Meg Tilly

Meg Tilly
PerformerCaprica
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Portrays:	Mother
Date of Birth:	February 14,1960
Date of Death:	Missing required parameter 1=month!
Age:	66
Nationality:	USA
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Meg Tilly (born Margaret Elizabeth Chan on February 14, 1960) is an American actress and novelist who portrayed Mother, leader of the Monotheist Church, in two episodes of Caprica. She received an Academy Award nomination and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for Agnes of God (1985), and is also known for The Big Chill (1983), Psycho II (1983), and Body Snatchers (1993).

Career

Born in Long Beach, California, the third of four children of schoolteacher Patricia Tilly and car salesman Harry Chan, Tilly was raised, after her parents' divorce, by her mother on Texada Island, British Columbia. At age fourteen she began taking dance lessons, training with the Connecticut Ballet Company in Stamford, Connecticut, and later with the Throne Dance Theatre. She made her screen debut as a dancer in Alan Parker's Fame (1980), but her ballet career ended in 1979, at age nineteen, when a partner dropped her during a rehearsal in New York and severely injured her back.

A 1985 wire-service profile grouped Tilly with a new wave of young actresses, including Kathleen Turner, Ally Sheedy, and Jamie Lee Curtis, who were taking on roles departing from the conventional Hollywood ingenue. Tilly moved to [[w:Los Angeles|Los Angeles** to study acting under Peggy Feury, and after a guest appearance as a prostitute on Hill Street Blues she won her first starring film role opposite Matt Dillon in Tex (1982). She followed it with One Dark Night (1982), Psycho II (1983), and Impulse (1984), and drew wider critical attention as Chloe in Lawrence Kasdan's ensemble drama The Big Chill (1983).

Agnes of God and the Amadeus role

Tilly was Miloš Forman's first choice to play Constanze Mozart in Amadeus (1984), after both Forman and co-star Tom Hulce praised her rehearsal work, but the role was recast after Tilly tore a ligament in her leg playing soccer with her children the day before filming was to begin in Czechoslovakia. Elizabeth Berridge took the part instead.

On returning to the United States, Tilly learned that Columbia Pictures had acquired the screen rights to John Pielmeier's 1982 Broadway play Agnes of God, itself developed from a real news story about a nun accused of killing her newborn child; the stage production had starred Amanda Plummer, who won a Tony Award for the role. Tilly lobbied director Norman Jewison's office for months to be allowed to read for the title role, a novitiate nun accused of murdering the baby she secretly delivered. To prepare, she spent time at a Benedictine convent north of Montreal observing the sisters' routine, including attending vespers; she later said she could not bring herself to imitate the nuns' devotional gestures because she had not been raised in any religion, though she believed in some overarching power and did not want to seem to be mocking their faith. Her performance opposite Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. Asked a few years later about her approach to choosing roles, Tilly said, "Women my age are supposed to be sex symbols."

Tilly continued acting through the late 1980s, playing an heiress opposite Rob Lowe in Masquerade (1988) — a performance The Pittsburgh Press called "a complex performance" — and a woman with a mysterious past in The Girl in a Swing (1988), of which critic Roger Ebert wrote that Tilly gave "a performance so good it deserves a better movie." She went on to appear in Valmont (1989), The Two Jakes (1990) with Jack Nicholson, Leaving Normal (1992), and the horror film Body Snatchers (1993), before largely stepping away from acting after the 1995 television film Journey to focus on raising her children and on writing.

Caprica

After fifteen years away from acting, Tilly was persuaded to return to the screen by her Sleep With Me (1994) co-star Eric Stoltz, who directed and starred in Caprica. Tilly portrayed Mother in Caprica's "Unvanquished" and "The Heavens Will Rise", receiving a "Special Guest Appearance by Meg Tilly" credit ahead of the episode's other guest stars.

I didn't realize how much I missed acting until I came back.

Stage, television, and later film work

In July 2011, Tilly played Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for the Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre in Victoria, British Columbia, a performance that led to a role in Michel Tremblay's The Real World at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre the following year. From January 2012 she starred as floor matron Lorna Corbett in the Canadian wartime drama Bomb Girls on Global Television, for which she received a Canadian Screen Award nomination and won a Leo Award; the series itself won a Gracie Award for Best TV Drama. She reprised the role in the 2014 television film Bomb Girls: Facing the Enemy. In 2017 Tilly appeared opposite Brad Pitt in David Michôd's Netflix satire War Machine, playing the wife of Pitt's general. In 2022 she joined the cast of Chucky for its second season; it was the first time she and her sister, actress Jennifer Tilly, had appeared on screen together. Tilly's character was killed off in the episode "Death on Denial" by Jennifer Tilly's possessed character; Jennifer Tilly later said her sister was nervous about filming the scene, recalling, "Meg was really upset."

Writing

Tilly is the author of ten novels. Her first, Singing Songs (Dutton, 1994), follows an insular young girl named Anna and was selected as a Barnes & Noble Great New Writers title. Tilly has said she did not set out to write a book, describing the process as unplanned: "It's strange because I didn't decide to write a novel." Reviewing the novel, Entertainment Weekly was sharply critical, calling it "oppressively ugly," while The New York Times Book Review offered a more favorable assessment, finding that Tilly had met unexpectedly serious literary challenges with skill. Tilly has said the novel's scenes of child abuse drew in part on her own childhood; she sent the manuscript to publishers under a pseudonym to get an honest assessment before it was accepted for publication under her own name by Dutton editor Carole DeSanti.

At the time of the novel's publication, Tilly also had a recurring role as George Grace on the short-lived NBC drama Winnetka Road, a series she had developed from her own story ideas in collaboration with writer-producer John Byrum.

Tilly's later novels include Gemma (St. Martin's Press, 2006); the young-adult titles Porcupine (Tundra Books, 2007), a finalist for the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize, First Time (Orca, 2008), A Taste of Heaven (Puffin, 2013), and Behind the Scenes (Puffin, 2014); and, after she turned to romantic suspense, the Solace Island trilogy — Solace Island (self-published 2017, reissued by Berkley Books in November 2018), Cliff's Edge (Berkley, May 2019), and Hidden Cove (Berkley, October 2019) — followed by the spin-off novel The Runaway Heiress (Berkley, July 2021). She has also sold screenplays to MGM/UA, Sony Pictures, NBC, Kidro Productions, ATO Pictures, and Lionsgate.

Personal life

Tilly married producer Tim Zinnemann, son of director Fred Zinnemann, in 1983, after meeting him on the set of Tex; they had two children, Emily (born 1984) and David (born 1986), and separated after about six years. She had a son, William, in 1990 with English actor Colin Firth, whom she met while filming Valmont. She is the younger sister of actress Jennifer Tilly and has a brother, Steve, and another sister, Becky.

References