Big Chill star Meg Tilly fires up young readers

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This article was published 05/05/2015 (4165 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s just after 9 a.m. on Monday after O Canada has been played and the morning announcements have been read over the PA at King Edward Community School.

In the library of the lively Selkirk Avenue institution, a nice lady with a spangly top, jeans and short, grey-streaked dark hair is preparing to read from her own books to grades 3 and 4 students.

The nice lady will crack them up with a hilariously gross chapter from her novel A Touch of Heaven, in which a young girl attempts to retrieve a baby tooth she accidentally swallowed.

But they don’t necessarily know the nice lady comes from a decidedly glamorous background.

A few decades ago, California-born, British Columbia-raised Meg Tilly was an ingenue movie star attracting attention in the 1983 drama The Big Chill as the girlfriend of the man whose suicide precipitates a reunion of close-knit college buddies.

A few years after that, she won a supporting actress Oscar nomination for her work in Agnes of God (1986), in which she played the mysterious nun of the title opposite thespian heavyweights Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft.

Tilly came to the school not as a movie star but as a children’s author, under the auspices of TD Canadian Children’s Book Week, which sends 29 authors and illustrators to schools and libraries around the country to fire up a passion to read.

Despite her recent award-winning turn on the Global series Bomb Girls, Tilly knows her primary audience at the school doesn’t have a clue who she is.

“They don’t know me,” she says, adding she stopped acting for 18 years to raise her children. “They have no idea.”

She comes to the school with a mission to encourage kids to read, because, coming from a “challenging childhood” encompassing poverty, hunger and abuse, reading was nothing less than a lifeline.

“It really saved us, I think,” Tilly says. “Books taught me a lot about how I wanted to be and what families could be.”

Bear in mind: Tilly was raised without television and few opportunities to see movies.

“Books were really it for me,” she says. “My three sisters (including fellow actress Jennifer Tilly) and I would go to the library and check out the maximum (number) and we’d read our books during the week and then read each other’s books. And if there was one we really liked, we’d check it out again. Some libraries let you take out four, but some would let you take out 10!”

Tilly says she was initially hesitant to try writing books herself.

“As an actress, you speak another person’s voice,” she says. “You don’t have your own.

“And I never knew I was a writer because that was for smart people. But I had something I needed to say, so my first book was written about my life,” she says of her 1994 debut novel, Singing Songs.

“And once I started writing, it was impossible to stop,” she says.

“I didn’t really feel like a writer until most recently, when I had six books published and I said: ‘I guess I am a writer.’ But growing up, I never thought I would be a writer. That was for people who went to university, that was for people who could spell, that was for people who were intellectual and I’m none of the above.”

Tilly says it is satisfying to show kids it’s possible to overcome challenging circumstances to achieve your dreams.

“I was very hungry growing up and I came from a lot of challenge,” she says. “I always try to let the kids know that your future, to a certain extent, is in your hands. You can make it better.

“I’ve got a really lucky life now, and I think that’s why I decided to speak out on what my life was like before, so people could feel like: ‘OK, I don’t have to continue this story. I can switch to a different one.'”

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca