Toni Collette

At eleven she talked a hospital into removing her appendix. What she wanted was a day off school, and she'd heard her mother describe how appendicitis pain shows up when the doctor lets go rather than when he presses. Reproducing that reaction at exactly the right moment, she convinced the emergency doctors and ended up in theatre. She has told the story in interviews a few times, always a bit sheepishly.

Born on 1 November 1972 in Sydney, the eldest of three, she grew up in Blacktown in the city's west. Leaving school before finishing it, she enrolled at NIDA, Australia's drama academy, and walked out eighteen months later when Neil Armfield offered her Sonya in a production of 'Uncle Vanya' opposite Geoffrey Rush. That final "e" on her surname is hers too: her father's family had dropped it and she put it back.

'Muriel's Wedding'

Her first film was 'Spotswood' (1992), with Anthony Hopkins, and it got her an Australian Film Institute nomination straight away. Two years later came the part that changed everything, Muriel Heslop in Muriel's Wedding, a girl from a Queensland town obsessed with ABBA and with getting married, written and directed by P.J. Hogan.

To play her she put on eighteen kilos in seven weeks, working with a dietitian. It became a phenomenon inside Australia and well beyond it, she won the AFI award for best actress, and her first Golden Globe nomination followed. Rachel Griffiths and Bill Hunter were in the cast with her.

What she did next was turn down the obvious route. Australian work carried on, with two more AFI awards for 'Lilian's Story' (1996) and 'The Boys' (1998), and British and American productions ran alongside it: Harriet Smith in the Emma that starred Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam, and the glam rock star's wife in Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine, with Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

'The Sixth Sense' and the decade after

In 1999 she played Lynn Sear, the mother who cannot work out what is wrong with her son, in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, with Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment. Lynn's last scene in the car brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the March 2000 ceremony.

That same year she made her Broadway debut in the musical 'The Wild Party' and picked up a Tony nomination. Fourteen years passed before she went back, for 'The Realistic Joneses'. Somewhere in between she put a band together, Toni Collette & the Finish, which released one album in 2006, 'Beautiful Awkward Pictures'.

Film treated her well in those years. Stephen Daldry used her in The Hours, she was Nicholas Hoult's depressed mother alongside Hugh Grant in About a Boy, a part that got her a BAFTA nomination, and another AFI award arrived for 'Japanese Story' (2003). In Her Shoes came next, with Cameron Diaz and Shirley MacLaine, then The Night Listener with Robin Williams.

Sheryl Hoover, the mother driving the yellow van in Little Miss Sunshine, arrived in 2006, with Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Alan Arkin and Abigail Breslin. The cast won the Screen Actors Guild ensemble prize and she took BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. Alongside it came The Dead Girl, and in 2008 a fifth AFI award for 'The Black Balloon'.

Supporting parts and small films filled the years that followed. Mary in Mary and Max was a voice job, for Adam Elliot's claymation feature; she was Peggy Robertson, Alfred Hitchcock's assistant, in Hitchcock, where the director was played by Hopkins, the same actor she had made her debut with; and both The Way, Way Back and Enough Said used her, the latter being Nicole Holofcener's film with James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Commercial horror turned up along the way, Fright Night and Krampus, and so did two of the small dramas she keeps coming back to: the alcoholic mother in Glassland, opposite Jack Reynor, and the woman with cancer in Miss You Already, with Drew Barrymore. Animation gave her Lady Cynthia in The Boxtrolls.

Tara, the Emmy and television

Showtime launched United States of Tara in 2009, created by Diablo Cody from an idea of Steven Spielberg's. Collette played a Kansas housewife with dissociative identity disorder, which meant playing four separate characters in every episode. Her Emmy came in September 2009 and her Golden Globe in January 2010.

Both of those bodies had already nominated her for 'Tsunami: The Aftermath', the HBO and BBC miniseries about the 2004 disaster. A long television run followed and hasn't let up: Wanderlust for BBC One, Unbelievable, the Netflix series about a real serial rape investigation, in which she is one of the detectives, with Merritt Wever and Kaitlyn Dever, and The Staircase, in which she is the woman found dead at the bottom of the stairs and Colin Firth her husband.

'Unbelievable' brought another Emmy and Golden Globe nomination in 2020 plus the Critics' Choice award, and 'The Staircase' one more in 2022. Netflix also had her leading Pieces of Her, and she was the mayor of Seattle in The Power, adapted from Naomi Alderman's novel.

Most recent, and among her biggest hits in years, is Wayward, which Netflix released on 25 September 2025. She plays Evelyn Wade, who runs a school for troubled teenagers that operates rather more like a cult. Mae Martin created the series and plays the town's police officer, and Collette has said she would come back for a second season.

'Hereditary' and the last ten years on film

Annie Graham in Hereditary (2018), Ari Aster's first film, is the role people have talked about most, and she produced it as well. Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro and Gabriel Byrne share the house with her, and the dinner table scene is among the most quoted in recent horror. Being left out of the Oscars that winter was a talking point for months.

Since then she has moved between registers without much visible effort. She was the resentful daughter-in-law in Rian Johnson's Knives Out, the art consultant in Velvet Buzzsaw with Jake Gyllenhaal, and the unsettling mother in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, written by Charlie Kaufman with Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons.

For Guillermo del Toro she was Zeena the Seer in Nightmare Alley, with Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett, one of those small parts that stay with people longer than their screen time warrants. Xavier Dolan's only English language film, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, had her too.

The last three years took her to Clint Eastwood for Juror #2, to Bong Joon Ho for Mickey 17 with Robert Pattinson and Mark Ruffalo, and into Goodbye June, Kate Winslet's first film as a director, with Helen Mirren.

What comes next

She set up her own company, Vocab Films, in 2017, and one of the novels she bought back then is now her debut as a director. 'The Best Of' adapts Graeme Simsion's 'The Best of Adam Sharp', about two former lovers who meet again decades later. Screen Australia announced its investment in October 2026, and she produces as well as directs.

Two other things are moving: 'Hot Mother', a thriller with Milly Alcock, and '2034', the Netflix film Joseph Gordon-Levitt is directing, which she joined in June 2026. That August she voiced Miss Marple in Audible's version of 'The Murder at the Vicarage', with Kit Harington as the vicar.

Her marriage to the musician Dave Galafassi began in January 2003, and the two of them announced their separation in December 2022, after nearly twenty years. Their children, Sage and Arlo, were born in 2008 and 2011. An ambassador for the charity Concern Worldwide since 2014, she also works with Médecins Sans Frontières and Amnesty International.

Five Australian Film Institute awards, an Emmy, a Golden Globe, an Oscar nomination and a Tony nomination, across thirty four years of work. The next one she signs from the director's chair.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Toni Collette is Muriel's Wedding (1994); in all, 48 films and 7 TV shows over 31 years. They have worked as actress in 55 and producer in 3. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Little Miss Sunshine (2006), with 52 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 26 titles. The person they have worked with most is Allison Janney, on 3 films, among them The Hours and The Way, Way Back.