Small parts in Canada from the late 1980s, and then one film in which he is the point. In Stories We Tell he reads his own account of his marriage in a recording booth, dry and unhurried, and it is the best thing in it.
Fi1m perspective
A man sits in a recording booth reading from pages in front of him. On the other side of the glass his daughter asks for the line again, and he does the line again. That is how Michael Polley spends most of Stories We Tell (2012), and it is how we remember him: English, dry, unhurried, reading an account of his own marriage that he wrote himself and that a vainer man would have cut. He does not ask for sympathy. He asks whether the reading was any good.
It was, by some distance, the largest thing he ever did on screen. He trained as an actor in England in the 1950s, in the same class as Albert Finney, then moved to Canada, worked on stage around Toronto and sold insurance to keep the family fed. The camera found him late. He was a gunner in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), on a set he was visiting because his daughter was in the cast, then the town doctor in Road to Avonlea (1990) and Frank in Slings & Arrows (2003). These are small parts, done dependably, and we will not pretend to a view of them we do not have.
The film that matters he did not so much act in as submit to. Sarah Polley put him in the booth, interrupted him, and let Mike Munn cut his reading against his other children and Diane's friends, who remember the same years differently. His voice holds the whole thing together. When he says, of Sarah, "I felt closer to you than I'd ever felt about the other children because there'd always been Diane there as well," he says it in the tone of a man reporting a fact, and that is why it lands. It moved us more than we were ready for, watching him let his daughter direct the hardest chapter of his life and stay courteous throughout. The film's fault, that it keeps explaining its own cleverness after we have understood it, is never his. He is the plain reading at the centre of a clever film.
A perspective built on one film is a thin thing, and we know it. But the film exists, he is the best of it, and it is worth an evening of anyone's time. Watch it for him, and for the way he does the line again when asked.
Biography
Michael Polley (1933–2018) was a British-born Canadian actor. He appeared in films including The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) as Gunner and Stories We Tell (2012) as Storyteller, providing the narration written by him. He also had roles in the television series Goosebumps (1995) as a cab driver and Slings and Arrows (2003–2006) as Frank.
Polley was the father of director and actress Sarah Polley. Her documentary Stories We Tell explores family history and includes his contributions as a storyteller. He emigrated from England to Canada and settled in the Toronto area.
