Sara Canning Canadian Actress Born 1987 in Gander

Early life

Sara Canning was born on 14 July 1987 in Gander, Newfoundland, Canada. She lived in Brown's Arm, Newfoundland, until she was eleven and then grew up in Sherwood Park, near Edmonton, Alberta. In her childhood and early teens she competed as a figure skater, and her interest in theatre grew while she attended F.R. Haythorne Junior High. She took part in several stage productions at Bev Facey Community High School and performed in shows at Festival Place in her hometown.

She made her professional stage debut in an Edmonton Citadel Theatre production of George Orwell's 1984. Afterwards she began general arts studies at the University of Alberta and considered a career in journalism. Still drawn to acting, she left university and moved to Vancouver, where she completed a one-year screen acting programme at Vancouver Film School in 2007.

Career

After finding an agent, Canning began working in television series and TV films shot in Vancouver, and she held a restaurant job between roles. Her early credits include the TV movie Paparazzi Princess: The Paris Hilton Story, in which she played Nicky Hilton, and guest appearances on Smallville and Kyle XY. In 2009 she starred in the TV movie Taken in Broad Daylight, playing Anne Sluti, a teenager who is abducted by a criminal played by James Van Der Beek.

That year she also shot a pilot for the CW series The Vampire Diaries and starred in the feature film Black Field, a nineteenth-century gothic drama directed by Danishka Esterhazy. She played Maggie McGregor, the older of two British sisters trying to make a life on the Canadian prairies, and the film premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2009. Her role in The Vampire Diaries was Jenna Sommers, the aunt and guardian of Elena Gilbert and her younger brother Jeremy. She appeared in the first two seasons, with her character's story ending in the episode "The Sun Also Rises" in 2011. To play the part she softened her Canadian accent.

Canning has also written. In 2010 she was co-writing a love story with a western setting, and in 2011 she worked on a short film noir called Corvus. Around the same period she shot the Lifetime film Hunt for the I-5 Killer in Vancouver and the Hallmark Movie Channel western Hannah's Law in Calgary. In 2012 she filmed I Think I Do in Edmonton, a romantic comedy that aired in 2013, playing an event planner who runs a business with her two sisters. In late 2012 she shot The Right Kind of Wrong in Banff with Ryan Kwanten and Catherine O'Hara, a film directed by Jeremiah Chechik.

Between 2012 and 2013 she starred as the predator control expert Dylan Weir in the Canadian science fiction series Primeval: New World. She also acted in the 2012 film I Put a Hit on You with Aaron Ashmore and joined the cast of the drama Eadweard in 2013 as Flora, wife of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. From late 2013 she played Dr. Mel Conner, a general surgeon, in the Global medical drama Remedy, which was renewed for a second season.

Later film work includes War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), the Netflix series A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which she played Jacquelyn Scieszka, and the TV film On the Farm. She appeared in Hello Destroyer, which premiered at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, and starred in the dystopian thriller Level 16 as the head of a boarding school, her second collaboration with Esterhazy; they worked together a third time on The Banana Splits Movie. Her later screen credits include Superhost in 2021, Influencer in 2022 and Dark Match in 2024. Among her listed screen works, the database counts nine films and two television series between 2006 and 2024.

Recognition

For Remedy, Canning won the UBCP/ACTRA award for best actor in 2014 and the Leo Award for Best Lead Performance in 2015. In 2020 she received a nomination for the UBCP/ACTRA award for best female lead performance for the web series Hospital Show.

Personal life

Canning moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to film The Vampire Diaries and lived there for about two years. She has said the American South had a very different culture from Canada's west coast but came to feel like a second home. After the series finished she returned to Vancouver.