Biografie

When she was 12, during the Persian Gulf War, she attended a children's awards show in Washington, DC, and was seated at a table with some representatives from the Walt Disney Company. They asked her to remove a peace symbol that she was wearing but she refused. Disney has blacklisted her ever since.

Has lived on her own since she was 14 years old.

Her stepfather, Michael Polley, said of his famously independent daughter in 1997, "She was at her best when she was out of kilter with society in some way.".

Recently revealed that she was conceived during an extramarital affair conducted by her mother Diane Polley and that Michael Polley is not her biological father. The revelation of this is at the core of her new documentary film Stories We Tell (2012).

When she went to pick up her Director of the Year award for Die Aussprache (2022) at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, it was presented to her by Eric Idle, her co-star from Die Abenteuer des Baron Münchhausen (1988), made when Sarah was 8 years old. [January 2023].

It is important to me to stay in Canada. I used to think it was because I thought it was important to build up an indigenous film industry - but now I realise I'm incapable of living anywhere else. I'm a real homebody.

"I was pretty uninterested in acting until I was about 17. I wanted to go to university and never think about acting again. I'd been very politically involved for a couple of years and I wanted a break, so I did Das süße Jenseits (1997) in 1997. But I ended up completely falling in love with acting".

I always think it's a bit of a joke when I get described as an activist. Really, for two or three months of my year I organise stuff, but I'm not as involved as I used to be.

I started acting when I was four. My first experience on a film set was in dead of winter. Now I realise that almost every film I've ever been in is like that. It was the beginning of a long career of incredibly cold, sparse, barren landscapes.

The guy who taught me to use the shotgun was a complete gun nut. I asked, 'Is the safety on when it's to the right or off when it's to the right?' And he said, 'The way I like to remember it is right is safe, like the government, and left is unsafe, like the people we are shooting at.' And I'm thinking, 'I'm in a room with my worst nightmare who's teaching me how to shoot a shotgun. How did this happen to me?'