Sarah Polley turned the secret of her own paternity into an acclaimed documentary
As a child, Sarah Polley was teased by her siblings for looking nothing like her dad. As an adult she learned why: her biological father was the film producer Harry Gulkin, with whom her mother had an affair. Polley made that discovery the subject of Stories We Tell, a documentary that critics adored.
Born in Toronto on January 8, 1979, the youngest of five, Polley was acting on screen at four and playing Ramona Quimby on television at eight. Fame arrived in 1990 with the CBC series Road to Avonlea, which made her financially independent and earned her the tabloid nickname Canada's Sweetheart. Her mother, an actress and casting director, died of cancer the week Polley turned eleven. At around twelve she wore a peace sign to an awards ceremony in protest at the first Gulf War and refused Disney executives' request to take it off, which chilled her relationship with the company that carried the show in the United States.
Adolescence was hard. Severe scoliosis meant spinal surgery at fifteen and a year in bed, and by the same age she had left school and was living alone, housed for a time by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, which also drew her into activism. She quit a Stratford Festival run as Alice early in 1994, officially over her back; decades later she admitted the real problem was stage fright. Working with Atom Egoyan on Exotica and then The Sweet Hereafter rekindled her interest in acting and made her a Sundance favourite. She even walked away from the role of Penny Lane in Almost Famous to make a low-budget Canadian film.
Directing became her main work. Her first feature, Away from Her, adapted an Alice Munro story, opened at Toronto on September 11, 2006, and earned her an Oscar nomination for adapted screenplay. She had asked Margaret Atwood for the rights to Alias Grace at seventeen and waited about two decades to film it, as a 2017 miniseries. A head injury later caused post-concussion symptoms that kept her from working for four years.
In 2022 her film Women Talking, from Miriam Toews's novel, won her the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. After 2010 she did not act on screen for fifteen years, until Seth Rogen coaxed her into playing herself in The Studio in 2025.
Source: Sarah Polley
