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"No one should have to go through puberty in a period costume," says Sarah Polley, fixing her interviewer with an unnerving, blue gaze that makes it almost impossible to tell whether she's joking. She cracks a smile and the clouds part. "It's really embarrassing."

As she sits in the Café Diplomatico, in Toronto's west end, there is little of the crinoline-clad child star Canadians came to know in the '90s. Tiny and unmade-up in jeans and hooded sweatshirt, Ms. Polley is contemplating her transition from CBC Television's petticoat-sporting darling on Road to Avonlea to full-grown writer/director.

At the not-so-ancient age of 27, she has just completed her first feature film. Away From Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent, will have its gala opening at the Toronto International Film Festival next week. Critics are already humming with delight over the film, which promises to catapult the ever-beyond-her-years actress/director to the first tier of Canadian filmmakers her first time out.

Still, Ms. Polley doubts it will entirely change the way Canada -- or the Canadian film industry -- sees her.

"I've been working since I was so young, I think in a way people will always see me as a child actor. I'm so used to it I'd probably be alarmed if people just started treating me like an adult."

Her trajectory from child star to director has been impressive, if unorthodox. Her first movie role was at the age of six in Disney's One Magic Christmas. She went on to star in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) before she took the title role in Kevin Sullivan's hit show, Road to Avonlea.

As a teenager, Ms. Polley became a left-wing political activist. Her return to screen was marked by a decision to stick largely to independent fare, most notably Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997) followed by Guinevere (1999) and My Life Without Me (2003).

Today, she lives in a modest house in downtown Toronto with her husband, film editor David Wharnsby, who also worked on the film. Ms. Polley's life is defiantly un-Hollywood. She rarely travels, except for work, and her income as a director is, she says, "not as luxurious as an actor's, but comfortable compared to all those people who do jobs they hate."

Contrary to popular belief, she did not make millions during her time on Avonlea. "Nowhere near it," she says.

Ms. Polley's transition from "It-Girl" starlet (as she was dubbed during 1999's Sundance festival for her role in Guinevere) to sober adult filmmaker was marked by her pivotal decision to drop out of the role of Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe's Hollywood hit, Almost Famous.

The actress who stepped in received an Academy Award nomination.

"Kate Hudson's life is my idea of hell," Ms. Polley says. "I feel like sometimes people misunderstood that. As if the decision to not become a big Hollywood celebrity was not some kind of gesture of integrity. In fact, [celebrity] is a place of terror for me. It's my worst fear. The idea of coping with that on a larger scale is my worst nightmare."

In an effort to insulate herself, both professionally and personally, Ms. Polley has, over the years, assembled the tight-knit creative team that came together to help her make her first feature. Having worked with Ms. Polley in the past, veteran Canadian producer Danny Iron (who produced the film) says he never once worried that she wasn't up for the job.

Adapted from an Alice Munro short story, Away From Her tells the story of a couple's struggle with Alzheimer's and the continuation of romantic love after 44 years of marriage.

It's an unusually staid choice of subject matter, let alone for a first-time writer/director. And yet it is a fitting irony that Ms. Polley decided to make a film about what she describes as "the end of things," during a period of new beginnings in her own life.

That was the spring of 2003 when Ms. Polley married David Wharnsby. As the young couple embarked on a life together, her creative mind kept wandering forward to the end of the relationship -- the part no one seems to want to think about.

"I was starting to play with ideas of what a long marriage would look like in my head," she says. "Love stories usually focus on the most boring part of love -- the part that anybody is capable of. But what happens when the show stops? And then, what does that look like after decades when the show has really stopped, and you've let each other down over and over again, over decades. I mean, inevitably two people are going to be disappointed in each other but if something remains, then how does it remain and what does it look like? To me, that's the most interesting part of a love story."

These measured words seem a far cry from the Sarah Polley of the past. Where is the angry child star and the potty-mouthed teen activist we got to know in the 1980s and '90s?

If it is a strange thing to watch a person grow up in the public eye, one can only wonder at how strange it would be to actually be that person. Imagine if your adolescent angst -- and subsequent rebellion -- made news?

That's what it was like for Ms. Polley, who spent much of her childhood filming Road To Avonlea.

"The crinoline years were not good years," she concedes. "I had signed on to a contract I couldn't get out of. All I wanted to do was go to school."

In the middle of it all, Ms. Polley's mother, casting director Diane Polley, died of cancer just short of her daughter's 11th birthday.

A year after her mother's death, Ms. Polley's disenchantment with the entertainment industry was cemented when she was asked by Disney Channel executives to take off a peace symbol necklace during an awards ceremony for children's television. She refused, and activist was born.

After leaving television, Ms. Polley spent a few years engaged in political activism. In 1995, she famously lost some teeth during a demonstration protesting against the Conservative government of then-Ontario premier Mike Harris.

"I look back on those years really fondly," she says. But her love affair with activism began to wane when her celebrity began to overshadow her role as a political organizer.

"I became a spokesperson and it wasn't what I felt I was very good at or what I liked doing," she says.

Her difficulties with activism coincided with a turning point that brought her back to movies in a serious way -- when she took the role in Atom Egoyan's film The Sweet Hereafter.

"I would never have thought making films, either as an actor or a filmmaker, had any use at all if I hadn't worked with Atom. That was the film when a light bulb went on for me and I thought, 'This is a beautiful, and not a ludicrous, way to spend your life.' "

From there Ms. Polley went on to write and direct three short films, the most recent of which, I Shout Love, won a Genie in 2003. At the same time she was trying to get an original screenplay off the ground, but she and producing partner Jennifer Weiss failed to get funding after years of slogging.

"It became very, very clear to me that my career as an actor and whatever the impression people had, was really working against me," Ms. Polley says.

Ms. Polley's history in the industry may have given her a head start, but it also presented challenges when it came to managing -- as opposed being managed -- on a film set.

"I grew up as a child actor so a part of me is constantly seeking approval," she admits. "I'm absolutely terrified of conflict, and making a film is constant conflict. As a director you are required to say what you think constantly. Your job, when you get up in the morning, is to get everyone to like you. I got about 10 years of experience in six weeks, just in terms of growing up as a human being."

For all that, Canada's sweetheart is still not entirely certain she wants to grow up. "What's going to happen when people can't call me mature any more?" she wonders with a dark laugh. "There will be nothing left! What will they say? 'She's so precocious for 58.' It's embarrassing."

SIX FACES OF SARAH POLLEY

CANADA'S LITTLE SWEETHEART

A prepubescent Polley is

contracted for seven long years

in the early 1990s as Sara Stanley in The Road to Avonlea.

A DISENCHANTED ADOLESCENT

Polley as an angry young white

supremacist in the 1998 TV movie White Lies.

INDIE BEGINNINGS

Polley plays Sister Sarah in Clement Virgo's Love Come Down (2000).

THE ART HOUSE IT-GIRL

Polley plays Margaret in Peter

Wellington's Luck (2003).

HOLLYWOOD PAYDAY

Polley pays off some debts as Ana in the 2004 zombie action thriller Dawn of the Dead.

THE WRITER/DIRECTOR

On the set of Away From Her,

working alongside director of

photography Luc Montpellier.