"Acting's not my whole life. My children definitely come first.""Horror movies can be very interesting because they can deal with intangible subjects that are full of emotion.""I know that in order to be considered successful, you're supposed to do two or three movies a year. I only work once every year-and-a-half, sometimes two years. I have children to raise.""I limited myself to introduce a change in my way of thinking and the way I see things. When I look at my child, I do it in a different way then when I'm contemplating a chair. They are different... the child is a living being, and the chair is an object.""I really enjoy acting. At home I can't even finish a sentence, and here I am reading these wonderful lines. I think it must be every housewife's dream, to be an actress part-time.""I still have a problem with nuns. I follow them around like a kitten with a ball of yarn. After a while, all my characters become very close friends.""I think it is important to say that though, of course, it is wonderful to have children, it is a disservice to others not to also say how hard it is to do it alone.""I wanted to write something from a child's viewpoint... Five of the characters I have played in movies have either been abused or became abusers, themselves, and I just kind of felt like there was a need.""I wasn't really interested in doing television. I don't have that much ambition. My agent, Eileen Feldman, has all the ambition for me.""I'm not that fashion-conscious. A lot of times, when women are appearing to be so perfect, it's because they're a mess underneath.""If they have covered your face with latex, you have to control yourself mentally so you won't think. If you start thinking, you will succumb to panic. I had a bit of a cold, and frankly I didn't have a good time.""If you meet people who have been successful in Hollywood, or look a their photographs, you see a haunted look in their eyes, you sense a trapped feeling.""It helps when 1 can send the children off to their fathers so I can support my new book with a national publicity tour. I started writing the book when my daughter was 5. It took me almost four years.""Look, I know he's been married three times before. I accept it, but I don't want it driving up the driveway.""That is why it's so fun to make movies... you get to do lots of things you would never do in your normal life.""There we times when everybody in the house has the flu. You're cleaning up vomit and it's 2 in the morning, and you're wishing there was somebody else there to help you."
Tilly, the third of four children, was born Margaret E. Chan in Long Beach, California, the daughter of Patricia Tilly, a schoolteacher, and Harry Chan, a Chinese American used car salesman. Meg Tilly Biography (c. 1960-) Following her parents' divorce when she was three, she was raised by her mother and stepfather, John Ward, on rural Texada Island in British Columbia, Canada. Tilly graduated from Esquimalt High School in Victoria, British Columbia. She has a brother, Steve, and two sisters, Rebecca, and fellow actress Jennifer (born 1958).
As a teen, she was involved with the Connecticut Ballet Company, as well as the Throne Dance Theatre, and made her screen debut with Alan Parker's Fame in 1980.
After a serious back injury forced her to stop dancing, she became an actress. She appeared in films such as The Big Chill and Psycho II before her acclaimed title role in Agnes of God, for which she received an Oscar nomination and won a Golden Globe. Tilly later appeared in Valmont, The Two Jakes with Jack Nicholson and Leaving Normal, as well as the 1993 horror film Body Snatchers.
Tilly was the first choice for the role of Constanze Mozart in Milos Forman's film Amadeus, having received glowing appraisals of her rehearsal work by both her would-be costar Tom Hulce and director Forman. However, she sustained a leg injury playing soccer and had to abandon the project. The role later went to Elizabeth Berridge.
Tilly was in the 10th episode of Caprica broadcast on October 5th 2010, her first on screen appearance since 1995.
Tilly has written a novel entitled Singing Songs, comprising a series of vignettes about a young girl whose stepfather molests her and her sisters. A second novel, Gemma, came out in October 2006. Her third novel, Porcupine, is a finalist for the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize. Tilly also wrote a novel, First Time, published in 2008.
According to Tilly's book Singing Songs, she and her sisters grew up surrounded by poverty and abuse. They were sexually molested by their stepfather. The book is written in first person and the narrator has a very child-like voice. In her website foreword, Tilly states that although the stories are fictional, they are based on her childhood experiences.
Tilly has three children: Emily (born 1984) and David (born 1986), by her marriage to film producer Tim Zinnemann, which ended in 1989, and a son, Will (born 1990), from her five-year relationship with British actor Colin Firth. Her second husband, John Calley, was 30 years her senior. He is a former president of Sony Pictures; they were married in 1995 and divorced in 2002.
Now remarried and living in British Columbia, Tilly has not appeared in a film since 1995 (although she has made an appearance in Caprica in late 2010), having decided to retire from acting in order to raise her children and write.
