The Whig-Standard - November 13, 1997

"Follows stays in the spotlight"
Liz Nicholls

In a country where stardom is a kind of astronomy that's considered thoroughly foreign, Megan Follows is an exception - highly recognizable, thoroughly Canadian.

Perhaps Canada feels especially proprietorial when it comes to the actor so identified with a certain mouthy red-haired P.E.I. orphan who's our most famous literary heroine.

It's been a dozen years since Follows played Anne-with-an-e. The delicate-featured actor has two children, ages three and five, and she lives in L.A. But Canadians haven't forgotten those Gemini- winning performances in the CBC/PBS mini-series Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea. In Edmonton to play Othello's lively bride in the fleet, beautifully staged Michael Langham production, Follows laughs, but indulgently, at the suggestion that she was born to be Anne.

"I wasn't that role," she grins, remembering her 16-year-old self. "I had to fight for it; they didn't want me to play her." Three thousand girls auditioned. Follows was the first, and the last. "I flew in from L.A. and demanded they see me again." They dithered over whether to have two Annes, one little girl and one teenager. In the end, it was the American co-producers who held sway.

For Follows, there was something to be learned in the hassle. "When people tell you you can't do something, they're mostly wrong," she says. "My mother [actor Dawn Greenhalgh] had tremendous belief in me; she knew I could be good ... But there's an incredible lack of imagination in a business about imagination. It's weird. You have to break through people's perceptions ..."

The latter, at the time, were formed by such Follows performances as the quiet, introverted, troubled lead in Atlantis' Oscar-winning short Boys and Girls, based on an Alice Munro short story. That was partly why Follows was so keen to land the role of Anne. "I could see the kind of roles girls were getting in American TV. Anne was no simpering cutie; she wasn't the girl on the phone, bemoaning not getting a date. She led the action ..."

Follows' showbiz credentials were already long and varied by the time she was shooting Anne. At 29 she's been in the business fully two decades, surrounded by a true-blue Canuck showbiz family that includes Greenhalgh, her actor dad Ted Follows, sisters Samantha (an actor in L.A.) and Edwina (a writer/producer), brother Laurence (a producer).

EARLY START

By eight she remembers watching TV, and pointing at the screen: "Hey I can do that - better!" A year later, Follows was gainfully employed, in a Bell Canada commercial.

She starred in Matt and Jenny, a 26-episode 1979 Global TV kids' series widely distributed in Europe. It had a couple of orphans - Follows disguised as a boy - travelling and having adventures in the 1850s. And when other kids her age were going into junior high school, Follows moved to Los Angeles with her older sister Edwina. The sitcom Domestic Life, produced by Steve Martin, dates from this period. "I played the bratty teenage daughter, perpetually in heat."

The Follows household in Toronto was a frantic, freewheeling high- density showbiz stronghold. Follows remembers it as "crazy and fun - chaotic, entertaining and liberal, full of engaging people, lots of talking."

It wasn't until 1988, after a post-Anne year living in Manhattan consuming art films, that Follows took to the stage, along with her mother and sister Samantha, in a Toronto production of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon-Marigolds at Young People's Theatre. "It was very unfamiliar working conditions," says Follows of the world of rehearsals and nightly performances. "It was strange not to have a finished product when you arrived the first day. I had to learn how to sustain a role, grow with it."

For Follows to devote the time and energy to live theatre would require, she says, "a challenging, and leading, role - if you're going to be there, anywhere, you might as well have your butt on the line."

It's been a busy year for the single mother. In March, it was the CBC mini-series Major Crime (to air Nov. 23 and 24), shot in Halifax. With Michael Moriarty as a cop wondering if he's over the hill, Follows plays a crown attorney prosecuting a pedophile. She calls the show "very disturbing," because, in a way she compares to Prime Suspect, we know who did what and how, at the outset. "The question is how to catch him, bring him to trial, and convict him."

And in Toronto in May, she did an independent feature film called Reluctant Angel.

Source: The Whig-Standard