The Ottawa Citizen - September 13, 1989

"Megan Follows as hooker; Anne of Green Gables star takes different role in film Series"

What's a nice girl like Megan Follows doing in a grubby old mining town tossing all those F-words around when the image that lingers is her squeaky-clean Anne of Green Gables?

She's a hooker, that's what -- part-time only between serving at Kresge's and a little waitressing between tricks.

She's Micheline Dushane in the new Allan King movie, Termini Station, which had its premiere at the Festival of Festivals here this week.

But please, she says, don't overdo the nice. Even Anne wasn't that perfect. She could be an unholy terror, sort of, and feisty.

Follows is 21 now, but looks as though she could still play Anne -- petite, and mini-skirted (so mini every time she gets up she has to ease the hem down towards the knee about a foot and a half away)... and nice.

After listening to her in Termini Station, swapping profanities with the husky sound of Colleen Dewhurst as her whisky-soaked mother, one is tempted to wonder whether she had to force the obscenities.

"Unfortunately, no. I'm afraid I do have a foul mouth sometimes." But she's quick to qualify, "Actually, speaking that kind of language is not in itself very interesting unless it's done as part of the character."

As Micheline (pronounced here like the tire), Follows makes it sound awfully natural. It's a tough part in a tough town and her relationship with Dewhurst, who plays Anne's foster-mother Amaryllis in Green Gables, had nothing to do with the casting, we're assured. King wanted Dewhurst for the part; Follows came along later after auditions.

King is quoted as saying, "It's not only coincidental, but I fought against it because I've got enough trouble in my life without without sending Anne of Green Gables out on the streets to hustle a buck. It's asking for trouble."

King says Micheline gave Follows the opportunity she needs in her career to stretch. Follows agrees: "I like the challenge. It was a part not at all familiar to me, or the circumstances she lived in."

She recalls only a few days of rehearsal in a comfortable room at the swish Sutton Place hotel here, then being driven straight up to Kirkland Lake where she spent four days before shooting began.

"I borrowed the director's car and cruised around town talking to people and getting a sense of its geography, just casual conversations. The four weeks shoot was mostly in the fall, but after Toronto it was cold."

After two films with Dewhurst, Follows says they get along pretty well but don't see much of each other otherwise because Dewhurst is so active as president of Actors Equity in New York.

Follows is New York-based herself now. After a spell in Los Angeles where the film opportunities are, she moved to New York for the stage work, and the change of seasons she missed on the West Coast. And because it's only an hour-and-a-bit's flight home to Toronto where her parents Dawn Greenhalgh and father Ted Follows live. Last year she appeared in Toronto at the Young People's Theatre with sister Samantha and their mother in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds. Her other sister, Edwina, is a writer at the Centre for Advanced Film Studies in Toronto.

Right now, says Follows, she doesn't have any particular commitment for stage and screen, which means waiting by the phone. After the full career that followed her appearance in Anne, it's a chance to relax.

She got back this summer from a two-week stint in new Zealand for a Canada-New Zealand TV co-production of a Ray Bradbury story, The Dwarf.

It's set in a fairground where she plays the woman who runs the rifle range and befriends the circus dwarf. It was fun but hectic and it will be seen on First Choice.

The work since Anne has been film in L.A. -- Stacking with Christine Lahti in 1986 and Destiny, as William Hurt's sister, in a major studio production that got a half-hearted release and survived only one week in Ottawa.

What she's hoping for is a chance to do comedy, something that has eluded her in her 12-year career. For the young girl who was the family clown, her only real fling in this direction was a CBC sitcom with Martin Mull, Domestic Life.

Termini Station is expected to open in Ottawa later this month.

Source: Ottawa Citizen