Career
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 daughter in Michael Winterbottom's Jude.
In 1997, Griffiths sparked a controversy after attending the opening of the Crown Casino in Melbourne, Australia. Topless and uninvited, her stated reasoning being the protest of the views taken by the media and state government towards the new casino, and inspired by the story of Lady Godiva.
Griffiths joined forces again with Muriel's Wedding director P. J. Hogan for her American film debut, My Best Friend's Wedding, in 1997. That same year she starred in My Son the Fanatic, a British film in which she portrayed a tough Yorkshire prostitute who becomes involved with a considerably older Pakistani taxicab driver, played by Om Puri.
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). She then appeared in 2001's Blow, opposite Johnny Depp and Ray Liotta.
In 2001, Griffiths was cast as one of the leads in Six Feet Under. Her performance as emotionally scarred massage therapist Brenda Chenowith earned her Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards, as well as two Emmy Award nominations. In the third season, she missed four episodes due to her first pregnancy. Her second pregnancy was written into the show's final season and she appeared in almost every episode of the series. She also played a supportive housewife in the film The Rookie opposite Dennis Quaid for which she garnered generally good reviews.
As of 2006, she became part of the ensemble cast, co-starring alongside Sally Field, Calista Flockhart, Balthazar Getty and Matthew Rhys, of the dramatic series Brothers & Sisters, in which she portrays Sarah Walker, who inherits control of the family business after her father's death. Griffiths received a 2007 Emmy nomination and a 2008 Emmy nomination for her work on the series. Griffiths received 2008 and 2009 Golden Globe nominations for her work on Brothers & Sisters. Additionally, she appeared as "Inez Scull" in the 2008 mini-series adaptation of Larry McMurtry's Comanche Moon.
Griffiths made her Broadway debut in Other Desert Cities, directed by Joe Mantello and co-starring Judith Light, which began previews on 10 October 2011, opening on 3 November 2011.
Read more about this topic: Rachel Griffiths
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
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“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)