There are many nouns that can be used to describe Meg Tilly: actress, writer, Oscar nominee, survivor. Now there’s a new one to add to the list: Torontonian. After a decade away from the spotlight, writing books in rural British Columbia — a life U.K. tabloid The Daily Mail termed a “sometimes eccentric seclusion” — Tilly is in Toronto and back on our screens.

The actress, who found fame and critical applause in the 1980s for her portrayal of Sister Agnes in Norman Jewison’s Agnes of God, is currently starring as frumpy, grumpy matriarch Lorna Corbett in Global’s top-rated Second World War drama, Bomb Girls. The series, which just began airing its much-anticipated second season, looks at the fireworks that go off when women are pressed into service in a wartime munitions factory. The show is set in 1940s Toronto and is filmed mostly in a warehouse in Etobicoke, leading Tilly to take up residence in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood with her husband, author Don Calame. Now she says, she is loving city life.

The creative couple first relocated when Tilly started filming the first season of Bomb Girls around two years ago. Initially, the show was destined to be a six-part miniseries, but it proved such a hit right off the bat that Global made the decision to bring it back for a full second season, much to fans’ delight. So Tilly, who was born in California but grew up and spent her life in B.C., has decided to jump into city life with both feet.

“When we were looking around, my husband and I thought, ‘If we’re going to do this city living thing, let’s really do it.’” The Annex, with its crowded, artsy bustle, was the obvious choice.

“The main thing, when I was looking, was I wanted to be somewhere we could walk,” says Tilly, contrasting the ease of strolling to Toronto’s museums and galleries with her life on the West Coast, where she had to drive everywhere.

“I love the neighbourhood feel to the Annex,” she says. “I love how people walk out, and I love how there are kids around. We know so many of our neighbours already.”

She also has dived right into Toronto’s ever-expanding foodie scene. She loves College Street eatery Frank’s Kitchen (“You always feel you are getting all these little appetizers for free!”) and Rosedale’s Black Camel (“big, juicy sandwiches”) and is making a conscious effort to explore new territory.

“When you move somewhere new, you start off with this flurry of energy and then you trail off,” she says. “So when we moved here, we made a pact with ourselves to try somewhere new once a month.”   

She hasn’t, though, cut ties completely with B.C. She has a son there, and when she heard a grandchild was on the way, decided to keep a small place on the West Coast. “I didn’t want to be a grandmother in a hotel,” she says.

Tilly is actually visiting the West Coast when we talk on the phone. Her manner of speaking is somehow full of contrasts. She’s friendly, quick to laugh and self-deprecating, but there’s a hint of something flinty there. It’s a voice filled with strength and vulnerability, a testament to the many hurdles she has overcome in her life, including growing up in a dysfunctional family and facing several unexpected career setbacks.

It’s easy to see how she has ultimately triumphed as an actress, winning so much praise for her portrayal of Lorna Corbett, Bomb Girls’ enigmatic shift matron. Tilly’s character is a complex one who spends the better part of the first season rigidly enforcing rules and espousing morality, yet gets pregnant by her secret Italian lover.

“She was always very black and white, but now she is starting to see a lot of colours and shades in between,” says Tilly, hinting at her character’s arc in season two. Tilly clearly enjoys playing Lorna, her first big TV role in almost 20 years, and is quick to praise the show’s writers.

“The writers blew my socks off,” she says. “They had such insight into being a woman in wartime.” Though the show is fictional, the characters and events are based on true Canadian history.

Tilly calls her character “a friend” and talks about how she roots for her when reading the scripts, yet it was far from love at first sight: Tilly bursts out laughing when asked if she wanted the part as soon as she heard about it.

“I auditioned, but really it was just for my new agent,” she says. At the time Global was casting the first season, Tilly had just finished playing the gin-soaked Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? out in Victoria. Her return to the stage had been widely praised, but Tilly says she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be back on television until she auditioned for the Bomb Girls’s director, Adrienne Mitchell.

Tilly says, “I read, and it wasn’t bad –— I still had a bit of Martha in me. Then Adrienne gave me a little adjustment, and her direction was really good. And then she gave me another layer to Lorna. This went on six or seven times, and by the time I’d finished reading for her, I knew I wanted to do it. I would have read the telephone book for her.”

Falling into the character of Lorna is just another twist in the tale of Meg Tilly. In her 52 years she seems to have inhabited countless different lives. After a childhood filled with abuse at the hands of her stepfather, she found beauty in dancing. But her blossoming career was cut short after just a few years when she broke her back in an accident. Then she bounced back as an actress, receiving a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for her role in Agnes of God. There have been a number of men in her life — her current marriage is her third, and she had a five-year relationship in the early 1990s with the then up-and-coming British actor Colin Firth, with whom she had her third child.

By the mid-1990s she had vanished from screen and stage to concentrate on her family. She took up writing, producing works that dealt with the horrific abuse she received as a child.

This month, she is publishing A Taste of Heaven, her fifth book and one which she hopes will be a different direction from her previous works. Writing for middle-school kids, Tilly says she wanted to see if she could write “something warm and cozy” for a change.

“My normal way of writing is I set out to write something cozy, but my childhood was a bit dark and so some of that tends to come across,” she says.

But now, starring in one of TV’s top shows, with another book out and a new life in one of Toronto’s best neighbourhoods, this latest chapter in Tilly’s story is shaping up to be a great one.

Bomb Girls airs on Global on Wednesdays at 8 p.m.