The Swirl of Hollywood

Meg Tilly’s star had limitless potential but, as Pamela Post reports, this Oscar-nominated actress rejected the limelight to reclaim her life

She still speaks with the same soft little-girl voice and exudes the same gentle-as-a-fawn aura as she did as the lithe and ethereal Chloe in The Big Chill or as the enigmatic young nun in Agnes of God. But it’s clear to me after spending an afternoon with her that Meg Tilly is no lamb—she’s a lionheart.

It’s a crisp fall day and we’re sharing comfort food at Aphrodite’s on Fourth Avenue. I chose the venue after reading her delightful blog. Her almost daily entries gave me a clear sense that Meg Tilly, the Academy Award-nominated actress and ’80s film waif, is an Earth mother at heart.

Her blog (officialmegtilly.com/blog) is peppered with musings about her kids, the economy, her life as a writer—and recipes. She shares her joy in the sensual pleasures of making turkey gravy, sweet potato mash, the perfect piecrust, and buttermilk pancakes in a way that gives you as much enjoyment reading about it as you’d expect to have eating the results. As we drink hot chocolate and share a piece of rustic apple-blackberry pie after lunch—“Mmm, good filling,” she murmurs approvingly—she tells me about what a long, strange trip it’s been.

She’s now 48 and I’m struck by how unapologetic this creature of Hollywood is about her age. Her black hair has whispers of grey that she respects enough to allow. There’s not a spot of makeup on her face or on her still disarmingly doe-like eyes. And unlike her glamorous sister Jennifer—Meg is the first to admit—she doesn’t get the fashion thing.

In this era of Botox and Desperate Housewives, there’s something about Meg’s comfort—even delight—with her unadorned self that feels infectiously liberating. The wisdom that comes with experience, she says, is one of the wonderful things about getting older. “I know a lot of women really don’t like it. But I love getting older. I don’t like the aches and pains in the body, but if that’s the price I have to pay for getting this much me—then it’s worth it, you know?”
Meg Tilly left life in the Hollywood fast lane in 1995 for what to her was a far greater calling: raising her three children. Her goal: to make the home life for them she never had as a child. “I made the decision to quit because I wanted to rewrite the book on my childhood. My kids now bear the burden of hearing what a ‘gifted actress your mother was’ and thinking I left this fabulous career for them. But it was as much for me as for them. It was hard being famous. It can be very lonely and isolating.”

She loved acting, “getting into someone else’s skin and having these wonderful experiences and travelling.” And the “fabulous” pay provided her with a nest egg that has both paid for her children’s education and has been carefully invested into a retirement fund.

But she doesn’t miss the dark side of fame. Like the time during childbirth when the modest Meg, splay-legged in stirrups, was deep in labour. “And every intern in the hospital was coming in to take a look, and the nurse saying, ‘What was Bill Hurt like? I have such a crush on him!’”
The decision to jump off the fame train was also the catalyst for her reincarnation as a writer. Meg crafted stories that she first passed off as fiction, but that after publication came with a stunning confession: her stories of children enduring heart-rending abuse, neglect, poverty, violence, and sexual predation—often within their own families—were based on her own childhood.

Meg Tilly was born Margaret Chan on Valentine’s Day in 1960 in California. Her teacher mother divorced her Chinese-American father when she was a toddler. Her mother and her new stepdad then moved the family to rural Texada Island off the B.C. coast. Being half Chinese was the first of many secrets that she and her siblings were taught to hide.

“Growing up, we were led to believe that being half Chinese was a dirty secret that would cause people to shun us if they knew. My mother loved us, but it was a defective, crippled love.”

After decades of hiding the truth, Meg talks with plain candour about the hurts and evils that came with her childhood. She now says her first novel, Singing Songs (1994), was her childhood, with dates, places, and birth orders mixed up to hide identities. In a fictionalized gloss it tells the story of growing up with a series of her mother’s boyfriends and husbands who were violent sexual predators. Meg, her sisters Jennifer and Rebecca, and several half- and step-siblings survived the rages and nocturnal visits of these men who beat, humiliated, and sexually abused them. And perhaps the worst nightmare of all: a mother who didn’t protect them.

The Big Chill (1983).The young Meg fled to New York at 16 on a dance scholarship at a top ballet school. When an injury put a halt to that career, she moved to acting and shot up the star stratosphere like a rocket. Her first screen role was a bit part in Fame, followed by The Big Chill, and Agnes of God, for which she won a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination. She was director Milos Forman’s first choice to play the role of Mozart’s wife, Constanze, in Amadeus. After rehearsing the role for seven weeks in Czechoslovakia, Meg tore ligaments in her leg during a pick-up soccer game the day before shooting was scheduled to start and ended up in hospital. The role went to Elizabeth Berridge.

“It was like a death… I felt like someone else was wearing my underwear,” she recalls, describing how she felt seeing the other actress playing Constanze on screen.

Looking back on her childhood, she sees why she so quickly became adept at acting or “hiding” in another person’s character. “Maybe that challenge was a gift as well. I learned to be a very good hider as a child. When my stepdad was coming to beat somebody, I was very fast. I could hide behind the fridge, under the sink, out of my window onto the roof.”

Much of her adult life, she says, she spent “being afraid,” sometimes attracting the wrong friends, partners, and relationships. She’s been married several times. Her two eldest children, Emily and David, are from her marriage to Hollywood film producer Tim Zinnemann. She had her youngest child, Will, now 18, during her five-year relationship with actor Colin Firth, with whom she is “still friends.” Another marriage was to a Hollywood mogul three decades her senior. She lived in a pattern of excessive caregiving, bailing one husband out of massive debt and hiding her fame light under a bushel, afraid to make the powerful men in her life feel “less than.”

After writing Singing Songs, Meg came more fully out of the closet with Gemma, the harrowing account of a 12-year-old girl kidnapped by a violent pedophile. Last year, her first book for young readers was released. Porcupine is a tale of children surviving the death of their soldier father in Afghanistan and subsequent abandonment by their mother. Her latest novel, First Time, released in November, tells the story of how a teenage girl deals with unwanted advances from her mother’s boyfriend.

She’s received critical acclaim for her writing, including comparisons to John Steinbeck. But disclosure came with a cost. Some family members loved her for it; some no longer speak to her. That was a tough pill to swallow for Meg, the nurturer. “I still send them love, but I decided not to be the doormat anymore. I decided in my books not to whitewash over the way these predators’ minds work, or what they did, because to do so would be a disservice to the children they victimize.

“My sister said to me, ‘Meggy, you know we spent our whole life holding the closet door shut—like terrified. And what you did is open it up again. You cleaned it out and you shined a light in there, and it’s like everything is clean again.’”

Having left Hollywood far behind, Meg now lives happily with her husband, Don, also a writer, and Will, who is in his final year of high school in Vancouver. She’s relishing her last year of being Earth mom to her last nestling. She makes Will hot breakfasts at 6:45 a.m. and drives him to school. Next year he heads to England to live with his famous actor father for the first time ever to study acting himself. All of which gives Meg chills of pride and fear.

“My goal when I left acting was to see my children safely into adulthood. I now realize that in trying to give them the wonderful childhood I didn’t have—the warm milk and cookies and the safety—that I deprived them of other things, like some of my self-sufficiency skills. But they’re off—well, almost all off—leading adult lives and doing so well. I’m left with this scary kind of exciting freedom for the first time in my life. It’s a little bit like feeling cut adrift.”

The pie plate is now empty. Just two forks and some crumbs remain. The now-cold hot chocolate sits congealing in our mugs as Meg muses about what comes next. “This I know. I want to be able to walk tall in this world and be solidly me, with all my perceived flaws or gifts. When I was a child, I had to take care of my brothers and sisters, coming from such a damaged childhood. Now I’m in my late 40s—almost 50. I don’t want to be good anymore. I’m just gonna be me.”

Pamela Post is a writer and broadcaster who has mastered Meg Tilly’s secret recipe for perfect piecrust. It wasn’t lard... um... hard.