Actress Molly Parker has built her reputation on playing strong female characters, often in challenging films. She brings an almost unconscious elegance and intelligence to each role, whether she's in the role of a working-class pregnant South Londoner, a crippled prairie girl during WWII, the spoiled socialite girlfriend of an aspiring politician, or a widow stranded in the frontier town of Deadwood.
Born on July 17, 1972 and raised on what she refers to as "a hippie farm" in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia, Molly discovered she had a passion for acting while she was a teenager. Though she had been training in ballet since she was three years old - including three years with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet - she decided to pursue acting at the age of 16. Her actor-uncle, introduced her to his agent and over the next few years she won a number of small roles in television series and movies-of-the-week.
After graduating from high school, Molly used her acting bursaries and scholarships to enroll in a three-year course at the Gastown Actors' Studio in Vancouver. She also took supplementary voice and singing lessons and continued to act, appearing on episodes of
n Rider, The Outer Limits, and The Highlander. In 1995 she was cast as Glenn Close's daughter in the Emmy award-winning TV movie Serving in Silence and was nominated for a Gemini for her performance in another TV movie, Paris or Somewhere.
It was Kissed, released in 1996, which really set Molly's career into overdrive. A cinematographer friend approached her about auditioning for a role in the low-budget feature film that he was working on and Molly agreed to meet with the director, Lynne Stopkewich. The two hit it off immediately, and Molly was cast in the role of Sandra Larson, a poetic and complex girl whose increasingly obsessive desire to be close to death develops into necrophilia. Molly was able to portray Sandra as an eminently sympathetic character, challenging the natural instinct of audiences to regard her as sick or weird.
Kissed opened to rave reviews at both the Toronto International Film Festival and the Vancouver International Film Festival. Much of the praise received by the film was for Molly's performance. Entertainment Weekly called her "a real find, with a hungry avidity reminiscent of Debra Winger in her prime." Variety hailed her "sexy, moody screen presence." Molly's performance was described as "compelling", "invigorating", "breathtaking" and "virtually luminescent". Considering the shocking subject matter of the film, the unadulterated praise is even more impressive.
Kissed won Best Canadian Feature - Special Jury Citation at the 1996 Toronto Film Festival, and Molly was awarded the 1997 Genie for Best Actress. Within days of Kissed's release in the US, Molly's phone began ringing off the hook. Fox-TV quickly cast her as the lead in their adaptation of Dean Koontz's Intensity and Jodie Foster's Egg Pictures invited her to audition for a role in their new film,Waking Up the Dead. It would become Molly's first big-budget American feature film. She was cast as the socialite girlfriend of a cogressional condidate and appeared alongside Billy Crudup, Jennifer Connelly and Janet McTeer. Around the same time she also signed with the powerful William Morris talent agency in Los Angeles, which represents superstars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Drew Barrymore, and was featured on the cover of Variety magazine.
As her
r "sexy, moody screen presence." Molly's performance was described as "compelling", "invigorating", "breathtaking" and "virtually luminescent". Considering the shocking subject matter of the film, the unadulterated praise is even more impressive.
Kissed won Best Canadian Feature - Special Jury Citation at the 1996 Toronto Film Festival, and Molly was awarded the 1997 Genie for Best Actress. Within days of Kissed's release in the US, Molly's phone began ringing off the hook. Fox-TV quickly cast her as the lead in their adaptation of Dean Koontz's Intensity and Jodie Foster's Egg Pictures invited her to audition for a role in their new film,Waking Up the Dead. It would become Molly's first big-budget American feature film. She was cast as the socialite girlfriend of a cogressional condidate and appeared alongside Billy Crudup, Jennifer Connelly and Janet McTeer. Around the same time she also signed with the powerful William Morris talent agency in Los Angeles, which represents superstars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Drew Barrymore, and was featured on the cover of Variety magazine.
As her performance in Kissed generated buzz around the world, Molly continued to work steadily, appearing in Canadian films, such as Good Things Too, The Chain and Hard Core Logo, and on American TV, in movies such as Contagious, Under Heaven and Titanic.
In 1998, Molly signed on to the cast of CBC-TV's quirky six-part sitcom Twitch City, playing Hope, the eternally optimistic girlfriend of Don McKellar's Curtis, an agoraphobic couch-potato living in Toronto's Kensington Market. As Hope, she provided an essential oasis of stability for the show, which was otherwise populated by oddballs and weirdos. With Twitch City, Molly was able to show off her comedic skills, in contrast to the intense roles on which she had been building her reputation.
The following year brought Molly three dream roles, in three very different films, all of which were featured at the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival. In Canadian writer/director Jeremy Podeswa's evocative The Five Senses, she played a woman whose young daughter goes missing. In English director Michael Winterbottom's bleak Wonderland, she played one of three lonely, working-class South London sisters. And in Istvan Szabo's epic Sunshine, she portrayed a Hungarian Jew married to Ralph Fiennes. Each film garnered its own critical acclaim and the buzz around Molly continued to increase.
In 2000, she reunited with Kissed director (and friend) Lynne Stopkewich for Suspicious River. Molly played Leila Murray, a bored small-town motel receptionist seeking emotional release by offering herself to the lonely guests at the motel. The story becomes darker and more disturbing as Leila becomes emotionally attached to a particularly cruel john. While Suspicious River received mixed reviews, Molly's performance was accoladed for its intensity, intelligence and luminosity. She was also nominated for a Leo (BC's Film and Television Awards) in 2001.
And as if her role in Suspicious River wasn't challanging enough, the following year brought Molly yet another sexually provocative film. In Wayne Wang's controversial The Center of the World, Molly portrayed a musician moonlighting as a lapdancer, invited by a young computer whiz to spend three nights with him in Las Vegas. There were mixed reactions to the film, though Molly's performance was again recognized and nominated for
