polley lost interest in acting and left the showfocused on Polley's character, Sarah Stanley, a girl who had lost her mother and was sent to be raised by her maiden aunts. "As a middle-class woman with a career, it is unimaginable to think of a woman having her children taken away because her 'desire for a career overtook her domestic duties'." [13], On September 10, 2003, Polley married Canadian film editor David Wharnsby, her boyfriend of seven years. Its different if somebody else is indiscreet about you.. . [30] The critically acclaimed documentary examined family secrets in Polley's own childhood. The 82-year-old icon, known for her roles in The Avengers and more recently Game of Thrones, had . The content on this site is intended for healthcare professionals. This was not a traditional father-child relationship. Two days after her 11th birthday, Sarah Polley lost her mother to cancer. Feb. 17, 2022. And telling it has brought her closer to Michael. As I get older, Im realizing its OK for stories to be messy or go down circuitous paths that dont lead anywhere., She added, We create these clean narratives to make sense of our basically bewildering lives. Polley, who became a mother herself during the making of this familial drama, found herself needing breaks during the long process, at one point leaving Stories We Tell for seven months to write and direct Take This Waltz, a narrative feature starring Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen released in the U.S. last year. There is a memorable line from Take This Waltz that goes: "Life has a gap in it, it just does." It binds everyone together." "Diane Polley, 54 was actress, talent agent", http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/thestar/access/471412111.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Jan+11%2C+1990&author=Sid+Adilman+Toronto+Star&pub=Toronto+Star&desc=Diane+Polley%2C+54+was+actress%2C+talent+agent&pqatl=google, "Sarah Polley recalls her own sorrow with new role in `My LIfe'", http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/bostonherald/access/421326461.html?dids=421326461:421326461&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Oct+09%2C+2003&author=Stephen+Schaefer&pub=Boston+Herald&desc=MOVIES%3B+Sarah+Polley+recalls+her+own+sorrow+with+new+role+in+%60My+LIfe%27&pqatl=google, "Sarah Polley popolnoma zaljubljena v igro [Sarah Polley completely in love with the game]", http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.siol.net%2Ftv%2Fzanimivosti%2F2011%2F04%2Fsarah_polley.aspx&date=2012-10-12, "Loretta says it's genetics that make her look younger", http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/thestar/access/470726331.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Jul+17%2C+1989&author=Rita+Zekas+Toronto+Star&pub=Toronto+Star&desc=Loretta+says+it%27s+genetics+that+make+her+look+younger&pqatl=google, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0689568/filmotype, http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=15IuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=UqEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=2842,1622127&dq=diane-polley&hl=en, "'Anne of Green Gables' star Jonathan Crombie dies at age 48", http://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/anne-of-green-gables-star-jonathan-crombie-dies-at-age-48-1.2333898, "'Anne of Green Gables' Star Jonathan Crombie dies at 48", http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jonathan-crombie-dead-anne-green-789940, "Sarah Polleys new film reveals her secret parentage", http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/sarah-polleys-new-film-reveals-her-secret-parentage/article4508957/, http://en.wikialpha.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Diane_Polley&oldid=160918. "I'm interested in the way we tell stories about our lives," she says in the film, "about the fact that the truth about the past is often ephemeral and difficult to pin down.". We are never going to feel that life is complete but we live in an age that tells us that this is a problem." And now here it is: Cafe Diplomatico, Little Italy, nicknamed "the Dip", which has been open for business for 45 years a Toronto landmark. This is the endlessly complicated subject of Sarah Polley's dazzling, multi-leveled documentary, an inquiry into her late mother, Diane, that widens in scope until director and audience stand at . At 14, she left home. On the upside, the experience afforded her the opportunity to more intimately understand her mother. This is a fantastic moment in the film (no reconstruction involved). She already has a classy track record as a film director. Polley's mom died in 1990 of cancer, and her father remembers bonding then with his youngest daughter. He says, I encouraged her anytime she felt I was inadequate to have an affair, as long as she didnt leave me. When Polley was promoting Take This Waltz, someone noted that, like Away From Her, its about a stoical husband who faces betrayal without anger. I have never seen a city with glossier, better tended roses. She did so much perhaps it is not such a surprise she died at 53.". The lady is not a tramp the tramp is a lady. For me, I love the feeling of using different parts of my brain separately. The officiator just said: never mind." Film producer Harry Gulkin describes her magnetism and takes Sarah to task because he wants the story told his way. Sarah was "staggered" to find an article that coldly spelt out that, for Diane, this was "the cost of adultery". They held off for 20 years until she was ready to make the show. [22] The show ran until 1996; Polley did return as Sara Stanley for an episode in 1995 and for the series finale. But now she has unveiled the puzzle of her parentage in an enthralling documentary, Stories We Tell, which premiered at festivals in Venice and Toronto to the acclaim of critics. But she wants to impress on me that she still regards her story as ordinary, whatever others may say. She sees herself as a part-time extrovert. But I made the film to have agency in how the story was going to be told. Documentaries dont usually require spoiler alerts. In its first chapter, Run Towards the Danger offers a melancholy reflection on Polleys teenage struggles with scoliosis, her body horror juxtaposed with several anxious, frustrating months spent playing the lead in a Stratford Festival production of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Her mother died of cancer when Polley was 11; her father sank into a depression and by age 14 the author had left home to move in with an older brothers ex-girlfriend and largely figure out the world for herself. Diane Polley was a Canadian actor and casting director. [57], In January 2012, Polley endorsed Toronto MP Peggy Nash in the 2012 New Democratic Party leadership race to succeed Jack Layton. She has starred in many feature films, including The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Guinevere (1999), Go (1999), The Weight of Water (2000), No Such Thing (2001), My Life Without Me (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Splice (2009), and Mr. Nobody (2009). Memory is not a convenient barn in which truth can be stored through successive winters. She thinks it too easy to "blame the person with whom we are sharing our life". When actress mom Diane Polley died, Sarah was just eleven. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements involving sexuality, brief strong language and smoking. Genealogy profile for Diane Elizabeth Polley. Despite the fact that the family had watched Diane battle the cancer that eventually killed her, when she died everyone was shocked. Like a father surveying his family from the head of a dining table, he reads aloud, savouring the narrative. [50] In 2003, she was part of former Toronto mayor David Miller's transition advisory team. I realized Ive gone to all this trouble and people are going to read the story before they see the film anyway. In 2012 Polley's daughter Sarah directed a film about her own birth, after having confirmed, as an adult, that her conception was the result of an affair her mother had. I got really, really ill. Sarah even found and filmed a newspaper cutting reporting on the case. [67] In June 2013, she received the National Arts Centre Award recognizing achievement over the past performance year at the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards, where she was the subject of a short vignette by Ann Marie Fleming entitled Stories Sarah Tells. Polley had five children, several of whom followed their parents into theatre, including her youngest, actor and director Sarah Polley. You cant be an artist unless you put yourself into it. A decade later, hours before she was to introduce a Montreal screening of Away From Her her first film as a director and one that would land her an Oscar nomination a secret that had been buried all of her 28 years suddenly burst into the open: Michael Polley was not her biological father. "And Dad joked about it.". Her son Mark Polley is also an actor.[2]. And Polley believes: "We blame relationships for that gap. The news also sent ripples through her extended family, with the story being told and examined from multiple points of view by her four older brothers and sisters, her uncle, her mothers friends and others. In another chapter, The Woman Who Stayed Silent, Polley revisits what she used to call a funny party story about my worst date ever with Jian Ghomeshi, the musician and former CBC radio host who in 2016 was acquitted of five charges related to sexual assault. Her character in the film was an aspiring singer, and on the film's soundtrack, she performed covers of The Tragically Hip's "Courage" and Jane Siberry's "One More Colour," as well as the film's title track, which she co-wrote with Mychael Danna.[25]. Another friend, Mort Ransen, speaks of her fear of cancer and likens her to a trembling bird. [14][15][16] When Polley turned 18, she decided to follow up on suggestions from her mother's friends that her biological father might be Geoff Bowesone of three castmates from her mother's play in Montreal. [8][9], Her mother was an actress (best known for playing Gloria Beechham in 44 episodes of the Canadian TV series Street Legal) and a casting director. Her father, Michael, is a transplanted British actor; her mother, Diane, was an actress and casting director. [60], On August 23, 2011, Polley married David Sandomierski, who at the time was working on his SJD degree (equivalent to a PhD in law) at the University of Toronto, which he would complete six years later, in 2017. Her first career was an actor. During the making of the film, her sisters also divorced their spouses.) Its completely unlike any other film Ive seen.. In 1999, Polley made her first short film, The Best Day of My Life,[20] for the On the Fly 4 Film Festival. The filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who directed Polley in his movies Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, said that not even his long friendship and past collaborations with her had fully prepared him for what he read in early drafts of her book. In the essay, Polley reproduces an email exchange she had with Gilliam several years later, writing to him that i was pretty furious at you for a lot of years, though she says the adults who should have been there to protect me were my parents, not you. (Gilliam replies with an apology for the chaotic film shoot, writing, Although things might have seemed to be dangerous, they werent.). "I felt closer to you than I ever felt about the other children," he tells her, explaining that he'd always shared her siblings' attention with their mom. Western Law 2018 Alumni Magazine, 2018. He taught himself to cook "amazingly". (Polley writes in the book that she saw Gerwigs film, calling it beautifully realized.). Genealogy for Diane Elizabeth Polley (MacMillan) (1936 - 1990) family tree on Geni, with over 230 million profiles of ancestors and living relatives. In the film, Polley breaks up her father's narration with interviews conducted with other members of her family. The filmmaker realized this was something worthy of more detailed exploration and a documentary was born. Last years Telluride and Toronto film festivals elicited rave reviews for the documentary and Indiewire called it the finest of Polleys filmmaking skills and New York Magazine referred to Polley as a gifted actress and possibly more gifted writer-director.

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