Meg Tilly

In The Big Chill (1983) old university friends gather in a big house after a funeral and spend a weekend telling each other how much they have changed. Meg Tilly plays Chloe, the dead man's girlfriend, the one person in the house who was not at the university and does not pretend to miss it. While the others reminisce she watches and answers when asked. It is a small part, and it is the one in the film that is not performing its grief.

That manner came from somewhere. She trained as a ballet dancer until a back injury ended it, studied acting with Peggy Feury in Los Angeles, and made her screen debut as a dancer in Fame (1980). Dancers know how to stand still and be looked at, and she brought that to a run of parts in the early eighties: Tex (1982), Psycho II (1983) as Mary Loomis, The Big Chill the same year, and then the title role in Norman Jewison's Agnes of God (1985), the part that made her reputation. Valmont (1989) for Miloš Forman, as Madame de Tourvel, was the last of the big ones. By the mid-1990s she had largely stopped acting to write novels and raise a family.

What critics kept noticing was the innocence, the wide unguarded look of someone who has not yet learned to hide anything, and what made it worth watching was that something was always going on behind it. Directors saw this and cast her, again and again, as the vulnerable young woman in crisis, over faith or over who she was. It suited her and it boxed her in. Too many of the films around those parts were not good enough, and by the time she left there was a fair question, never answered, about how much more she could have done with better material. We are fonder of Chloe than the film gives us reason to be: in a house full of people explaining themselves, Tilly's refusal to explain anything felt like the only honest thing on screen, and we found ourselves waiting for her to come back into shot.

She did come back, to television, in Caprica (2010) and then as Lorna Corbett in Bomb Girls (2012–13), a closed and difficult woman whom the series slowly opened up, which is the kind of part she was built for and rarely given. She has taken the occasional role since, from her home in British Columbia, between books. "I really enjoy acting," she once said. "At home I can't even finish a sentence, and here I am reading these wonderful lines." It reads like someone who could take it or leave it, and mostly left it. The loss is ours more than hers.