Profile of Sarah Polley on Famous Like Me

Sarah Polley (born on January 8, 1979, in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian actress and director of short films. She has starred in a number of films, including Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. Her mother, a Canadian actress named Diane Polley, died of cancer when Sarah was an adolescent.

Her first cinematic appearance was at the age of 4, in the role of Molly in Disney's film One Magic Christmas. At age eight, she was cast in the title role in the television series Ramona , based on Beverly Cleary's books. Though the series lasted but one season, the following year, Polley burst into the public eye as Sara Stanley, the star of the popular CBC television series Road to Avonlea produced by Kevin Sullivan. The series made her famous and independently wealthy, hailed as "Canada's Sweetheart" by the popular press. After seven years with the program, she became irate at what she saw as Disney's interference and Americanization of the series and asked to be written out of the show's plot and saw her character travel to France to study and disappear from the series which then ended.

Her disenchantment with Disney was rooted in an incident that happened during the Gulf War, when she was invited by Disney to appear at a Children's Award Show in Washington, DC. With the United States still engaged in the Gulf War, the 12-year-old Polley wore a peace symbol to the event, and upon refusing to remove it, was blacklisted from Disney productions.

She turned more of her energies to left-wing politics, becoming a prominent member of the New Democratic Party, where maverick Ontario legislator Peter Kormos was said to be her political mentor. In 1995, she lost several teeth to riot police while protesting against the Provincial Conservative government of Mike Harris in Queen's Park, Toronto. Not wanting to be seen to be stealing the spotlight, by virtue of her profile, from other activists, she later scaled back on her political activism, but remains one of the most engaged young actors in North America.

After this incident she returned to acting and her role in The Sweet Hereafter (1997) first brought her considerable attention in the United States. She became a fan favourite at the Sundance Film Festival. She was cast in the role of Penny Lane in Almost Famous, but she dropped out of the project to return to Canada to make the low-budget film The Law of Enclosures.

In 2003, she was part of newly-elected Toronto mayor David Miller's transition advisory team, and that September she married film editor David Wharnsby.

Selected Filmography

• The Secret Life of Words (2005)
• Dawn of the Dead (2004)
• My Life Without Me (2003)
• The Weight of Water (2000)
• The Claim (2000)
• Go (1999)
• eXistenZ (1999)
• Guinevere (1999)
• Last Night (1998)
• The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
• Exotica (1994)
• Road to Avonlea (1989) (TV series)
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
• Ramona (1988) (TV series)

Trivia

• Appearance:
  • height: 5'2
  • hair color: blonde
  • eye color: blue

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