Toni Collette

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Date of Birth : Nov 1st 1972

Collette was born Antonia Collette in Blacktown, Sydney, New South Wales to Bob Collette, a truck driver, and Judy, a customer-service representative. She has two younger brothers, Ben and Christopher. When Collette was eleven years old she faked appendicitis out of boredom and longing for attention. She was so convincing that doctors removed her appendix, even though tests showed nothing wrong with it. She attended both the Australian Theatre for Young People and NIDA.

Collette has won four Australian Film Institute awards, including the Australian Best Actress in a Lead Role for Muriel’s Wedding in 1994, a role for which she gained 18kg (40lb) in seven weeks. In 1996, she was part of the ensemble cast of the comedy, Cosi. She received an Academy Award nomination for her role as the mother of troubled boy Cole in the U.S. film The Sixth Sense, which also starred Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment.

A tall, vivacious Australian actress with a chameleonic ability to alter her appearance as the role dictates, Toni Collette shot to international fame at age 22 as the overweight but determined bride-to-be in P J Hogan’s blackly comic “Muriel’s Wedding” (1994). Raised in Blacktown, a suburb of Sydney, this eldest of three first performed onstage as a teenager in a production of “Godspell”. By age 16, she had left home to work with the Australian Theatre for Young People before enrolling at the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art.