Polley thinks of these interviews as performances. In interviews at the time, she appeared before the cameras, speaking like a polite, poised adult about her role on the show. MORE: With ‘Turning Red,’ Domee Shi wants to tell the story of your childhoodīack then, even when she was out of character, Sarah Polley seemed to be living in a kind of idyll. (In one of our conversations for this piece, Polley describes Montgomery as “problematic on so many levels” because of this nostalgia, but acknowledges the fierce grip of her romanticism on lonely children.) In the book, she writes that she now sees much of Montgomery’s work as creating a nostalgia for a time that never existed. In her new memoir, Run Towards the Danger, Polley puts the lie to the notion that she was experiencing anything like the wholesome L.M. They represented a sort of innocence that he loved.Ĭhild actress Sarah Polley playing flute in her room. He once said, “I think of her as my own little girl.” My father was always bizarrely charmed by child actors. He would sit on the edge of the couch, eating leftover spaghetti and grinning at her proudly. He couldn’t stop raving about her performance, about how adorable and intelligent she was. My father thought Sarah Polley was the most beautiful child he had ever seen. I read every book of hers I could get my hands on, convinced this was the life I should be living. At the time, in the 1980s, there was nothing more wholesome than Montgomery. She is more erudite and sophisticated than the town’s people, and she ends up enrapturing them all.

Polley was playing the lead role, Sara Stanley, a wise, orphaned child who is sent to live in a rural Prince Edward Island town.

The first time we saw Sarah Polley was in the TV series Road to Avonlea, which was based on characters and stories from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. And those shows were part of who we were. The rest of the time we watched CBC television. Sometimes it would find a lucky spot where it could sit for a week or two. Then there was a whole to-do with the antennae, which often involved sticking it out the window and using masking tape to hold it in place. We put piles of old Yellow Pages on the radiator to lower and raise the television to a spot where the reception was clearer.

This involved a small Brechtian production.

My dad and I did everything we could to occasionally pick up the PBS channel from Vermont. I grew up in Montreal in the ’80s, without cable TV.

Waves of Reckoning by Terri Marie