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.
Jul
26
2013


Real character: Toni Collette in Sydney recently. Photo: Marco Del Grande

For many in Australia, Toni Collette is, and always will be, Muriel Heslop. It’s a role that has stuck with the prominent Australian actor as much for its own durability as for her capacity to elude stereotyping since. Playing a ”terrible” girl from Porpoise Spit shot Collette to international acclaim, laying the foundations for the array of extraordinary characters she has delivered on screen and stage since. Collette is the first to admit the ”profoundly life-changing experience” of Muriel’s Wedding (1994) gave her an ”unexpected career”.

In short, Collette is an enigma. The same can be said of her onscreen persona. The greatest theme to her roles might well be their lack of a theme. ”I’ve never been boxed in,” she says. ”After Muriel’s Wedding, I first went to America and I was sent all these scripts about fat girls overcoming hurdles. Something in me knew not to go down that road, even if it was a good script. I just never want to repeat myself. I also don’t want to be bored in life. The great luxury of being an actor is you get to be different people, and I would hate to be repetitive.” Her latest film, The Way Way Back, is no exception. The coming-of-age film is about a boy, Duncan, with a crippling lack of self-confidence and a divorcee mother (Collette) in a bad relationship, and who finds solace in a job at Water Wizz water park. The complete interview can be read at the Syndey Morning Herald’s official website and in the magazines archive.

Nov
25
2012

Here’s a great new interview with Toni Collette by Slant Magazine: Before she recounts what she’s been up to this past year, Toni Collette takes a breath. In the wake of 2011, which saw the actress say goodbye to one baby (her Showtime series The United States of Tara) and hello to another (her now 18-month-old son, Arlo), you might think Collette was lightening her schedule, with little more than a little-seen indie (Jesus Henry Christ) and a small part in Hitchcock. But the actress has a much different tale to tell, divulging tidbits about at least six projects, all of which left her little time for rest in 2012. “This year has been bonkers,” Collette says. “It’s been right up there with the mid 2000s. I’ve been home about six weeks in total. But it’s been great – a very full, satisfying year of my family being a bit of a traveling circus.” One story Collette is eager to tell involves the common experiences of making Hitchcock and The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s Hitchcockian phenomenon that landed the actress an Oscar nod. Though the latter film hit theaters more than a decade ago, Collette says she felt a similar vibe on the Hitchcock set (particularly in terms of likely audience embrace), and that she also encountered private, eerily familiar spook moments.

“When we were making The Sixth Sense, I had a couple of weird things happening,” she says. “In the hotel room I was staying at in Philadelphia, I started meditating a lot, and then I would wake up at night, roll over, and look at the clock, and it was always a repeated number—1:11, 3:33, 4:44. That started to really spook me. And it did start happening again during Hitchcock.”

Anecdote notwithstanding, Collette doesn’t register as someone especially woo-woo or superstitious. She comes off as a woman with no shortage of secrets and side projects, like her focus on animal rights (she’s fought against unethical sheep farming in her home country of Australia) and her musical ambitions, which, in 2006, led to the debut album of the band Toni Collette & the Finish. The complete interview can be read here.

Nov
19
2012

Here’s a first promotional interview for “Hitchcock” by Cinema Blend: Though it’s now considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks, Psycho was initially deemed a risky prospect by everyone in Hollywood, even Hitch’s most ardent supporters like his wife Alma Reville and his devoted assistant Peggy Robertson. The struggle to get Psycho made is the focus of the new film Hitchcock, but at its throbbing heart are the two women who helped this genius filmmaker make the best out of Hitch’s films and his iconic image. Toni Collette tackled the role of Peggy Robertson, who served as Hitchcock’s personal assistant through four decades and scores of films and television productions. While she is known to have been Hitch’s right hand woman and dedicated defender, little else is certain about her or her role in the makings of his films. This offered a unique challenge to Collette, who had much fewer historical resources on which to base her character than the rest of the cast. But by focusing on what kind of person Peggy must have been to be able to handle 40 years of Hitchcock’s reputed bad behavior and wicked humor, Collette created a portrait of Robertson that shows her to be sharp, collected, and ready for anything. The complete interview can be read here.

Sep
15
2012

A winner in the 2009 Women of Style Awards, actress Toni Collette talks to Jessica Rowe about babies, the big screen and being a homebody. Toni Collette is one of our biggest stars—though you’d never know it. The 39-year-old likes nothing more than hanging out in her trackie-dacks, on the couch, with her family of four—husband and musician Dave Galafassi, daughter Sage, four, and son Arlo, 18 months. But there’s no denying acting is in the DNA of Collette, who these days finds herself drawn to playing mother figures, women who are flawed, raw and honest. In her latest performance, she becomes the gutsy and ballsy Shaz; the film, Mental, is a “dramedy”, written and directed by PJ Hogan, who brought Collette to the world’s attention with his 1994 film, Muriel’s Wedding. And just as with those beloved Heslops of Porpoise Spit, the family dynamic in Mental is a little, well, twisted. The complete interview with Toni Collette can be read over at InStyle’s website.

Sep
08
2012

Here’s a new in-depth article on Toni and the upcoming Australian release of “Mental” by The Age Life & Style. From working-class Sydney to Sunset Boulevard is quite a journey, but Toni Collette has made it look easy. Amanda Hooton meets the instinctive actor and hands-on mother who has taken the “t” out of can’t. You can tell Toni Collette is a celebrity because of her hair. It’s blonde (art, not nature) and thick, and it has an excellent kink in it, swinging over her forehead and brushing her cheekbone. Even when celebrities shave their heads – as Collette has done on more than one occasion – you just know the great hair is there, waiting to spring forth again upon an astonished world. Apart from the hair, Toni Collette has turquoise eyes with thick, dark lashes, long teeth, a great figure (including quite a big bottom), and is far friendlier than I expected. Back in the ’90s, she seemed anxious and uncertain, often arriving late to interviews and sounding spiky and defensive. These days, however, she’s famous enough to do hardly any publicity, and perhaps this makes it easier for her to be calm with the journalists she does meet. And given that I manage to fling iced water all over the hotel lounge the moment we meet, and then burp loudly while she’s trying to answer a question a few minutes later, she’s actually under no obligation to be calm at all. But she is. “Burp it up,” she says cheerfully, pointing one long finger, with a short, purple-painted nail, towards my enormous stomach (I blame pregnancy for both aberrations). “Kids are the greatest, greatest thing,” she says. “You love them so much, you just want to …” She mimes a great big bite, as if eating a hamburger. Collette has two children – daughter Sage, 4, and son Arlo, 1 – and she arrived on the set of her latest film, Mental, last June, when Arlo was only nine weeks old. The complete article can be read here.

Apr
22
2011

On showtime’s United States of Tara, Toni Collette, 38, plays a peculiar suburban mom who inhabits seven other identities, including a gun-toting guy. We checked in with the eighth version of Collette, the Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning actress herself, pregnant (at press time) with her second child and due in late April, from her home in Sydney.

How did you hide your pregnancy on the show?

By “standing behind large objects. So I’m stirring lots of large pots and carrying lots of plants and books.”

How do you and your husband divide parenting?

Collette and her husband, musician Dave Galafassi, who have recorded an album together, “share everything. My husband is supportive, handsome, a useful human being. He’s a miraculous man. They do exist.”

What misconceptions do we Americans have about Australians?

“We live in the outback with kangaroos and don’t have cosmopolitan cities and lives.”