It has been 27 years since Meg Tilly earned a best-supporting-actress Oscar nomination for her starring role in Agnes of God.

It seems a lifetime away, the pinnacle of a Hollywood career she gave up to raise her three children and write novels including Singing Songs, inspired by the childhood sexual, emotional and physical abuse inflicted by her stepfather and other males.

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If you had told the Victoria-raised author and actress a while ago that she’d be reviving her acting career, and that she’d be back in the limelight at another awards show, she probably would have reacted with her trademark giggle and disbelief.

Yet here she is. Tilly, 53, received a best-actress nomination for her role as Lorna Corbett in Global TV’s hit series Bomb Girls and will appear as a presenter Sunday (8 p.m., CBC) during the inaugural Canadian Screen Awards gala.

The awards, which replace the Geminis and Genies, honour excellence in Canadian film, television and digital media.

“Really, I got nominated? Me in my dotage?” said Tilly, recalling her reaction with a laugh. “Then you look and there’s, like, 44 pages of nominations. Whoa! I thought the Oscars were long, but this is going to take forever.”

That was before she realized the two-hour show would focus on the major awards, with others awarded beforehand.

Bomb Girls, co-created by another former Victorian, Michael MacLennan, centres on a group of women working in a Second World War munitions factory. The show, which returns March 25 at 9 p.m., began as a miniseries but strong ratings prompted Global to pick it up for a second season. Its success prompted Tilly to move from Victoria last year to Toronto, where it’s shot.

Tilly admits she became more attached to her character, the stern Blue Shift floor matron, than she expected. And she’s grown accustomed to comments that she looks younger in person than her patriotic character.

“The fact is I am a matron,” she says with a laugh. “You don’t get to the venerable age of 53 and not be a matron. I’m proud of my ‘matronage.’ Anyway, Lorna’s got a lot on her mind. I love her.”

Living inVictoria with a doting husband (author Don Calame), her children grown up, she realized she was ready for a new adventure. An inspirational Christmas gift from her older sister, actor Jennifer Tilly (Bound), furthered her resolve.

The gift was a silver bracelet with a message: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

It inspired Tilly to contact Brian Richmond, producing artistic director of Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre, who cast her in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“He took a chance on me,” she said. “It was a big gamble for him, too. Who knew? It had been 17 years.”

Tilly’s powerhouse performance as Edward Albee’s vitriolic Martha attracted nationwide attention, leading to her appearance in Michel Tremblay’s The Real World at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre last year.

Before Bomb Girls, she also accepted an invitation from actor Eric Stoltz, her co-star in 1994’s Sleep With Me, to appear in the sci-fi series Caprica.

“I didn’t realize how much I missed acting until I came back,” said Tilly, once best known for her roles in the boomer classic The Big Chill, opposite Jack Nicholson in The Two Jakes, and in Valmont.

It was in the latter that she met actor Colin Firth, father of her third child, Will, 22, an emerging actor. Her other children — Emily and David, both in their 20s — were with producer Tim Zinnemann.

“Even that I decided to do a bit of acting again at all was a strange choice because I was very happy puttering along with my little life, but I felt I needed something more. I’m really enjoying it the second time around for sure.”

Tilly initially planned just to do some plays — until she met Bomb Girls executive producer Adrienne Mitchell.

“She was so insightful with the character, I thought, ‘I can learn something from this woman.’ I’m glad I did.”

Her own perception of Lorna is “only how she feels in my body,” Tilly says, since she doesn’t watch herself onscreen.

It’s because she doesn’t want to put on the “mirror face” — expressions that are more flattering but not true to the character. “Let’s imagine you hadn’t looked in the mirror for 17 years and then you looked in the mirror up close,” she says. “It would be a bit of a shocker. I want to see Lorna from the inside out. I worry if I watch the show, vanity might take over.”

She’s getting acting offers, but she’s waiting to see how Bomb Girls plays out. Tilly, who is about to become a grandmother, also values balance and wants time to write more books.

Her new Penguin novel for those in the middle grades, A Taste of Heaven, centres on two girls who become best friends.

“It’s about the challenges and joys of that,” she says. “It’s my cosy, rainy-day book.”

Just don’t assume she’s “gone Hollywood” again, says Tilly, who didn’t even watch the Oscars.

“I’m as far from Hollywood as can be,” she says, recalling how such perceptions persisted, even when she was raising her children in Victoria.

“People would come to the top of the drive and they expected me to be dancing naked with a boa and sashaying around in high heels. It’s just so far removed from what my life is really like.”