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TRANSFORMATION OF MEG TILLY
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Tilly finally found her real vocation as a novelist
of TheColumnists.com
Every now and then, it's common for baby-boomers to sit back and ponder what ever happened to the "promising" young stars of Larry Kasdan's 1983 "The Big Chill," that quintessential film of their era about old college friends coming together to pay their last respects to a dead friend.
Well, Kevin Costner, briefly seen as the dead friend, is still a big star and has an Oscar for directing "Dances With Wolves" in 1990. William Hurt no longer has his name above the title, but he, too, collected an Oscar (for Best Actor in 1985's "Kiss of the Spider Woman"). Glenn Close still lands leading roles in television and, though they're no longer big names, we still see Tom Berenger, JoBeth Williams and Kevin Kline from time to time in smaller roles.
But the one "Big Chill" graduate boomers probably wonder about most is Meg Tilly, who played Costner's girl friend. To most movie fans, she seemed to drop out of sight in the mid-90s, never to be heard from again. What happened? Did she marry a sheep rancher and retire to life in the Australian outback or has she just been in permanent rehab, getting over the excesses of her youth?
Actually, the truth is none of the above, although some may find it hard to believe. What happened to Meg Tilly is she became a full-time mom and, while doing that, discovered she was even better at writing fiction than living it as an actress.
And let's not forget that Meg Tilly was--and no doubt still is--a very fine actress. By the mid-1980s, she had found a special niche for herself in pictures with what Leonard Maltin called "her ethereal roles." Her most "ethereal" one may have been the title role in Norman Jewison's "Agnes of God" (1985), in which she was the troubled young nun who's accused of murdering the seemingly fatherless baby she gave birth to in the cloistered seclusion of a convent. Tilly earned plaudits from critics, who praised her for holding her own against co-stars Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft, two acclaimed Oscar-winning veterans, but also earned herself an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
 Meg Tilly in her Oscar-nominated performance in "Agnes of God" |
 Tilly, young and sexy, with Anthony Perkins in "Psycho II," a film she doesn't remember so warmly. |
For the next few years, all the hot filmmakers seemed to want her for the next cutting edge movie, but Tilly made some unfortunate choices and squandered much of her early momentum--such as "The Two Jakes," Jack Nicholson's dreadful sequel to "Chinatown," and Milos Forman's "Valmont," which everybody ignored because it came to theaters right after Stephen Frears' "Dangerous Liaisons," which told exactly the same story.
By the early 1990s, Tilly was doing made-for-TV movies and some not-so-special feature films, like Abel Ferrara's critically-anhilated "Body Snatchers" (1993), the third film version of Jack Finney's novel "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
"Toward the end," says Tilly today, "I was just doing the movies that would take the least time and pay me the most money."
A major reason for that was her need to spend more time concentrating on her private life, which had become extraordinarily complex, and less time on a movie career that no longer was very satisfying to her. After doing "Journey," a 1995 Hallmark Hall of Fame movie for CBS-TV, Tilly walked away from her acting career, settling near Vancouver in British Columbia, the province of Canada where she'd grown up.
Tilly, then in her mid-30s, was still trying to cope with the residual pain of a terrible childhood and had started to write about it. Tilly, whose real name is Margaret Chan, is half Chinese. Her mother, Patricia Tilly, was a schoolteacher, and her father a car salesman. They divorced when she was three. Her mother married again and Meg's stepfather sexually molested her. So did a male boy friend of her mother. She bottled up lots of anger and pain and made it work for her as an actress--and one with an exceptional ability to show emotions running below the surface.
Originally destined to be a ballet dancer, Tilly suffered a severe injury that ended her dream of a dancing career just as she was getting started. But the dancing got her onto the movie screen as one of the young performers in the movie "Fame" and her acting career grew out of that exposure.
Tilly had a troubled first marriage to Ted Zinnemann, the film producer son of two-time Oscar-winning film director Fred Zinnemann ("From Here To Eternity," 1953; "A Man For All Seasons," 1966). She has two children by that marriage. Her second marriage--to former Sony Pictures CEO John Calley--also failed. She has a third child. fathered by actor Colin Firth, her co-star in "Valmont."
A lesser person might have felt heavily weighted by all that emotional baggage and slinked away to lick her wounds as her acting career withered and died. Not so Meg Tilly, who devoted herself to motherhood, burying any signs that she used to be a Hollywood hottie you might expect to see on "Entertainment Tonight" or on the cover of National Enquirer. While older sister Jennifer Tilly continued to pursue her own acting career, Meg distanced herself from hers, getting fully involved with her children, their schools and the people in their immediate lives.
It wasn't difficult for her either because Tilly says, "I never really liked the movie star life." She didn't crave the spotlight, so she didn't miss it when it moved away from her and illuminated others.
In the process of leaving the movies behind and taking up a new life, Tilly began to resolve her feelings about her old life. She began to write about her childhood in 1990 while she was living in a cabin in a rural Canadian setting, pregnant with her third child and mothering daughter Emily, then five, and son David, then three.
Tilly likes to think she needed a good friend then and writing began to fulfill that need for her. Her suppressed childhood memories had come coursing back into her mind, probably cued by her observations of her own children. She needed to deal with some of those memories and writing became the path for her, telling her true stories as fiction, but drawing heavily from her own childhood experiences.
"Once I started writing things down,
I couldn't stop," she recalls.
After she'd written several little stories in longhand, Tilly
sent them to a literary agent, who encouraged her to keep going.
She bought herself a typewriter, taught herself how to type and
began pounding out more stories, looking at the often trafic
events of her youth with the knowledge of a grown-up, yet retaining
the little girl's viewpoint. Four years later, they had been
shaped into her first novel, "Singing Songs," published
in hard cover by E.P. Dutton.
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At left, Tilly's first novel, "Singing Songs"; at right, her second novel "Gemma."
Looking back, Tilly realizes it wasn't so monumental an achievement for a movie actress to publish a first book of fiction. Publishers often see the promotional value of having an author who's already a celebrity. It makes booking talk shows and all the other selling techniques much easier. But Tilly knew it would be much harder to publish a second book if the first hadn't become an enormous best-seller.
"Singing Songs" didn't become a best-seller, but it drew praise from all the right places. Publisher's Weekly called it "an impressive first novel." The New York Times Book Review called it, "A book of considerable quality." Harper's Bazaar said it was, "An exquisite first novel" while The Philadelphia Inquirer literally raved that it was "A masterful novel...a literary debut of major properties."
And indeed it is. Re-reading some of the brief chapters, I'm often stunned at the sordid events Tilly so innocently describes, from having to wash and clean the slimy false teeth her father hands her to lying awake in horror as her sister is raped by one of the "adults" in the nightmarish household.
Two years later, Tilly's second novel, "Gemma," was published, again the story of an abused child, a harrowing story of a 12-year-old kidnapped by a sexual predator who slowly, but surely breaks her down in a horrifying cross-country journey.
As I read it, I thought most of Dorothy Allison's equally shocking "Bastard Out of Carolina," which tells its dreadful story in the voice of a young girl. Reviews again made it clear this wasn't a vanity book from a Hollywood star, but rather a stirring work of fiction by a profoundly talented literary talent.
Boolist wrote,"Tilly achieves moments of raw beauty and genuine fierceness." Kirkus Reviews praised her for "conjuring up a revolting and consummate villain."
But Tilly's new book definitely proclaims her ability to veer away from her own life-altering traumatic experiences to find significant meaning in a reall-life situation most readers will be able to identify with easily. Written for young adult readers, "Porcupine" (Tundra, $15.95) will be liked just as well by her following of adult readers because it is to young adult books what "Huckleberry Finn" is to mainstream fiction--a masterpiece for all ages.
Her story is told through the vision of a 12-year-old tomboy whose name is Jacqueline Cooper, but is known to most everybody just as "Jack." She's the oldest of three children whose loving father, whom she idolizes, is killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. Their mother goes to pieces and the children are sent to live with their great-grandmother, a lean and hard old farm widow in a rural section of Canada's Alberta province. They have never met their great-grandmother and didn't even know she existed. The reason: Their mother has been estranged from the great-grandmother ever since her marriage. So, the resentful old woman does not exactly welcome the kids with open arms.
"Porcupine" is the tender, poignant story of two very rough-edged people--the sour old lady and the stubbornly independent 12-year-old girl--who are like porcupines. They're heavily defensive and prickly to each other, but somehow, in order to survive, they must find how to make each other lay down their sharp-edge spines and reveal the soft parts underneath.
I literally love this book. Its heroine is the strong and resourceful girl I'm guessing Meg Tilly finally became after hardening herself to all the pain she felt in her youth. Tilly says she has drawn much from her own family to form these people, but her extraordinary talent with character development has enriched them to the point where they now are incredibly believeable real people to even the casual reader.
When the manuscript went out to potential purchasers of movie rights, the first to bid for "Porcupine" was actress-talk show star Rosie O'Donnell. Tilly admits she was very reluctant to sell the rights at first because "Porcupine" is very close to her heart and she didn't want it to be turned inside out to make some cheapjack movie.
In fact, when she mentioned at a book-signing in Bellignham, WA, who might be making the movie, a ripple of displeasure seemed to ripple through the crowd, no doubt due to the bad publicity O'Donnell has generated over the past few years with her public feuding with Donald Trump and her clashes with Barbara Walters and others on ABC's "The View" daytime talk show.
But Tilly quickly explained that O'Donnell was extremely comforting and protective of her when she first began to talk about her own childhood sex abuse while promoting her earlier novels on O'Donnell's talk show. She and O'Donnell have worked closely developing the movie and Tilly has written her own screenplay for it.
"I have high hopes it will be a good one," she says.
Now 47, Tilly seems to have put her life on a very even keel. Her children are grown up and she has remarried happily. Her new husband, who keeps totally out of the spotlight, accompanied her to her Bellingham book-signing and cheerfully helped her accommodate the overflow crowd of fans, taking pictures of them with his wife and chatting with them.
Listening to Tilly read from her own book is like hearing a world-class actress doing a one-woman show. She still IS a world class actress and when she speaks her own dialogue aloud you begin to wonder what this marvelous talent could do if she wrote herself a grand role to play on the stage or screen.
The very open, very animated and lively woman you meet in person is also nothing like the "ethereal" people she used to play on the screen. She's very disarming and instantly likeable. And it becomes even harder to remember this woman has passed through a series of life traumas that might have broken even the strongest of women.
Will she ever act again? Tilly says it's very likely, though she's not rushing around trying to get something going. Why should she? Right now she has a literary career that's starting to boom, a movie of "Porcupine" and a second young adult novel, 'Lucky," due for publication in 2008.
If you ask her if she's happy about the way things are turning out, she doesn't need to say a word. She just gives you the most radiant of big smiles and that says it all, doesn't it?
©2007 by Ron Miller. The photo of Ron Miller is by Natasha Johnson. The photos of Meg Tilly are courtesy of Ms. Tilly. The cover illustration from "Porcupine" is courtesy of Tundra Books. This column first posted Dec. 10, 2007.
Meg Tilly's first two novels are currently available in large format trade paperback editions from Syren Book Co. and can be ordered via www.syrenbooks.com. In bookstores, "Singing Songs" lists at $14.95 U.S. and "Gemma" at $15.95.
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