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Ellen Page, Actress
After describing Juno as “just about the
best movie” of 2007, the critic Roger Ebert, writing for the
Chicago Sun-Times (December 14, 2007), lavished praise on Ellen
Page, the actress who, at age 19, portrayed the title character.
“Has there been a better performance this year than Ellen Page's
creation of Juno? I don't think so,” Ebert wrote. “If most actors
agree that comedy is harder than drama, then harder still is comedy
depending on a quick mind, utter self-confidence, and an ability to
stop just short of going too far. Page's presence and timing are
extraordinary.” Many other critics, too, applauded Page's turn as a
pregnant teenager who decides to give her baby up for adoption, in a
role that required the actress to exhibit both sarcastic wit and
childlike fragility. “She has a gift for making her motor-mouth
lines sound like they're really coming from her head, and an
instinct for mixing almost supernatural self-possession with flashes
of vulnerability,” the film critic David Edelstein said in his
review for the National Public Radio program Fresh Air
(December 7, 2007). Her work in Juno, which was directed by
Jason Reitman, brought Page nominations for an Oscar and a Golden
Globe Award and a bevy of other awards, as have her performances in
some of the two dozen films and television series in which she has
appeared since she began her acting career, at age 10. Those honors
include the 2003 ACTRA Maritimes Award, from the Alliance of
Canadian Cinema, Television, and Radio Artists, for her work in the
film Marion Bridge; the 2004 Atlantic Canadian Award, given
out at the Atlantic Film Festival, for her performance in the motion
picture Wilby Wonderful; and two Gemini Awards (which
celebrate excellence in English-language Canadian television), in
2004 and 2005, for her performances in Mrs. Ashboro's Cat and
ReGenesis, respectively.
Ellen Philpotts-Page was born on February 21, 1987
in Halifax, the capital of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. Her
mother, Martha Philpotts, is a teacher; her father, Dennis Page, is
a graphic designer. According to Dominic Wills, writing for
tiscali.co.uk (2008), her father had a son and daughter from a
previous marriage, and her parents separated during her childhood;
her father later remarried. When Page was 10 years old, talent
scouts seeking child actors for a TV movie called Pit Pony
visited the public Halifax Grammar School, where she was a student,
and cast her in a small role. The film was successful, and Page
signed on for the spin-off TV series. “My parents never pushed me
into this at all, but they've really supported me,” she told Jill
Rappaport for Dateline NBC (January 13, 2008), explaining
that she enjoyed a relatively normal childhood. “And their main
thing is that I do remain grounded and keep my head on my
shoulders.” When she was 13 Page was offered a role on a U.S.
sitcom, but her parents insisted that she turn it down, since taking
the part would have meant moving to Los Angeles, California. “It's a
good thing,” Page told the WENN Entertainment News Wire Service
(January 21, 2008). “I would have had to move to LA and I can't even
imagine what I would be like now. They [her parents] said keep up
your grades and then you can act.” During those years Page played
competitively on two soccer teams. She also enjoyed hiking and
snowboarding. “I'm pretty adventurous,” the self-professed tomboy
told Ginny Chien for the Los Angeles Times (January 6, 2008).
From 2001 to 2002 Page portrayed Treena Lahey on
the Canadian TV comedy Trailer Park Boys, a show known for
its raunchy humor. “I am not sure she enjoyed her work on Trailer
Park Boys that much because of the humour on the show—she is so
much of a gentle soul, and for her to be able to embrace that I
would think would have been beyond her ken,” the actor John
Dunsworth, who played her drunken father in the series, told
Lee-Anne Goodman for the Peterborough Examiner (December 15,
2007). Dunsworth told Robyn Young for the Halifax Daily News
(January 23, 2008), “Who can put a finger on the magic when some
people just have it? She's incredible.”
In 2002, the same year that she appeared in the
film The Wet Season and the TV show Rideau Hall, Page
worked alongside the actress Molly Parker in the independent
Canadian film Marion Bridge and decided to pursue acting as a
career. “For the first time, I felt something different,” she told
David Ansen and Devin Gordon for Newsweek (January 28, 2008).
“I felt myself being overcome by something I can’t necessarily
explain. But I wanted to keep feeling that and finding out what that
was and learning more about it.”
Over the next couple of years, Page appeared in a
string of TV movies, among them Mrs. Ashboro’s Cat, Homeless to
Harvard: The Liz Murray Story, Going for Broke, and I
Downloaded a Ghost. She also had a recurring role on
ReGenesis, a Canadian TV science-fiction series. Her film work
included Touch & Go, Love That Boy, and Wilby Wonderful,
all Canadian releases. According to Dominic Wills, Page attended the
Queen Elizabeth High School before transferring to Shambhala High
School, a nondenominational private school that incorporates a brief
period of meditation in every student's daily schedule. Page’s
favorite teacher, Jane Hester, has recalled the young actress as
smart, funny, and similar to the character she would later play in
Juno. In an interview with Young, Hester called Page a
“normal Nova Scotian girl,” adding, “She's just going to be who she
is; she's just going to be honest about herself and that's what
she's got going for her.” During downtime on film sets, Page taught
herself how to juggle, and she would sometimes use the skill to
amuse her classmates.
In 2005, the same year she graduated from high
school, Page appeared in Mouth to Mouth and Hard Candy,
films that heightened her profile and allowed her to tackle dark,
challenging subject matter. In Mouth to Mouth, she played a
runaway teenager who hitchhikes through Europe and joins a cult-like
underground organization called SPARK, or Street People Armed with
Radical Knowledge. While the film received mixed reviews, critics
praised Page’s performance. “An intensely direct performer, Page is
also subtly adept at hinting at something held back, in this case
through the merest tilt of a jaw that hints at a skeptical strength
taking root within a girl who has little reason to trust anyone,”
Ella Taylor wrote for LA Weekly (May 31, 2006). In his review
for the Los Angeles Times (June 2, 2006), Mark Olsen, having
seen some of Page’s later movies, was less impressed, writing,
“Page’s performance here is developmental at best, and though she
shows flashes of the strong-willed, seductive decisiveness that has
marked her subsequent roles, she mostly looks slightly confused,
unsure of herself and under-directed.”
In Hard Candy, directed by David Slade,
Page played Hayley Stark, a 14-year-old who drugs and tortures the
pedophile who murdered her best friend. “Hard Candy, however
it's wrapped, is a tough one to swallow,” Rob Nelson wrote for the
Village Voice (April 11, 2006). “Still, the acute
precociousness of our score-settling Lolita strains credibility only
if you fail to accept the film's effortless assertion that American
pop—e.g., the Internet and, yes, extreme cinema-on-demand—has
lowered the minimum-age requirements for just about everything,
including principled payback.” Nelson went on to write that Page, “a
Molly Ringwald type who was only 15 when the movie was made, leaves
little doubt as to whether a kid can play a grown-up's icky game and
win.” Describing Page’s performance for Entertainment Weekly
(April 12, 2006), Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Looking like a baby
Sigourney Weaver, she takes off from the script's dexterous sarcasms
to play Hayley with an enlightened lack of mercy, an ability to
stare down her enemy by thinking just like him. To watch Hard Candy
is, at moments, to be very afraid, but the scariest thing about it
is the fury of Page's talent.” In an interview with Gina Piccalo for
the Los Angeles Times (December 2, 2007), David Slade, who
had auditioned more than 300 girls before he cast Page as Hayley,
recalled Page’s commitment to the part: “She often said, ‘I will
cry. I will break down. I will look like I'm in a mess. That's part
of my process.'” Slade added, “When she's in character, you can't
talk to her about anything else. When [in the film] she believes her
friend was murdered, she believes it to the exclusion of the world.
Yet, she's not this impenetrable dark soul. She's also this breath
of fresh air.” In 2006 Page appeared as Kitty Pryde in X-Men 3:
The Last Stand (2006), the final film in a trilogy based on a
popular Marvel Comics series. While some of her friends teased her
for “selling out” and taking a part in an action blockbuster, Page
has said that she had fun portraying a comic-book heroine. “Doing a
film like that has helped me do the last five films I've shot,” she
told Piccalo, referring to the increase in offers that followed the
release of that high-profile film.
It was after seeing Page in Hard Candy that
the director Jason Reitman, the son of the acclaimed comedic
filmmaker Ivan Reitman, began considering her for the title role in
Juno. “You saw a career opening up before your eyes,” he told
Piccalo, likening her performance to Jodie Foster’s star-making turn
in the 1976 film Taxi Driver. “When I met her, it wasn't even
a second thought,” Reitman added. “It's a combination of her
fearlessness and her intellect. It was literally like meeting Juno.
She comes right at you with her intelligence and her sense of
humor.” “She's way too smart for her age,” Reitman told Chien. “It's
embarrassing sometimes to have a conversation with her.” Juno
was written by Diablo Cody, a first-time screenwriter who had gained
attention with her memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an
Unlikely Stripper ( 2006), which described her experiences as an
exotic dancer. Juno is about a snarky teenage outsider who
gets pregnant and decides to give the baby to a yuppie couple,
played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. “I just fell in love
with [the script],” Page told Jill Rappaport. “It was something that
I really, really, really wanted to do. I feel pretty lucky.” In
particular, Page was struck by Juno’s distinctive way of expressing
herself, a characteristic many critics have praised. “One of the
things that I was blown away by when I first read the script was the
dialogue,” she told Bob Strauss for the Daily News of Los
Angeles, as printed in the Baltimore Sun (January 11,
2008). “Although it was unique and witty and all of that, to me it
felt very fluid, it felt very rhythmic and it felt very organic. And
although I didn't speak the exact same way as Juno spoke when I was
16, I definitely had my own unique language with my friends, which
was different from how I communicated with my parents and in work
environments.”
After Page’s character learns that she is
pregnant, she briefly considers having an abortion; her decision to
have the baby adopted has led some to label Juno a pro-life
film. Page, who has identified herself as pro-choice, told Strauss
that to politicize Juno is to miss the film's point. “I think
people have an idea of a movie they want to make, and it's not about
a woman who has an abortion,” she said. “For example, our film was
about a young girl who decides to have her baby and give it to an
uptight yuppie couple. That was Diablo's idea of the film, but it's
great that she shows that there's an extremely viable choice that
needs to be there for young women. And she deals with it in an
incredibly well-done way.” She added, “But this is what the film is
about. If Juno had an abortion, it would be a short film.”
Page has also said that she liked Juno’s attitude
and regarded the character as refreshing, even unique. “Juno is a
teenage female lead we've never seen before,” she told Johanna
Schneller for the Toronto Globe and Mail (January 23, 2008).
“She feels genuine, honest. That's what people are responding to.”
Many critics agreed, and in his review for Time (December 7,
2007), the film critic Richard Schickel wrote, “In this effort Cody
and Reitman are particularly blessed by Ellen Page's performance.
She has a way of making her preternatural articulateness seem real
rather than forced, a way of indicating her vulnerability without
pressing us for sympathy. Hers is a lived-in character, perking
along, tougher than she looks, naturally funnier in speech and
outlook than she probably knows. Juno is not a great movie;
it does not have aspirations in that direction. But it is, in its
little way, a truthful, engaging and welcome entertainment.” In his
review for the New York Times (December 5, 2007), the film
critic A. O. Scott wrote that Juno “outgrows its own
mannerisms and defenses, evolving from a coy, knowing farce into a
heartfelt, serious comedy.” He added, “A good deal of the credit for
this goes to Ms. Page, . . . who is able to seem, in the space of a
single scene, mature beyond her years and disarmingly childlike. The
naïveté that peeks through her flippant, wised-up façade is
essential, since part of the movie’s point is that Juno is not quite
as smart or as capable as she thinks she is.” Writing for
Entertainment Weekly (December 7, 2007), Lisa Schwarzbaum called
Page “radiantly no-nonsense,” and she went on to grade the film an
A–. In Page's interview with Rappaport, she responded to one
critic’s statement that she embodied Juno the way Audrey Hepburn did
Holly Golightly, the iconic lead character of the film Breakfast
at Tiffany’s. “I don't want to sound like, you know, too
self-deprecating or what have you,” Page said, “but, you know, I
definitely just—I feel like I have so much to learn and so much I
want to do and so on. So it's hard to absorb such kind of insane
comments.”
In addition to her Academy Award and Golden Globe
nominations, Page received leading-actress award nominations from
BAFTA (the British Academy of Film and Television Arts), the
Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Screen Actors Guild, and the
Online Film Critics Society. She earned awards in that category from
the film critics' associations of Chicago, Florida, Central Ohio,
Las Vegas, and Toronto, and “breakthrough” awards from the Hollywood
Film Festival, the National Board of Review, the Phoenix Film
Critics Society, the International Press Academy (whose prizes are
called the Satellite Awards), and the Independent Film Project (the
Gotham Award).
In 2007 Page also appeared in the Canadian films
The Tracey Fragments—playing “an emotionally unstable
teenager looking for her little brother,” according to Goodman—and
The Stone Angel. In An American Crime, a U.S. film
that, as of January 2008, was still awaiting distribution, she plays
a real-life young girl, Sylvia Likens, who in 1965 was raped,
tortured, and eventually murdered by the Indiana family whom her
parents had hired as caregivers. During filming Page starved herself
in an attempt to connect with the horrors Sylvia had faced. “At one
point, while we were shooting, she was lying on the cellar floor,
which is where a lot of it happened,” the film's director, Tommy
O'Haver, told Piccalo. “I noticed how skinny she was. I turned to
her and I said, ‘Ellen, have you been eating?' She said, ‘Well, no,
because Sylvia wasn't being fed.' She said, ‘I'm doing this for you,
Tommy.' I just couldn't believe it.” Page appears in the film
Smart People, released in April 2008. In that romantic comedy,
starring Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker, Page portrays the
politically conservative Vanessa Wetherhold, who is “Juno rewritten
by Ayn Rand,” as A. O. Scott observed in the New York Times
(April 11, 2008, on-line).
Page is said to have a handful of films in
preproduction, including “Light-house”; “Whip It,” which will mark
the directorial debut of the actress Drew Barrymore; and “Jack and
Diane,” in which she portrays a teenage lesbian living in New York.
In February 2008 it was reported that she had signed on to star in
“Drag Me to Hell,” a horror film to be directed by Sam Raimi.
Explaining to Chien how she chooses her roles, Page said that it
“feeds my soul when I can approach a character who is honest and
well-written and whole. I guess I just feel strongly about remaining
connected to myself.” “When you do this, you do have to understand
to a certain extent that it's a business,” she told Howard Gensler
for the Philadelphia Daily News (December 14, 2007). “But I
don't really feel like compromising my happiness or integrity,
because life is too short and there are a lot of things that my
heart's attached to. So I pick roles that I want to play that I feel
branch away from stereotype, and a lot of the actresses I really
like have done that.”
During many of her interviews surrounding
the release of Juno, Page wore a badge that read “Nova
Scotia: Canada's Ocean Playground.” She enjoys traveling, reading,
and playing the guitar. In 2007 she spent a month backpacking in
Europe. She lives with friends in Halifax.
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