Small, quick movements that bolster an impish grin, hands that can suddenly take mischievous flight—there’s a pixie-ish quality to Alison Sealy-Smith. The mischief goes back a long way, to her days as class clown at a private elementary school run by nuns on the island of Barbados, where she was born in 1959. Her solidly middle-class parents (father an engineer, mother a teacher) probably hoped that a degree in psychology from New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University would settle her down. Not likely. Before long, she says, she was sporting a “huge Angela Davis Afro,” had graduated, married after a three-month courtship and hitchhiked to Toronto to become an actor. “My family was devastated.” They feel differently today. A four-time Dora nominee (and single mother of two daughters), she’s performed with countless companies in this country—from Nightwood to Stratford—and appeared in film, television and even an animated series (she was the voice of Storm on Fox’s version of X-Men). A founding member of Obsidian Theatre Company, she’s deeply committed to enriching the national scene through works that empower black artists—hence the adaptation of Austin Clarke’s Giller Prize–winning novel, The Polished Hoe (set in a lightly disguised Barbados), in which Sealy-Smith plays the main character, Mary-Mathilda. “It’s a way to tie up the two forces that have shaped my life,” she says. “I am Barbadian, yet everything I am as an artist has been shaped by Canada. I have this transcendent feeling that it’s all coming together.”

The Polished Hoe runs Feb. 22 to March 4 at Harbourfront Centre’s Enwave Theatre.