Maggie
Margaret, "Maggie," Shenfeld was born in 1930 and grew up in a Canadian Jewish family, the sole child of a doctor. She recounts in the film how, during the depression, her family was forced to relocate several times, before settling back in Toronto. She studied to be a dentist at the University of Toronto in the late 1940s, a time when few women were entering the profession. Maggie's interactions with Merly throughout the film reveal an individualistic woman who still retains her passion for the natural sciences. Her conversations also show her sense of humour, and her stubbornness. Maggie married her late husband, Louis Shenfeld (a scientist who worked to regulate air pollution) in 1954 and they had two children. The furnishings of her condominium apartment, where she has lived for more than thirty years, and where much of Maggie & Merly was filmed, reflect the comfortable life she led. Still-life "cutaway" shots of her paintings and Heintzman piano, which also provide the backdrop to the film's action, indicate her artistic and musical talents (though she is no longer able to paint or play). Quiet scenes reveal how the close contact she has with Merly not only keeps her physically safe, but mentally well in the face of health challenges.
Merly
Merly Lamery is the voice of Maggie and Merly. She was born in 1964, one of four daughters of a poor rice farmer and his wife on the island of IloIlo in the Philippines. When Merly speaks of her childhood in the film, she talks about her family's poverty, of how sometimes they had only rice to eat and no money for clothes or shoes. Her parents, however, somehow scraped together enough money to send all of their children to school, and Merly graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture from the local West Visayas State University. She worked for more than a decade at a variety of jobs- in retail sales, as an inventory clerk, as a cashier, and at a factory. None of these jobs, however, provided her with enough income to support herself and extended family members who were in need. Like many of her compatriots, Merly thus left the Philippines to work as a live-in caregiver in Canada. Maggie & Merly is structured like a ballad with reoccurring scenes in which days flow into nights and nights back into days. In these scenes we see Merly steadfastly caring for Maggie: bathing and dressing her, shopping, cooking, and doing the chores. We witness Merly's patience, playfulness, tireless sense of responsibility- and her capacity to love. We also witness her loneliness and the painful irony of her longing to see her own elderly parents before they die thousands of miles away.