The Globe and Mail - June 16, 2001

"'I have a chair fetish'"
Deirdre Kelly

Megan Follows, the actress who made Anne of Green Gables real to millions of television viewers on the CBC miniseries of the same name, is now 33 -- divorced, with two children of her own. Pursuing an acting career on both sides of the border, Follows is spending the summer performing alongside her mother, Dawn Greenhalgh, and her three siblings in Noel Coward's Hay Fever, directed by her father, Ted Follows. The period comedy opens in previews at the Gravenhurst Opera House in Gravenhurst, Ont., on June 27, and runs from July 3 to 28 (call 1-888-495-8888). It moves to the River Run Theatre in Guelph, Ont., Aug. 1-4. The actress spoke to Deirdre Kelly this week.

'When I have extra money, I spend it on furniture, usually antique and almost always big. I have a chair fetish. I am always in search of the perfect chair to sit on.

Recently, I bought an old oak filing system cabinet, the kind that architects use, and inside were drawings of architecture from the the 1960s. This thing is big . It's sitting between my living room and dining room. I wanted it to put my photographs in. I tend to do that, buy things that are unruly.

I love antiques. Originally, I got hooked on them while driving across the country because of work and pleasure. I'd be in Nebraska or Louisiana, and I'd see something I'd like and it would be highly impractical because I'd buy a piece of furniture that you just couldn't put on the back of a car. I did that once in Hong Kong. I found a 17th-century chest. I just had to have it. But getting it home was another story.

I try not to buy little things. You know, nitpicky things that just take up space. Especially when you have kids, you don't want a lot of small things lying around. Otherwise, the next thing you know, you've got more made-in-Taiwan stuff than you know what to do with. So when I buy, it's pretty substantial, and it often sets me back a bit, yes.

But my thing about chairs has to do, I think, with me trying to tell myself to do something, and that's sit down and relax. Because that's impossible to do with kids. Well, you know. You keep yourself pretty busy running after them and keeping a household running smoothly. It's pretty much a full-time job.

Recently, I bought six new chairs, for my dining-room table. They are original naval chairs. I bought them in an antique store in Pasadena. They had come from an old naval base. They're made of aluminum, so they're really light. I bought them to go with the table, which is wood and metal.

I also have a rocking chair that I bought recently. It's a deep-seated chair and so you really recline back when you sit in it. I have a lot of rocking chairs, actually. And no, my house isn't nearly big enough to fit them all. It's really small. I think we need to get some feng shui happening soon to make it all kinda flow.

I split my time between Toronto and Los Angeles. I have a place also in Nova Scotia, where I have this 12-foot deacon's bench. There's a lot of room for people to sit down. And I am trying to entertain more now. In L.A., I make more of an effort. You have to. You rarely bump into people you know on the street. Anyway, you're always in your car. But I'm not social by nature. So I need to make an effort.

Whether it's collecting chairs or armoires -- I bought a huge one the other day because I don't have enough closet space -- it all comes down to one thing. It's about nesting, the nesting instinct.

As actors, we spend so much of our lives living away from home to fulfill our work passions. I started in the business when I was 9. I was away from home quite a bit and from a young age. I was never in one place for too long. So I guess it's about making a home for yourself, and collecting things with associations with home.

The good thing about being on location so much is that you get to experience a different city for a while, and know it not as a tourist, but as someone living and working there.

Right now, I'm away from home again, but I have home surrounding me. I have my entire family here -- my brother, my two sisters, my parents, my boyfriend [actor Stuart Hughes] and my two kids. My parents are divorced. But Dad is directing this production and Mom is acting. We're staying in this B & B down the road from the theatre, and there's a lot of energy!

We just arrived on the weekend so I haven't had time to suss out the local antique stores. But I have spotted them. I know where they are. It's pretty much a guarantee that I will be in one of them soon. And I'll probably go with my mother. She has a lot of antiques, mostly from China where she was born, so I'd say I get my appreciation for things from the past from my mother.

I have pretty broad tastes. I have Chinese antiques, and other things from Asia, I have Mission-inspired pieces, and I have some Stickley. Usually, I buy what I get a hit off, something that strikes me and that I like looking at and want to be around or because it's from a place I liked visiting.

We never had a summer place as kids growing up. Mom and Dad were always working, so we spent our summers in Stratford, in Barrie, at the summer theatre festivals. So we'd go wherever the work was. And this just means that I have eclectic tastes.

The fascinating thing about being a performer is you live vicariously in other times. As Anne I was living in the 1890s. In The Stork Derby, a film I just made in Montreal, I was living in the 1930s and wearing the most wonderful things. I love that retro style. When I was doing Romeo and Juliet at Stratford, I was living in the 1920s. I like that aspect of my job. You get to see patterns through which all things are influenced, if that makes sense. I bought a few pieces from shows I have been in. I bought a lamp from 1912 that was off the last Anne show. I like the attention to detail and the craftsmanship in things made back then. You can spend the same amount of money on an Ikea cabinet that takes six hours to assemble as on a terrific antique that you know will last because it already has lasted a number of years.

I like owning things that come with a bit of history. I like wondering what the story is behind a bureau or a mirror I have just bought. Who else has looked into it in the past? Where else has it travelled?

Now that I have children of my own, things that I once thought were so old aren't any more. You realize that time just goes by so quickly. Our times and experience with things is actually very brief and that's what makes them precious. A hundred years isn't really long at all. When I was younger, I used to think it was an eternity. As you get older, you see life from a whole new perspective."

Source: The Globe and Mail