Sarah Polley explains why held off talking about Jian Ghomeshi
CTV
About halfway through Sarah Polley's essay collection 'Run Towards the Danger,' she notes that she spent much of her 20s 'mostly limiting my acting roles to ones in which I could express a lot of pain.'
It offered a great "catharsis," the 43-year-old writer and director says in a recent interview from her home in Toronto, because off-screen, her life was plagued by personal and professional pains.
During these years she was living with a severe case of endometriosis. Well into an acting career that started at age four, she had also begun to resent the demands it placed on her, even as a child.
She writes that she was 11 and working on the CBC series "Road to Avonlea" in the southern Ontario town of Uxbridge when her mother died of cancer back home in Toronto.
"The idea of playing a light character that's happy and giggling all the time was a real stretch for me," Polley says.