Toronto’s Ella Ballentine
Toronto’s Ella Ballentine will play Anne Shirley when the timeless Canadian tale of Anne of Green Gables is re-made into a TV movie next year. The decision was announced last week by a production team created by YTV and headed by Kate McDonald Butler. Ms Butler is the granddaughter of the story’s author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. It has also been announced that Martin Sheen will play the role of Matthew Cuthbert. Ella Ballentine, who is now 13, has performed mostly in Toronto since 2010. The producers say the series will be shot not just in Prince Edward island where the story is set. Ms Ballentine showed a very early interest in performing and began to study classical ballet when she was just four. She would soon move onto other dance forms and then took vocal training. Her professional acting career began in 2010 playing Francis Perks in the Mirvish Productions’ The Railway Children, which was followed by a role that used her dancing talent when she performed in Jörgen’s The Nutcracker during its Toronto run. Ballentine then landed a lead role in Numbers at the Toronto Fringe Festival, for which she received a Best Performance in Live Theatre nomination for the 2013 Young Artist Award. More recently she played the Young Cosette/Young Eponine for Mirvish Production’s 25th anniversary version of Les Miserables at Toronto’s Princess of Wales theatre in 2013/2014. On screen she has appeared in leading and supporting roles on such high-profile projects as Atom Egoyan’s feature Queen of the Night which was released as The Captive. She also appeared in Jason Stone’s The Calling, as well as Mario Azzopardi’s video game and TV series, Time Tremor. Green Gables has a fabled history beyond its impact on Canadian children. It so charmed certain educators in Japan that the book was adopted for English instruction there, creating an enormous fan base of Japanese adults who now travel with their children to Prince Edward Island to visit the fictional home of Green Gables.
