Welcome to Toni Collette Online, your premiere web resource on the Australian actress and singer. Best known for her iconic performances in "Muriel's Wedding", "The Sixth Sense", "United States of Tara" and "Hereditary", Toni Collette has emerged as one of her generation's greatest talents. In its 13th year online, his unofficial fansite provides you with all latest news, in-depth information on all of her projects on film, television and the theatre as well as extensive archives with press articles, photos and videos. Enjoy your stay.
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Within years of dropping out of school to pursue her dream, Toni Collette emerged as one of Australia’s brightest acting talents and brought a wide range of headstrong characters to world cinema ever since. In return, Collette has been honored with numerous accolades and constant praise of being “one of the best character actresses of her generation”.

Please note: In all the years of maintaining this fansite, Toni Collette has remained a very private person and has always put the focus of public interest on her work and away from her family. With this biography and throughout the website, I do the same.

Born in 1972, Toni Collette grew up in Blacktown, an hour away from Sydney, with two younger brothers. At 14, after being cast in a school production of “Godspell”, Collette knew that she wanted to become an actress. At 16, with the support of her parents, Toni left school and enrolled at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts on a three-year course. She left after a mere 18 months to act in her feature film debut, “Spotswood”, starring Anthony Hopkins as an efficiency expert brought into a moccasin factory to cut costs. For her motion picture debut, she was nominated as Best Supporting Actress by the Australian Film Institute. After leaing NIDA, Collette joined the Q Theatre Company and then the Sydney Theatre Company in 1990, performing the key roles in theatre for young women, inlcuding Sonya in “Uncle Vanya” (1992) and Cordelia in “King Lear” (1994). Her second feature film performance, as the hapless, ABBA-obsessed Muriel in P.J. Hogan’s “Muriel’s Wedding”, made Collette a star overnight, winning her first AFI Award for Best Actress and even receiving a Golden Globe nomination in Hollywood. She spent the next years on a constant working roll, switching between Australia, England and the United States, with performances in “Emma”, “Clockwatchers” and “Velvet Goldmine”. She received two more AFI Awards as Best Supporting Actress for “Lilian’s Story” (1996) and “The Boys” (1998). In 1999, she received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for playing the desperate mother in “The Sixth Sense”.

Throughout the 2000s, Toni Collette provided crticially lauded performances on film and television. Among her key roles throughout the decade were her Broadway debut in “The Wild Party”, earning a Tony Award nomination, the suicidal mother in “About a Boy”, for which she received a BAFTA nomination, a geologist stranded in the desert in “Japanese Story” – winning another Best Actress AFI Award, the aid-worker trying to bring structure into the chaos after the 2004 Tsunami disaster in HBO’s “Tsunami: The Aftermath”, for which she received a Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe nomination, and another desperate mother character in the Oscar-winning independent hit “Little Miss Sunshine”, for which she received further BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations and won a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the film’s ensemble. In 2007, Toni took a break from acting to pursue her second dream: music. She produced her own record with her band, Toni Collette and the Finish. “Beautiful Awkward Pictures” provided a collection of spiritual and inspirational songs, was well received by Australian critics and gave the band a chance to tour through Australia, including a performance at the 2007 Live Earth. After wrapping the tour and giving birth to her first child, Toni returned to relevision, playing a suburbian housewife with dissociative identity disorder in Showtime’s “United State of Tara”. The darkly comic series, produced by Steven Spielberg, gave Collette the possibility to play a variety of different personalities at once. She received her first Primetime Emmy Award in 2009 and a Golden Globe Award in 2010. The series ran for three successful seasons until 2011.

After taking another two years off for motherhood, Toni Collette returned to the big screen in a string of supporting roles opposite Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren in “Hitchcock” (2012), the coming-of-age drama “The Way, Way Back” (2013), a critically acclaimed lead role opposite Drew Barrymore in “Miss You Already” (2015) and the campy fan-favorite “Krampus” (2015). Her returns to television and theatre were less successful with the panned one-season thriller series “Hostages” (2013) on CBS and a well-received return to Broadway in “The Realistic Joneses” (2014), which didn’t attract audiences or awards recognition. But the end of the 2010s proved to be the most busy and successful period in Toni’s career – starting with a leading role in Ari Aster’s feature film debut “Hereditary”. As a mother grieving not only with the death of her mother, and losing her grip to reality with all the strange occurrences that follow, Collette won rave reviews for her performance, as did the film, often dubbed as “the best horror film of the decade”. She received a Critics Choice Award and Independent Film Award nomination for her performance. After returning to television with the BBC/Netflix produced 8-part series “Wanderlust”, she played a hard-boiled detective trying to connect a series of unsolved rape cases in Netflix’s “Unbelievable”, which also chronicles the downward spiral of a rape victim after her case has been closed. “Unbelievable” was heralded by many critics as one of the best shows of the year, winning praise and awards for the performances by Collette, Merritt Wever and Kaitlyn Dever. Toni received nominations for the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award, as well as winning a Critics Choice Award as Best Supporting Actress.

Toni Collette is married to musician Dave Galafassi since 2003. They have two children, a daughter (born 2008), and a son (born 2011).

This biography was exclusively written for Toni Collette Online and was last revised on February 22, 2020.