Toni Collette (b. 1972), actor, producer, singer and songwriter, spent much of her childhood in the western Sydney suburb of Blacktown and left school at 16 to join the Australian Theatre for Young People. She started studying at NIDA in 1991, but left after eighteen months for a role in a Sydney Theatre Company production of Uncle Vanya in 1992. That year, having performed in further productions for the STC and Belvoir Street, she made her feature film debut in Spotswood. She got her breakthrough film role playing the lead in Muriel's Wedding (1994), for which she won a Best Actress AACTA and a Golden Globe nomination. She won further AACTAs for her performances in Lilian's Story (1996), The Boys (1998) and Japanese Story (2003). At the same time she'd made her first international film forays in Emma (1996) and Clockwatchers (1997), cementing these successes with projects including The Sixth Sense (1999), The Hours (2002), About a Boy (2002), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Enough Said (2013) and The Way, Way Back (2013). In addition, she established a reputation as a Broadway performer, and played the lead in the television series United States of Tara, for which she won Emmy and Golden Globe Best Actress awards in 2009. Her numerous subsequent credits include the films Jasper Jones (2017) and Nightmare Alley (2021) and the Netflix series Unbelievable (2019).
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