Sarah Polley Movies
Known as much for her intelligence as for her talent, Canadian actress Sarah Polley has been wowing television and film audiences since she was barely out of diapers. Born January 8, 1979, in the Toronto area, Polley got her first screen role at the age of six, in Disney's One Magic Christmas. From 1987 to 1988, Polley made her name in the title role of the Canadian television series Ramona. Her work on the show led to more screen work, first in the Matt Dillon flop The Big Town (1987) and then in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989).In 1990, Polley got a lead role on the acclaimed TV series The Road to Avonlea, a part that she played for five seasons. In 1994, she had a small but significant role in Atom Egoyan's Exotica and again collaborated with the director in 1997, for his critically lauded The Sweet Hereafter. The film was nominated for a host of awards, including a Best Director Oscar for Egoyan, and won a Special Grand Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. Polley drew her share of praise for her performance as the paralyzed survivor of a catastrophic bus accident and soon Hollywood was courting the waifishly unconventional actress, whom one critic remarked looked like Uma Thurman's wiser younger sister. However, for her next picture, Polley opted for a small Canadian production, The Last Night (1998), directed by Don McKellar.
Hollywood did become part of the picture with Polley's casting in Doug Liman's Go (1999), in which she starred with such other young notables as Katie Holmes, Scott Wolf, Taye Diggs, and Breckin Meyer. Her role in the film, combined with her performance in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (1999) and a lead role in Guinevere (also 1999), helped to classify her as one of the most talented actresses of her generation, not a bad accomplishment for someone who repeatedly stated that her primary goal in life was to become a writer.
In 2000, Polley returned to Canada to star in Kathryn Bigelow's The Weight of Water, a drama about the efforts of a photojournalist and her husband (Catherine McCormack and Sean Penn) to investigate a 19th century murder. That same year, she also appeared in Michael Winterbottom's The Claim, playing the daughter of a gold miner (Peter Mullan) who sells his family for a bag of gold.
Over the next four years, Polley continued to stick mostly to smaller independent films. She played a journalist opposite a monster in Hal Hartley's 2001 fantasy No Such Thing and won rave reviews and a Vancouver Film Critics Circle award for her performance as a terminally ill young woman in 2003's My Life Without Me.
In 2004, Polley took another stab at Hollywood, heading up the ensemble cast in the remake of George Romero's horror classic Dawn of the Dead. She returned to artier fare with the 2005 film The Secret Life of Words opposite Tim Robbins.
Polley made her direcotiral and screenwriting debuts in 2007 with an adaptation of Alice Munro's story The Bear Came Over the Mountain, a beautifully observed drama about an elderly married couple dealing with the wife alzheimer's disease. The film earned a handful of year-end awards and nominations, garnering Polley a nod for Best Adapted Screenplay from the Academy. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
- 1987
Hands of a Stranger was adapted by playwright Arthur Kopit from the best-selling novel by Robert Daley. Armand Assante plays a New York City narcotics officer who aids DA Blair Brown in her investigation of a rape case in which drugs were involved. In the subsequent days, Assante becomes something of an expert in rape evidence. Thus, when his wife Beverly D'Angelo is sexually assaulted while en route to a rendezvous with her lover, Assante suspects something even though D'Angelo remains mum about the incident. Conducting his own investigation, Assante determines the rapist's identity while wiretapping a phoned-in attempt to blackmail his wife. Will Assante forget everything he's learned about police procedure and attempt to take the law into his own hands? Co-starring in Hands of a Stranger is Arliss Howard as the scummy rapist. Preceded by a warning that the film contained scenes of a violent and graphic nature, Hands of a Stranger was originally broadcast in two parts, on May 10 and 11, 1987. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1987
This 15-part family-oriented series chronicles the lively adventures of author Beverly Cleary's much loved and ever mischievous 8-year-old Ramona as she grows up in a midwestern middle-class suburb. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1985
The "magic" in One Magic Christmas is often (and surprisingly) of the "black" variety. Like Jimmy Stewart before her, worn-out wife and mother Mary Steenburgen wishes that she'd never been born. And like Stewart, Steenburgen is visited by a guardian angel, in this case the western-garbed Harry Dean Stanton. Instead of granting Steenburgen's wish, Stanton shows her what life would be like without Christmas--and that vision is as grim as anything you're ever likely to see in any Holiday film. Throughout the horrendous tragedies heaped upon Steenburgen, we are comforted in the knowledge that Stanton is working in concert with Steenburgen's young daughter. Steenburgen learns her lesson of course, but what a ride! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Mary Steenburgen, Gary Basaraba, (more)
