Meg Tilly: Meg o'the Wild

"I hope I say good stuff," Tilly says, when we've grabbed a corner booth. Just to get the mystery out of the way, I start out by asking why she lives here.

"My ex-husband [producer Tim Zinnemann] was willing to co-parent and he gave me the names of places he thought were fine and Vancouver was one of them. I feel so strongly about raising my children in a normal environment, not in L.A. I didn't want them raised with children who are raised by housekeepers, and I didn't want to be the only mom at the park.

"I flew here and called a real estate place from the airport and said, 'I want to look at houses for this much with a little bit of land, privacy, about an hour from Vancouver, and I'll be right over.' They thought I was a wacko right off the plane. I didn't say who I was, I just said this is what I want to do. So then I was looking through these real estate papers and I saw what's now my house--'log house, five acres'--and I said, now this, even if it's in a crummy area, this is what I want. I went and looked at it and the next day made an offer. That's how I do things. You just go on your gut feelings and if things are wrong I just gradually fix it."

A milder version of the conviction you detect in any Tilly performance, no matter what the merit of the movie, radiates from across the formica table. Every time a child's wail echoes through the mall she looks up instinctively, but other than that, she's all concentration. I indulge the opportunity to stare at her astounding face, with its oriental mask-like reticence and depth which obviate questions of beauty. She reads as fragile, but that is not how she talks.

"I was raised in the San Juan islands off Canada," she begins. "There were six kids plus three stepbrothers and sisters, so nine. I was in the middle. It was good to grow up that way because then you didn't have such a sense of self-importance. We had a farm- chickens, ducks, a cow. But we didn't really farm--we made a pathetic attempt."

Were her parents proto-hippies?

"Hippies? I don't know. If I look back now. . . No, my mom was a teacher and my stepfather didn't have a beard or long hair. He liked wheatgerm. But I don't know. We didn't have TV or a phone, but I don't know if that makes you a hippie. Maybe I'm a hippie. I think some people may think I am. I don't think I am. But sometimes when I wear my long skirts and long sweaters. . .lots of times when I'm home I like to be barefoot. Does that mean I'm a hippie? I don't do drugs or drink. Does that mean I'm not?"

We let the matter drop. I ask her what kind of an adolescence she had.

"I went to one rock concert, but I don't remember who it was. One guy had a car and eleven of us fit into it. I don't know how. I went through a period where I got all my teenage angst out. I'd talk back to teachers and not do homework and if you weren't allowed to wear shorts to school I would. Looking back, I was probably unhappy but at the time I was very much myself. I've always prided myself on being different. Now that I know I'm different, I'm being more normal.

"Ballet was the focus I needed for all the energy I had. I'd go after school and work 4 or 5 hours. At 14, I was late starting--I had to start with 5-year-olds. Everybody said I couldn't, but in a couple of years I was winning scholarships. Whenever anyone says you can't, then I'll say I'm going to. That's how you get to do what you want to do.

"I wanted to study ballet in New York City. Nobody I knew had ever been there. They said you can't go there. But I'd been working as a waitress since I was 14, til 3 and 4 in the morning on weekends, at a Chinese restaurant and then at a deli that was fun because I was behind a counter and it was nice and clean and people didn't try to pick you up or throw up in their food.

"So I took the bus. I arrived at the bus station in New York. You know what that's like? All these guys were trying to talk to me. I'd ridden from Victoria and was wearing my little flowery pastel dress because I wanted to look nice. I was scared but I was trying to be tough. I went to this girl's apartment where I was going to stay for a day. I didn't know her and there were three other girls in this one-bedroom apartment. That night two guys who were lovers in the next apartment had a big fight. One was screaming, 'Don't kill me, don't kill me, ahhhhhhh.....' And the guy goes, 'Put the gun away! Put it away!' Then somebody called the police and they came and the guy who was being really mean was suddenly calm and said 'Everything's fine,' and then when the police left he screamed, 'You little shit!' and there was more banging and yelling. That was my first night in New York."

Meg Tilly talks really fast in a sort of syntactical grape-shot. But there's an endearing earnestness to her storytelling. You get the feeling she's told some of these stories before, maybe even that her sense of her own story helps her build up steam for the choices she believes in making. Whatever it is that sustains her has been sorely tested--if you count the breakup, of her marriage, she's faced three heavy disappointments that are on record. The first came when she was dropped by a ballet partner and injured so severely she was told she could never dance again if she wanted to be walking when she was 30.

"Dancing was everything that was holding me together," she says of that catastrophe. "I couldn't picture life without dancing. So I figured whoever was in charge was telling me that I was going to die and to get everything in order. I'd gone home to Canada and I was really nice to everyone because I wanted them to miss me when I was gone. I thought maybe I'd be hit by lightning, just something real simple. But I didn't die, so I thought maybe I'd missed the signs. I'd had a dream that I realized afterward was forecasting what was going to happen with my back and the dancing. I've had dreams that predict things that will happen and dreams that tell me about the mistakes I'm making in my life. I don't pay much attention to it, but once in a while it's so strong it overcomes. The only thing I could do was acting, so I did that."

Tilly came to L.A., lived with her sister Jennifer and studied with Peggy Feury:

"I don't think I'd be doing what I'm doing today if it hadn't been for Peggy. She was an inspiration to me. Whatever characters I couldn't do were something in myself I wasn't accepting. I think everybody has all characters in them. I don't think Peggy said exactly that to me, but that's what I made out of it. I was being the virginal young little thing, the ballet dancer with long hair down to here and frilly dresses and talking in a high voice. Have you ever met a lot of ballet dancers? Not all are like that, but it's a certain type. I made this reality for myself out of what my life was supposed to be rather than being who I was. Pretending I didn't know things that I did. I found it a good protection, I guess, against a lot of men in New York. I would just pretend I didn't know what they meant. But I'd actually believe I didn't know what they meant because the pretense was so strong. Peggy made me be a woman, be my age, and not be frightened and not pre¬tend to be something I wasn't. I'm not sure how she did it."

Six months after coming to L.A. Tilly was cast in Tex and her acting career was in motion. Her second big disappointment came after her elusively beguiling performance in The Big Chill had brought her to Milos Forman's attention. After five screen tests Forman cast her in the role of Constanze, Mozart's young wife in Amadeus. On location in Prague, just as shooting began, she damaged tendons in her ankle in a spontaneous soccer game with other cast members. Forman was forced to replace her.

"I was devastated. But you grow and you find there's an upside. I'd learned that before and then I had to relearn it. I don't think I was ready for what was going to happen to me if I did Milos's movie. It was a much bigger part [than the one replacement Elizabeth Berridge played] and I was young and I don't think I would have been ready to handle it. I was having nightmares about this big luxury cat that was on my shoulders. And I was saying, 'Oh, you have such a beautiful fur,' but it was weighing me down. And I saw children running, and they were in tatters, but I was thinking, 'They're so free, who wants this luxury cat?' And I was trying to get it off but it was hanging on with its claws, and I was suffocating. Now that I look back on it, I think these were signs that too much was happening for me. I know it sounds weird, but I think my body just took care of things for me."

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