Rachel Griffiths

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Date of Birth : Dec 18th 1968

Rachel Anne Griffiths is a Golden Globe-winning, Academy Award-nominated and Emmy Award-nominated Australian film and television actress known primarily for her roles in movies, soap operas, and television. She is perhaps best known for her roles as Peter Krause’s wife, Brenda Chenowith, in Six Feet Under, Sally Field’s daughter and Calista Flockhart’s sister, Sarah Whedon, in Brothers & Sisters, and Hollywood films such as Hilary and Jackie and Muriel’s Wedding.

Born in Newcastle, New South Wales, Griffiths grew up in Melbourne with her art consultant mother and two older brothers. After earning a Bachelor of Education degree in drama and dance at Victoria College, Rusden, she began her career as a member of Woolly Jumpers, a community theatre group. She had her first success as the creator and performer of Barbie Gets Hip, which played at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 1991.

Griffiths and Toni Collette were relative unknowns when they were cast as best friends and fellow outcasts in the 1994 film Muriel’s Wedding. Her performance won her critical acclaim and both the Australian Film Critics Award and the Australian Film Institute Awards for Best Supporting Actress. She followed this triumph in 1996 with the role of an earthy, ill-mannered pig farmer’s wife in Michael Winterbottom’s Jude.

Griffiths received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of real-life flautist Hilary du Pré opposite Emily Watson as her sister, famed cellist Jacqueline “Jackie” du Pre, in Hilary and Jackie (1998). Showing convincing range, she portrayed Johnny Depp’s hysterical mother in 2001’s Blow, opposite Ray Liotta