An Old Fashioned Thansgiving

I grew interested in Tatiana Maslany after seeing her in the first several seasons of Orphan Black, where she played eight major characters and a dozen minor ones, often in the same scene. I don’t know of any other actors who could pull that off. She says she has been acting since age nine, in her native Regina, Saskatchewan, then moving to Toronto and getting small parts here and there, eventually graduating to independent Canadian features where she had the lead role and won some awards, and finally her Emmy-winning turns in Orphan Black. For a long time she looked younger than she actually was. In this one she was twenty-three, playing seventeen. It is a Hallmark Channel movie, based on a story by Louisa May Alcott, and it is really nothing special, though it got the best ratings ever for a Hallmark heart-warmer. It is set in the New Hampshire woods, and tells of young Tilly, her mother Mary (Helene Joy) and her two younger siblings. They have fallen on hard times, and Tilly takes it on herself to write to her well-off grandmother, Jacqueline Bisset. Mom and Grandma have issues. Tilly dreams of bigger things in life. It all works out well in the end.