Oscar Profile #567: Meg Tilly

Born February 14, 1960 in Long Beach, California, Margaret Elizabeth Chan, known professionally as Meg Tilly, is the daughter of a Chinese American father and a mother of Irish and Finnish extraction. She is the younger sister of producer Steve Tilly and actress Jennifer Tilly. Her parents divorced she was three and her mother moved to British Columbia where she and her siblings were raised by her mother and stepfather. At the age of 12, she began to take dance lessons, and in a few years developed into a gifted ballerina.

Tilly attended high school in British Columbia, and International High School in Seattle, Washington. Later a member of the Connecticut Ballet Company, she had to give up dancing when her dance partner dropped her, leading to a serious back injury in 1979. Despite her injury, she made her film debut playing a dancer in Alan Parker’s 1980 film, Fame.

After appearing in a couple of TV shows, Tilly made her dramatic film debut in opposite Matt Dillon in Tim Hunter’s 1982 film, Tex where she met and married the film’s producer, Tim Zinnemann, the son of legendary Oscar-winning director Fred Zinnemann. They would have two children together before divorcing in 1989. It was during their marriage that Tilly’s career blossomed.

In 1983, she starred in a key supporting role in Richard Franklin’s Psycho II, the sequel to 1960 Alfred Hitchcock classic, for which she would win several awards for her performance. She had an even bigger hit in Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill later the same year in which she played the girlfriend of the deceased whose death reunites the film’s cast at his funeral.

In 1984, Tilly starred opposite Tim Matheson in the horror film Impulse. A foot injury forced her to drop out of Milos Forman’s 1984 Oscar-winning film, Amadeus, but she rebounded with a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination of her own for 1985’s Agnes of God in which she co-starred with Jane Fonda and Anne Bancroft.

The actress had two high-powered roles later in the decade with 1988’s Masquerade and 1989’s Valmont where she met actor Colin Firth with whom she lived for several years and with whom she had a third child. Her films during this period included The Two Jakes, the Jack Nicholson directed sequel to Chinatown and Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers, the third film version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Tilly married influential producer John Calley, then the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, who was thirty years her senior in 1995, and gave up acting. The marriage ended in divorce in 2002 when she married third husband, Don Calame.

Tilly returned to acting after a fifteen-year absence in 2010. She is also the author of six published novels written between 1994 and 2014.

Meg Tilly is now 61.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THE BIG CHILL (1983) , directed by Lawrence Kasdan

Nominated for 3 Oscars for Best Picture, Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress (Glenn Close), this ensemble comedy-drama featured an all-star cast that included William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Tom Berenger, Jeff Goldblum, Mary Kay Place, and JoBeth Williams in addition to Close and Tilly as mourners at the funeral of Kevin Costner whose flashback scenes were deleted from the film’s release print. He is seen briefly, however, as the corpse. Tilly plays Costner’s girlfriend at the time of his death. The others play his college friends who reunion is being conducted at the home of married couple Close and Kline.

AGNES OF GOD (1985) , directed by Norman Jewison

The film, which is about the struggle between Freudian logic and Catholic faith, was nominated for 3 Oscars including Best Actress (Anne Bancroft), Supporting Actress (Tilly) and Score. Tilly plays the naïve novice nun who is discovered with the corpse of a newborn infant in her convnet quarters, a role that won a Tony for Amanda Plummer on Broadway opposite Tony nominee Geraldine Page. Jane Fonda received top billing as the court appointed psychiatrist played on Broadway by Elizabeth Ashley. Ironically, Page who was passed over Bancroft for her role in the film, won the Oscar over Bancroft for her performance in The Trip to Bountiful.

MASQUERADE (1988) , directed by Bob Swaim

Tilly plays a young woman who recently inherited $200,000,000 upon the death of her mother in this twisty, perverse melodrama. Someone wants her dead. Is it the young racing captain (Rob Lowe) who says he wants her, not her money; her rejected ex-boyfriend now cop (Doug Savant); or her nasty stepfather (John Glover)? Kim Cattrall co-stars as the sluttish wife of Lowe’s employer with whom he is having a side affair. Dana Delaney has a featured role as Glover’s equally nasty girlfriend. Location filming in Long Island’s Say Harbor and Southampton among other locales adds immeasurably to the film’s enjoyment.

VALMONT (1989) , directed by Milos Forman

Both this film from the Choderlos deLaclos novel and Stephen Frears’ version of Les Liaisons Dangerouses from Christopher Hampton’s stage adaptation called Dangerous Liaisons were filmed at the same time. The Frears version, released a year earlier, received 7 Oscar nominations and 3 wins. Forman’s version received just one nomination for its Costume Design and no wins. Annette Bening, Colin Firth, and Tilly have the roles played in the Frears film by Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Tilly and Firth fell in love while making the film. Their son was born a year later.

BODY SNATCHERS (1993) , directed by Abel Ferrera

This third version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is set on a military base, giving the story a bit of a reboot instead of it being a remake of the 1956 and 1978 versions. Tilly’s famous line from the film, “Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide? Nowhere… ‘cause there’s no one like you left” was later used by Canadian industrial band Skinny Puppy in their song “Dal” from their 2007 album, Mythmaker. This version, co-starring Terry Kinney, Gabrielle Anwar, Billy Wirth, R. Lee Ermey, and Forest Whitaker, was critic Roger Ebert’s favorite of the three.