Sarah Polley, in an unknown movie production

Sarah Polley (born January 8, 1979 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian actress and producer. She has starred in a number of films including Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter.

Her first cinematic appearance was at the age of 4, in the role of Molly in Disney's film One Magic Christmas . By 11 she had caught a secondary role on Kevin Sullivan 's television series Lantern Hill , and begun to attract minor attention.

At the age of 12, 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 young Polley wore a peace symbol to the event, and upon refusing to remove it, was officially blacklisted from Disney indefinitely.

She burst into the public eye at age fourteen as Sara Stanley, the star of the popular CBC television series Road to Avonlea also produced by Kevin Sullivan . The same year she was romantically linked to Canadian writer and notorious "womanizer" Rick Salutin. 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.

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 offered and was set to take the role of Penny Lane in Almost Famous, but she dropped out of the project.

In 2003, she was part of newly-elected Toronto mayor David Miller's transition advisory team.

Partial filmography

• Dawn of the Dead (2004)
• My Life Without Me (2003)
• Guinevere (1999)
• Go (1999)

Television

• Road to Avonlea

External links