Bringing flinty CanLit heroine Hagar Shipley to the big screen was a process of discovery two times over for actors Ellen Burstyn and Christine Horne.

Hollywood veteran Burstyn and Toronto newcomer Horne play the 94-year-old Hagar at different stages in The Stone Angel, Kari Skogland's movie adaptation of Margaret Laurence's classic 1964 novel of raging against the indignities of old age. The film opens Friday in Toronto.

Neither Burstyn, 75, nor Horne, 26, had previously heard of Hagar or read the book, which is set in Manitoba (the movie was shot there).

"I read the script first, then I read the novel," Burstyn said during an interview at the most recent Toronto International Film Festival, where The Stone Angel premiered.

"Then I found out how beloved it is and how many people know it. I had no idea."

Horne blushed a bit when she admitted that she, too, didn't know about The Stone Angel, even though it's required reading in many Canadian schools. Maybe she was at a hockey game when her class was studying it?

"I didn't have to read it in school, but the boys that I know who had to read it hated it," said Horne, who was born and raised in Aurora, north of Toronto.

"But then I read it for the film and it's a beautiful book. It has this reputation for being a stuffy boring book about an old lady on the Prairies and it's not."

The two actors also had trouble seeing themselves in each other. Writer/director Skogland first cast the Oscar-winning Burstyn as the white-haired Hagar, then needed to find a younger actor who could plausibly play her decades earlier, with long red hair.

The resulting matchup was a revelation, especially for the two women.

"She's amazing!" Burstyn said of Horne, who had stage experience but no prior film roles when she was hired.

"She's so beautiful, I couldn't possibly think at first that she was a good match for me. Then when I saw her on film, I went, 'Omigod! That really looks like I looked when I was younger!' She's very talented and a very quick study, too. It's the first time she's ever been on a sound stage, and she handled herself very well."

Horne, who is normally a short-haired blond, said she "auditioned with every other young Canadian girl who looked anything like Ellen Burstyn," never expecting to land the coveted role.

"I don't know how I got it. The stars just aligned for me."

Any film fan would know about Burstyn, who has six Oscar nominations over four decades, from her Best Supporting Actress nod for The Last Picture Show in 1971 to a Best Actress nom for Requiem for a Dream in 2001. She won Best Actress in 1975 for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, directed by Martin Scorsese.

But did anyone ever tell Horne she looked like Burstyn?

"Never! Then once (The Stone Angel) started happening, people would look and say, `Oh God, how could I not see it before?' I think our features are actually quite different, but I think we have the same jaw or something. I'm not sure what it is."

There's one thing Burstyn and Horne definitely have in common. It's an appreciation for the character of Hagar, who is revered worldwide as a symbol of empowerment both for women and the elderly.

Hagar, a rebel from her first breath to her last, refuses to be put out to pasture in a seniors residence. She literally runs away from home for adventures of the kind nonagenarians rarely get up to.

"She's a great character," Burstyn said. "She's so human. She's not a stereotypical heroine; she's very much her own person. Strong, independent, stubborn and bullheaded."

Does that mean she liked Hagar?

"I liked her a lot. She comes to understand that she might have been responsible for the great pain she's feeling. When she looked back, she could see a lot of things that she wished could have been done differently."

Horne also came to know and understand Hagar.

"She's lovely. I think I walked away from this having a greater appreciation that my grandparents were not always my grandparents. I've done this with my parents too. I've frozen them at a certain age and they don't get any older and they were never any younger, and so doing this made me really go, 'My grandmother had a grandmother and she was a child and she got married and had babies and so on.'

"That was interesting, to suddenly assign a whole life to the people whom I'd previously given just one role in life."

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