courtesy of some quick Googling...
Rachel Griffiths
Rachel Griffiths is probably best known for her role as Muriel's saviour in the Australian comedy Muriel's Wedding where she starred alongside Toni Collette. She played Rhonda, Muriel's cocky and utterly charming friend, who gave her the courage to turn her back on her old life in suburban Porpoise Spit and venture into Sydney. And from Muriel she got the biggest compliment any friend could get: "Since I've met you, my life is like an ABBA song". For her performance she received the Australian Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. She shared the screen again with Toni Collette in Cosi.
Toni Collette
Hot on the heels of Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett came another Australian thespian sensation, Toni Collette. Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that she does not share the extraordinary good looks of her glamorous peers - the term "jolie-laide" might have been invented for her - she is perhaps the most fascinating of today's top-line actresses. Onscreen she's absolutely magnetic, consistently compelling in a wild variety of roles, her emotional intelligence shining through even in brief supporting roles. She can so very human - funny, warm, decadent, hurt, sympathetic, neurotic - and consequently so very attractive. Unafraid to send herself up, to appear genuinely drab, dumb or even ugly, she is clearly one of us - a proper people's princess.
Toni Collette was born on the 1st of November, 1972, in western Sydney, Australia. Her father, Bob, was a truck driver, while mother Judy worked for a courier service as a customer service rep. The family would be completed by two younger brothers.
When Toni was 6, the Collettes moved out to the suburbs, where she found herself mercilessly teased for being a "westie". But she fell quickly into suburban life. The family kept cats, dogs, birds and rabbits and Toni, hanging with her brothers and very much a tom-boy, would climb trees, ride her bike, play basketball, basically lived an energetic Australian life. Aside from being a tom-boy, she's also admitted to being something of a liar. At one point, when she was very young, her mother told her that, when she (her mother) was 11, she'd had her appendix taken out. How did you know you had appendicitis, asked young Toni? Well, said mum, you know when the doctor pushes in and it doesn't hurt, but when he lets go it REALLY hurts. So, several years pass, Toni is 11, and she doesn't feel like going to school. She remembers this story and tells her mother she has pain. Off to the doctor's they go, he pushes in and Toni says nothing, he lets go and she yelps. She is rushed to ER, and has her appendix removed FOR NO GOOD REASON. Afterwards, the doctor said it was slightly infected. But then he HAD to, really, didn't he?
Cate Blanchett
Catherine Elise Blanchett was born on the 14th of May, 1969, at the Jessie McPherson Hospital in Melbourne, as the daughter of a Texan navy officer (Robert Blanchett) and a Melbourne schoolteacher (June Blanchett). When her parents met, Robert Blanchett moved to Australia, and got into advertising. As a kid, Cate recalls herself as "part extrovert, part wallflower". When she was ten, Cate and her older brother Bob Blanchett and younger sister Genevieve Blanchett were pulled out of a Melbourne cinema to be told that their father was dead of a heart attack at the age of 40. It's a story she resists talking about, but the loss of her father was deeply mourned. As a child cate dreamt of living in a haunted house, so she might meet her father again. Cate and her brother and sister were raised by her mother June. Cate's brother Bob Blanchett is a computer programmer, and her sister Genevieve is a set designer in the theatre.
Cate attended Melbourne's Methodist Ladies College(where she became the school drama captain and appeared in various plays), and from here went on to Melbourne University to study Fine Arts and Economics. She dropped out because she wanted to travel and to gain experience before deciding upon a career.
During a visit to England, she was forced to leave due to an expired Visa. From England she then moved on to Egypt, where she was spotted by a fellow-guest in her cheap hotel who asked to appear as an extra in an Egyptian boxing movie. She decided to go with it because she needed the money. Coming to realise that actors have the power to genuinely move people, which is what she wanted, Cate moved back to Melbourne, where she enrolled in Sydney's Prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Arts(NIDA).
Cate graduated from the NIDA in 1992, and began her career on the stage in her final year, playing in Sophocles' Electra. Her first major stage role was opposite Geoffrey Rush in the 1993 David Mamet play Oleanna. She then played in multiple Australian plays, before landing a role in the TV Movie Police Rescue in 1994. She maintained her stage career while playing in TV series such as Heartland, Bordertown and Parklands. She made her filmdebut in Paradise Road, starring Glenn Close and Frances McDormand, as one of a group of women imprisoned by the Japanese in Sumatra in World War 2. Her big break in the film industry was Oscar and Lucinda, which got her the part of Queen Elizabeth I in 'Elizabeth'. The director of 'Elizabeth', Shekhar Kapur, saw Cate on a reel of Oscar and Lucinda which was playing in the office of his casting director and immediately decided upon her for the part. 'Elizabeth' catapulted Cate to the A-list of actresses, and got her numorous awards and award nominations, such as a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.
As for her social life, in 1997, while playing Nina in Chekov's The Seagull, she met playwright Andrew Upton. It nearly never started. "He thought I was aloof," she later said "and I thought he was arrogant. But once he kissed me, that was that. It just shows how wrong you can be... I was, and am, swept away". Later, she would say she'd also been impressed by his passion for the Russian novelist Turgenev. The pair married, in the Blue Mountains National Park of New South Wales, just before Cate left to film Elizabeth in 1998. During the filming she missed him sorely, director Shekhar Kapur noted that Upton was "very, very stabilising" for her, lending her the confidence she needed to perform. Cate and Andrew are self-confessed homebodies. They had their first child, son Dashiell in 2001, who was named after Andrew's favourite crime novelist, Dashiell Hammett. Cate and Andrew's second son was born April 23, 2004. They reside in a four storey home in the Kemp Town area of Brighton, England.
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