The Globe and Mail - September 10th, 2005

"No Pigtails These Days, Thank You"
Sarah Hampson

Yes, you will always be Anne of Green Gables to some. But you just accept your iconic status and get on with being your complicated self.

"There's only one Peter Pan, you know. The rest of us grow up."

Megan Follows, stylish in a clingy Diane von Furstenberg dress, shakes her mane of strawberry-blond hair off her forehead and offers a rueful smile.

It is not the first question. But it was there in the back of my mind, and then, finally, she brought it up. "I have an identity that's tied to a very specific Canadian icon," she observes, almost in passing.

I take her cue, and wonder if she thinks that part of the interest in her role as May in Sam Shepard's play Fool for Love , a Soulpepper Theatre Company production now playing at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre Theatre until Oct. 1, is that the public has this image of her in pigtails. We see her still as Anne Shirley in the 1985 Canadian miniseries Anne of Green Gables, which became an Emmy-winning international hit. In Fool for Love , she plays a distraught young woman in a dumpy motel on the edge of the Mojave desert who reunites with her cowboy lover, Eddie, played by her real-life partner, Stuart Hughes.

What, sweet, little Anne is in a red sexy dress, slumped against a wall, railing at her lover? The public lets other actors assume new roles. Maybe we are more possessive of child actors, an audience who holds them in a collective parental gaze.

"You should answer that question," she shoots back. "It's all about perception and reality."

Follows still looks like a fresh-faced country girl, the kind of character an advertiser would want to see beaming from a box of Corn Flakes, but she is a complex woman of 37, whose personality, intellect and passion push the interview around like a shopping cart at the local market. There's lots to gather up, if you really want to get her full measure.

"I do experience more scrutiny because of [Anne]," she admits. "But I have come to the conclusion, for my own sanity, that I can only choose things according to my own barometer of what I'm trying to achieve or how I'm stretching and reaching. That's all I really have in my control."

She is interested in what different people have invested in the character of Anne. One woman came up to her after a performance of Fool for Love and confessed that whenever she was upset as a child, she would think of Anne in the garden, picking apples. Another evening, a man approached her to offer his praise of her performance in the play and tell her that he still can't get over the scene in the TV series when she receives a dress from Matthew, Anne's adoptive father.

Clearly, she has had to think about the cultural baggage she carries for the population as an icon. "Oh, yes," Follows acknowledges, with a laugh. "Sometimes, one is made to feel as though you have to apologize for a success like that." She curls herself like a cat into her wingback chair, leaning forward and resting her head with one hand on her chin. But she is not about to apologize. "Audiences, whether in Canada or the United States, want to celebrate things and identity with people. If they don't identify with their own people in Canada because we're not presenting them to them, they will identify with what's on our airwaves, and often times that's more and more from the United States. And the United States never apologizes for its successes. Anne had a huge impact.

"When I was younger, I may have felt more strongly the need to distance myself from her, but where I have come to now is that I basically embrace that part of who I am."

See? Follows is an existential-thinking girl next door. You expect her to serve you something cozy like muffins and tea. But no. She'd rather toss you a stiff cocktail.

She's the Anne of Dark Corners.

Her introspection extends to every aspect of her work and life. In Fools for Love , an intermission-less bundle of roller-coaster emotions, she has learned to trust the "safety in the structure of the story." What May unleashes is volatile, she explains. "But whatever emotions you're mining, you're in the womb of someone's creation," she says. Still, the play has taken its toll. "An emotion is an emotion. Your body doesn't know that it's May having the emotion. I, Megan, haven't wept and had a nervous breakdown. I, Megan, haven't been crawling around on the floor, but I still feel as though I have. At night, sometimes I feel I'm down. But then I think, 'I'm not really depressed. May is.' "

She breathes deeply, and looks down at her feet. "It's a funky ride to go on, this play," she allows, looking up with a laugh. "And there's a fear to being back on the stage. You're exposed." Follows, who divides her time between Los Angeles, where she went to high school, and Toronto, where she was born, has been in a number of television shows, including the upcoming CBC biopic about Shania Twain, in which she plays the singer's chain-smoking stage mother.

But if she's nervous on stage, her partner Hughes, a founding member of Soulpepper, also provides a measure of safety in Fools for Love . "We choreographed the fights. But it's easier because we know each other's body language. And then, I can look up and see his eyes," she says softly.

Of course, Follows's understanding of the life of an actor comes not just from the fact that she's been one for 30 of her 37 years, but also because she grew up in a theatrical family. Her mother, Dawn Greenhalgh, and her father, Ted Follows (now divorced), had four children (Megan is the youngest), all of whom are involved in the arts. Her childhood was far from serene, and she learned, early on, that the world of the theatre was often chaotic.

"You see the allure of theatre. You see the jealousy. You see the frustration. All of it," she says of her parents' volatile domestic life. Her mother had been traumatized by the time she spent as a young girl during the Second World War in a PoW camp in China. The Japanese invaded and rounded up white-collar expatriates, of which Greenhalgh's father was one. She witnessed beatings and despair. Later, she had to overcome alcoholism. Greenhalgh told me once, when I spoke to her a few years ago, that theatre "is a religion."

"My parents lived, breathed, ate and slept theatre. Emotions were right on the surface. Growing up, the unreal had as much importance as the real," Follows says, offering a bemused expression, as though she's an English-literature student, analyzing a scene in a novel.

She also had to contend with parents who were always morphing into other people. "One week your mother is Virginia Woolf, and the next, she could be Amanda in The Glass Menagerie . My mother deeply inhabited the roles that she played. As children, we grew up in this mercurial world. Boundaries were always changing. Perceptions were constantly changing. It makes for an extremely rich inner life, but it's the clashing of the inner life with the outside world that's a challenge." She pauses again, in a darkly pensive mood, then suddenly laughs, as though she long ago figured out that the best way to deal with her memories is to find the humour in them.

She is very close to her mother, who is now in her 70s. "I admire her so much," Follows says. Her father left the household when she was 11, and she witnessed her mother's strength. She also taught her daughter about money management. Most of her earnings from Anne of Green Gables were put into savings, she says, which has allowed her some financial stability. She owns a house on the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick and another in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of Los Angeles.

Despite her success as an actor, Follows has had her share of personal instability. At 23, she married Christopher Porter, a gaffer in the film business, who lives in Nova Scotia. Together for a total of 11 years, they have two children, a girl and a boy, aged 15 and 11 respectively. " I eloped with him!" she chortles when asked about that union. "Ran off to Vegas!" Why? "How the hell else was I going to get away with that?" she says with a high-pitched laugh. "No one was going to come to that wedding!" She flashes her country-girl smile. "I was also pregnant at the time," she confesses. After she left her marriage, for a time, she lived with her mother.

That experience, too, has been rolled into her creative life. She and her screenwriter sister, Edwina, are working on a six-episode TV series for the CBC, called My Mother's House , in which she explores the mother-daughter bond as well as the public perception of her as the iconic Anne, juxtaposed with the complex reality of her adult life. "It's a black comedy," she offers with a sly grin.

The series, which will be a mixture of non-fiction and fiction, is her first foray into writing. "Being scared is good. It's the antithesis of complacency. As long as it doesn't cripple you, I welcome it all."

And with that, Anne of Dark Corners unrolls another peal of raucous laughter.

Source: The Globe and Mail