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WELCOME TO MOLLYWOOD
Molly Parker has gone Hollywood - but on her own terms.

Text: SARAH HAMPSON

MOLLY PARKER IS DRIVING ALONG SUNSET BOULEVARD IN HER ultramarine Chevrolet Rent-A-Wreck. Billboards scream. Helicopters chop through the air. Traffic thickens on every street. There is no air-conditioning in the car. It is at least 30°C and humid outside.

But Parker is serene. She and fiancé Matt Bissonnette, a Montreal-born filmmaker, moved to Los Angeles last spring. Parker wanted to bring their old Toyota station wagon, but couldn't register it in L.A. because it didn't have air bags. So they had to rent something while they consider what to buy. "A convertible?" I suggest, conjuring up the classic starlet-loose-in-L.A. image. "Oh, no," Parker says emphatically in a long breath, wrinkling her nose.

Parker, who is 28, is very non-L.A. It took her a long time to decide to move here, even though she had every encouragement to do so. "It just seemed so overwhelming," she explains. After her starring role as a necrophiliac in Vancouver-based Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed in 1996, she got a big break when the William Morris Agency in Hollywood signed her as a client. Still, she doesn't seem to be breathlessly courting the Hollywood-size stardom that looms on the horizon.

There is none of the starlet sensibility in her calm demeanour. Giddy narcissism and sparkly conversation are not her style. Parker is an elusive personality and inscrutable somehow. Her face is long and old-fashioned, like that of a Jane Austen character. She's dressed in a white cotton top with spaghetti straps and colourfully patterned capri pants, her arms crossed delicately over the steering wheel, her left leg scrunched up so her bare foot rests on the driver's seat. She moves through the heat and the traffic and the affront of L.A. like a solo canoeist, self-contained and graceful.

If Parker seems enigmatic in person, then her choice of films adds layers to her mystery. She made her name playing complex off-centre female characters - not only the necrophiliac in Kissed, but also a motel clerk who has sex with guests in Suspicious River (also Stopkewich's) and a stripper in Wayne Wang's The Center of the World. The National Post dubbed that choice "The porno world of Molly Parker." She has played other characters, too, of course: opposite Ralph Fiennes in Sunshine, an epic tale about a Hungarian family, and in many television series, including Twitch City on CBC.

This fall and winter, she appears in four new movies that show more of her range, thus deepening her mystery. She plays a woman with polio in The War Bride; an architect in Bruce Sweeney's Last Wedding, a black comedy about relationships; an alcoholic single mother in Paul Gross' Men With Brooms; and the object of William Hurt's middle-aged lust in Rare Birds, a comedy by Sturla Gunnarsson.

Film directors love her for her enigmatic appeal. "She has deep resonant pools. You feel like you know her but you don't feel as though you're seeing all of her. It's very paradoxical," Gross says. "Her acting is completely transparent," explains Gunnarsson. Murray Gibson, her long-time manager, saw her potential when she was only 16. She had just graduated from a high school in a small town outside Vancouver. She had blue hair. "She had a real maturity that was very compelling. She's like an old soul," Gibson says. In L.A., Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have met with her, although nothing yet has come of these high-level chats.

A profile of Parker, then, is an effort to understand her centre, to glimpse the source of her deep resonant pools. As we were driving around and during lunch, I asked her if she could articulate what grounds her. So many departures into odd and complex film characters must necessitate a strong foundation, I posited. That's when she talked of the house she and Bissonnette have rented in Echo Park, in central L.A. She drives there now, pointing to some Victorian houses perched on a hill, with gingerbread trim like a child's fantasy sandcastles. It's a diverse family-oriented neighbourhood close to Hollywood. "Here, I don't have to be confronted every day with the soul-selling that goes on in L.A.," she says in her slow, measured voice as she points out her corner store, the park with a pond, a vintage clothing store she likes, a small run-down South Pacific-style bar she has frequented once or twice. The pursuit of celebrity is dangerous, she says. "I don't know how you create anything worth putting out in the world when you're living in a bubble."

Suddenly, she decides to take me to her house, even though she had stipulated at the start that she likes to guard her privacy. Maybe she's tired of the perception that she is enigmatic. Or, perhaps, it is the ultimate non-L.A. thing to do. Guarding one's private life is playing the celebrity game, after all, something Parker seems to be avoiding. She parks the Rent-A-Wreck, grabs her Camel Lights, her jean jacket, and slings her bag over her shoulder, leading the way past a high hedge of bougainvillea, up the wooden stairs and across a narrow, open porch littered with books, magazines, a box or two, and into her arts-and-craft-style home. Inside, it is simple, spare. White walls. Big, comfy brown furniture in the living room. Wooden floors. An old steamer trunk for a coffee table. An unmade bed in her bedroom. Clothes spilling from drawers. Linoleum in the small kitchen. A small table. A bowl of fruit. No dishwasher.

"This is why I rented this place," she says, as she mounts a narrow, wooden staircase to the second floor of her house. It is like a barn up here, a large, unfinished attic space. There's a ping-pong table in the middle, covered with small piles of papers. Bissonnette's desk sits in one corner, near a window. "This reminds me of Vancouver," she says, looking around the room and drawing a deep breath. "I need to be surrounded by people and things from home. In a space like this, you feel like you could do anything."

Asked what she is trying to create and why, she talks about her inspiration as if she, too, has had difficulty understanding it. At first she says, "Film is the only art form in which you watch a person change, where you can watch life happen, life being lived." There is an intellectual exploration in her work, she goes on to say. "Basically, I am interested in playing women who are allowed to be complicated and conflicted." Still, that doesn't fully explain what she's trying to express as an actress, why she does it. She breathes deeply, sighs. Then a memory surfaces. She tells me about watching a scene in Silkwood as a teenager - when Meryl Streep looks back at Kurt Russell as she's getting into her car, the look on her face, the emotion and how she flashes him, just opens her shirt to reveal her tight white T-shirt underneath. It was such a small, human moment, Parker says. It made her want to be an actress. Good acting "is about making us give a shit about humanity," she finally blurts.

It's a telling moment, this impassioned declaration, mostly because Parker has come undone a bit. She is normally so composed, so still. From the age of three until she was 17, she studied ballet, she explains. "It's a disciplined craft, so self-contained. So held together." When she's nervous, such as in an interview, she confesses that she "goes into this very upright, very measured, very careful kind of thing." It comes, she says after a pause, "from a desire to be understood."

She leads me into her garden, a small space that she has completely dug up and replanted. She spends most of her time in the garden when she's at home, which is often. She goes to one audition a week, sometimes more, depending on the season. Through a thicket of orange and grapefruit trees, she has created a small winding path. She has planted dahlias, zinnias, rosemary, some shrubs, snapdragons. Parker stands at the edge of the garden, shading her green eyes from the sun. She likes to think about its textures and colours. "I love the experimentation it requires, and the patience."

Molly Parker's world is small, contained, real. She is thinking her way through life and through her work, figuring stuff out and not caring too much that she doesn't know where it will lead. "I planted all this from seed," she says, pointing to a bed of larkspur. "And it's always a surprise to me to see what something is going to become when it starts out so really small."