Welcome to Toni Collette Online, an unofficial information resource on the Australian act-ress and singer, best known from "Muriel's Wedding", "The Sixth Sense" and "Little Miss Sunshine". This site offers all essential info on her life and career with a comprehensive archive of press articles, news, images and video clips. Enjoy your stay!


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AUTHOR 		THE DAILY MAIL

In her Rock 'n Roll Shoes

September 23, 2005

Baz Bamigboye

Toni Collette finds our obsession with beauty very scary.

She illustrated her point by discussing the roles she and Cameron Diaz play in the movie In Her Shoes, a grade-A weepie about family and relationships, in which Toni plays Rose, a lawyer, and Cameron is her sister Maggie, a slob who can't get a job.

"So much emphasis is placed on the external self and I think it's very interesting when you see Maggie, who is statuesque and blonde and beautiful and everything women are told they should aspire to be," Toni explained.

"But really, it's just a show - she's a complete mess inside.

"Rose, you wouldn't look twice at in the street, but the more you get to know her, the more beautiful she becomes."

At the risk of sounding like a self-help manual, Toni said, the film is "about a journey to knowing yourself, because these two sisters have developed a way of coping, but not living".

Anyway, it's definitely not a manual but an engrossing picture that's deeply moving.

Toni is fabulous, so I was surprised when she told me that, for a very long time, she felt she had no future in acting. "There was a stage where I felt I had to take everything that came along because you really don't know when it's going to run out of steam and you're like a grateful child when you're given a job."

She feels confident now, and some of that may be due to her husband Dave Galafassi, with whom she has formed the rock band Toni Collette And The Finish.

Dave plays drums on their first album, Beautiful, Awkward Pictures, which features 11 of Toni's own songs. They aim to tour Australia and Europe in the middle of next year.

I caught Toni several years ago on Broadway in The Wild Party - a dreadful musical, admittedly, but one in which she proved she had a splendid mezzo range.

In Her Shoes opens here on November 11. Next year, Toni can be seen opposite star-in themaking Eddie Redmayne and Tom Sturridge in the psychological murder thriller Like Minds.