In an old '50s-style trailer by a lakeside cabin in British Columbia's Interior, a little girl and her brother are at play on an improvised stage.  It's just a curtain over a table that coverts to a bed.  But a little Henry Parker plays his part, which is to get on his hands and knees, and Molly plays hers, which is to get on Henry's back, open the curtains and say "Ta-da!"  There's not much of a story, just a simple act of being "onstage."  The trailer is the scene of later theatrics - Molly and a school friend hold crying contests here to see who can produce tears first (Molly always loses) - but this scene is the prototype.
    Skip ahead several years - though not too many, because even today, Parker is only 26.  Now she has seen the inside of more trailers than she can remember.  She's had big trailers for little parts (the part of Glenn Close's prim daughter-in-law in the Emmy-winning Serving in Silence) and the little trailers for big parts (her Genie Award-winning role as a necrophiliac undertaker in the controversial film Kissed).  She doesn't hold crying contests anymore, but if she did, she'd probably win.
    That's because Molly parker is one of the brightest lights on the Canadian film scene these days.  Hailed as "luminous" and "reminiscent of Debra Winger in her prime," she took Cannes by storm two years ago with her breathtaking performance in Kissed; the film continues to tour at film festivals the world over.  Since then, she's starred in Under Heaven, an adaptation of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, which screen at the Sundance Film Festival this year; Waking the Dead, a Jodie Foster film due out this winter; and the quirky CBC comedy series Twitch City.  Her stock is high and getting higher: she's played opposite the likes of John Malkovich and Lorraine Bracco (in Ladies Room, a film about three stage actresses confronting the realities of aging).  Recently, she joined Arnold Schwarzenegger and Drew Barrymore on the roster of William Morris, L.A.'s hotshot agency.  This fall, she's in Budapest for her first high-profile lead role in A Taste of Sunshine, director Istvan Szabo's saga about three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, which casts her opposite the devilishly talented and rather easy-on-the-eyes Ralph Fiennes.
    She is, in other words, a rising star.  But that's one role she won't play.  In a business where it's all too easy to believe your own hype - and everyone else's - Parker keeps a clear eye and a cool head around the glitz, the glam, the sheer shine of the job.  A pragmatist, she accepts those as a necessary evil in her life (one reason she hasn't moved to Los Angeles, the path of least resistance - and greatest remittance - for many Canadian actors).  She doesn't seem to care whether she lands big in Hollywood roles.  In a world where size is sometimes the only thing that matters, she's turned down a few big parts, instead choosing smaller projects with more challenging roles.  As for fame, she's not yet a household name, and that's just fine with her.  Which is to say, she's shrugged off the rules of showbiz - and seems to be making it anyway.

    The set of Ladies Room is a study in entropy.  A clutter of lights, cameras and cables crowds the soundstage, and nobody seems to know exactly where the actors are or what scene will be shot next.  At a moment's notice, the crew moves camp, dragging along a tangled heap of equipment, their shouted repartee and laughter ricocheting around the Usine C theatre in Montreal's east end.  In this chaos, I am waiting to meet Molly Parker and I am worried.
    With good reason.  Yesterday, several days after my appointment had been made final, her agent called to cancel.  Things on the set were hectic; Molly was a little stressed; this just wouldn't be the right time.  I did what any self-respecting writer would do: I begged.  So I am here, notebook in hand, a flutter in my stomach, bracing myself to meet the high-strung artiste.
    When I spy her, she's traipsing down the hall, a gaggle of teenage girls in tow.  They're giggling and wisecracking, and for a moment I am confused: that's Molly?  Then she walks over and introduces herself.  Even dressed down - denim jack over a black laced-edged full slip, hair in a bun, Japanese schoolgirl bangs framing her face - she radiates a quiet elegance.  (That's 13 years of ballet.  She couldn't shake it off if she tried).  She smiles warmly.  "I'm going to show the girls my trailer.  Wanna come?"
    It's that simple.  The girls (ballet students who play dancers in Ladies Room) chat for a while, then leave.  Molly and I hang out there for the next few hours, talking.  This trailer scene is a preview of the way things will go: Molly will hedge and try to call off every interview we set up - she's got an audition soon and needs to focus (true), she'll be in Budapest (not true).  Once we're talking, though she will be charming, funny, thoughtful (when we meet for lunch, we almost switch restaurants twice because she suggests the places may be too loud for my tape recorder).  At the end, she will laugh and say something along the lines of "Well, that was a lot less painful than I'd anticipated."
    The truth is, Molly Parker probably isn't thrilled that this story, or any other about her, has to be written.  Pragmatism (and she's got a strong dose of it) dictates some publicity is necessary; her almost impossibly good-humored nature dictates she must be nice about it: that doesn't mean she's going to bare her soul.  If it all sounds a little like your typical star-seeks-privacy tale, it's not.  For one thing, she's not a star yet - at least not of the class that needs no press.  For another, in Parker's case, it runs deeper than that: "I don't want people to know about me," she tells me, with a half smile that makes Mona Lisa look like a grinning floozy.  "The more people know about me, the less they will be able to see me as any character.  It's dangerous to my work."  It's also contrary to her personality: if Parker doesn't want to be typecast as an actor, she really doesn't want to be defined as a person.
    About her background, this much seems clear: she had something of an idyllic childhood.  She was raised on a farm in picturesque Pitt Meadows, B.C. ( "Not a dairy farm, but like a hippie farm with chickens and goats," notes Parker, who grew up a vegetarian and is still one today.)  Her parents, who owned a retail seafood store, reveled in their kids, "wanting to know everything I thought and treating us like people and not like children who were just supposed to do what we were told.  They took us everywhere.  I almost never had a babysitter and if I did, it was my grandmother."
    You could call it progressive parenting: Lynne Stopkewich, Parker's friend and director of Kissed, calls "a 60's experiment gone right." The point is she got her family's unconditional support for whatever she wanted to do.  At 3, she started ballet (she'd taken to pléing around the house) and danced three times a week until she was 17.  Her schools included the Royal Winnipeg Ballet of Canada.  At 14, she discovered her other passion: acting.
    Her acting career began with the usual fare - high school plays, drama club - except that a year later, her uncle, an actor, took her to his agency.  She says she seldom worked at first, staying on only because "I thought it was fun, having to go to auditions."  But over the next few years, she got small roles in television series and movies of the week.  As even the low-key Parker will admit, her dedication was unstinting.  "I didn't have a nervous breakdown for a year I didn't even go to university.  I just worked."
    What she did, when she finished high school, was cash in her acting scholarships and bursaries, and then she took a three-year course with Mel Austin Tuck at Vancouver's Gastown Actors' Studio.  On the side, she took supplementary voice and singing lessons and had roles in TV series such as Neon Rider.  At 18, she was among the youngest in her class.  "It was so exciting," she says, her blue-green eyes growing translucent the way they do when she's fired up about something.  "It was real acting.  It was really working on a scene, having somebody teach you."
    And for Parker it's the scene work matters, not the spotlight.  She acknowledges that "it's a pretty neat feeling to be onstage or in front of a camera, to make people believe something, feel something."  But what moves her is the cerebral side of her job, "the psychology of the characters, the relationships.  Because people are fascinating," she continues, then, perhaps catching herself in a cliché, adds with a giggle and a flamboyant wave of the hand, "and I'm fascinating and I just get to be fascinating all the time."

    In the refuge of her Ladies Room trailer - she hasn't yet been called for her scene, a closed-set love scene - we continue to talk about quitting smoking (Parker has turned to the NicoDerm patch, after many years), Mike Leigh films (her favourite director, he rehearses with his actors for months.  I ask if this is common.  "Yes," she quips, "in Russian theatre 50 years ago..."), the zodiac.  She confesses that she sometimes figures out the signs of her characters to get inside their heads.  This is something of an obsession; she also tries to figure me out when we realize we're both the same sign : Cancer.  "Are you a list-maker?" she demands "I bet you are."  (It's true.)  Of her, I can't help thinking that if every star in her business were half as grounded, a lot of L.A. therapists would be out of business.
    Of course, Parker doesn't live in L.A., which is one reason (or perhaps a sign) that she's so level-headed ("Sometimes sadly  so," she muses, "I'm just so rational...").  She lives with her partner, Matt Bissonnette, a filmmaker, in Toronto.  "Los Angeles is a company town," she says.  "You can't go anywhere without somebody thinking they know you or should know you.  The desperation is palpable."  Staying in Toronto means having an almost normal life, with friends besides actors and interests besides acting - gardening (her new love), listening to music, reading.  "I really love being an actor, " she explains, "but there are lots of things that I really love.  It's not the be-all and end-all." She couldn't do it all the time, she adds, because "it would make me such a boring person."
    Lynne Stopkewich puts it this way: "Some stars do what they do because their egos need to be stroked, or for love, for approval.  Molly is the antithesis of that."  What drives her is passion for the work - which means script, story, characters.  That was true for Kissed, the career move of her lifetime - although that's certainly not what it seemed like then.  The role, after all, was to play a necrophiliac, a taboo to beat all taboos.  Parker who'd never had an on-screen love scene, had to do several, well, unusual sex scenes.  And Stopkewich was a first-time feature filmmaker, with minimal funding.
    But Parker read the script and was fascinated by the part.  She was tiring of playing women who were "wives, daughters, girl-friends, all defined in relation to men."  ("It's still amazing to me how many scripts I see that in the first scene, the woman is walking around her apartment naked," she observes.)  This character - notwithstanding her propensity for walking around a mortuary naked - was a strong woman, and the role was undeniably challenging: Parker faced the daunting task of finding common ground with a person most of us would dismiss as weird or sick.  Her Sandra Larson is poetic and complex, an eminently sympathetic character.
    "I think women have to make the films they want, to be represented the way they want," says Parker.  That's one reason she's taken on Ladies Room, directed by Gabriella Cristani.  But compelling parts aren't confined to films by women: she's found an equally intriguing role in A Taste of Sunshine.  Ralph Fiennes plays all three male leads; Parker's character, Hannah, is a Jew who falls in love with one of Fienne's characters, converts to Catholicism, and in a bitter irony, faces death.  "It's interesting, in terms of one's lineage," says Parker, "what gets passed on and who breaks patterns and who doesn't, and what we do in reaction to our parents or in spite of them."

    Of course, those are things Parker won't reveal - she's determined to keep her family life away from the hungry media maw.  "I want my parents and friends to have normal lives.  I don't want them to ever become 'Molly Parker's mother' or 'Molly Parker's father,'" she explains.  But it is also a fear of what they might reveal about her?  Parker admits that's part of it.
    And here, she might almost, almost sound like a hard-nosed worldly celeb - except that Molly Parker is sitting across from me, with a red lollipop in her mouth ( her new smoking substitute), worried that she's getting too comfortable with me and saying too much.  "It's much better to be a mystery," she says simply.  "Doesn't everybody want to be mysterious?"