The hectic life of Ms Griffiths

Marianne Gray10 April 2012

Rachel Griffiths is sitting, sprawled in a pair of surfer shorts, on a shabby chic white sofa in the sun somewhere in the middle of Texas. She's waiting for her dialect coach to arrive and has a week to turn her Australian accent into that of a small-town Texas housewife for the film she's about to shoot, The Rookie with Dennis Quaid.

She's good with accents. She's pulled off convincing English ones in several films including Jude and her Oscar-nominated role as Hilary du Pr? in Hilary And Jackie, American ones in Me, Myself And I and My Best Friend's Wedding, and now a Welsh one for Very Annie Mary , an eccentric comedy set in the village of Ogw, Wales.

'With a name like Griffiths it was a bit like visiting the ancestors. In my case it was from New South Wales to Wales,' laughs the likeable, leggy Griffiths in her roundly flat Australian voice. 'For the first time I saw where my father's face and my deep-set green eyes had come from.'

Very Annie Mary is written and directed by Sara (Mad Cows) Sugarman and set in the Welsh valleys. At 16 Annie Mary, who's now twentysomething going on nine, won the Eisteddfod and was offered a scholarship to study in Milan but had to turn it down because her mother was dying.

'She could have sung at La Scala but her chapel-strict baker father [played by Jonathan Pryce] keeps her tied to him. While he careens around in his bread-van singing arias in a Pavarotti mask, she loses her voice. More and more over-shadowed by him she isn't able to make a break for freedom until she finds it again.

'Thank goodness Annie Mary never got to Milan because I've no voice. The only time I've sung on screen was in My Best Friend's Wedding and the closest I've been to the opera in Milan was Venice on holiday. It's quite a tragic story but definitely a comedy. There are comic pieces, like one by Ioan Gruffudd and Matthew Rhys, that make you pee yourself they're so funny.'

Griffiths, 33 going on 19, has recently found her own cheerfully outspoken voice. Also opening this week is Ted Demme's Seventies drug cartel drama Blow, where we'll see Griffiths as Johnny Depp's strident mother, Ermine Jung. 'It was hardly a glamour role,' says Griffiths. 'No stripping there. Strictly a character role. She was a very small-town, embittered woman who thought she'd raised a nice, clean son. She feels life has ditched her. I enjoyed playing her although I had the odd quirk about being Johnny's mother when, in fact, I'm four years younger than he is. Hello make-up department! Let's call it a challenge. Mother roles are not what every actress in their thirties necessarily wants to play, but I enjoyed her.'

Earlier this year she popped up as Natasha Richardson's lesbian lover in Blow Dry ('she just has fun, a regular sort of girl, straight but gay'). Now she inhabits a country girl's character ('Annie Mary is probably the least sexual character I've ever played').

'Actresses go on about female roles being terrible but I've been lucky,' she says, clunking a cup of tea as the house's cat drags in a dead lizard. Griffiths dismisses the scene with a huge laugh, shrieking, 'Carnage, Carnage!' hand to forehead, Sybil Thorndike-style. 'I'm a character actor and I'm happiest when I can project different parts. Live another life. How often does a girl get a chance to play a nunogram (Divorcing Jack) and a prostitute (My Son The Fanatic)? Or climb up pylons and paint them (Among Giants)? I don't have any ID crisis though, and don't need to talk to a shrink!'

The idea of Rachel Griffiths visiting a shrink doesn't sit easily in the imagination. This girl is up for everything and doesn't particularly care how much she has to take off or put into it. 'It's the male roles that seem limited, less three-dimensional, nowadays. Right from the start I've found myself with great opportunities to work with the best, not be mobbed in the street because nobody recognises me and make more in a year than my entire family will in a lifetime. It is so great to be able to be generous.' She is also a staunch supporter of Oxfam's global charter for basic rights and involved with various charities.

Griffiths makes talent look sexy and easy. She's an almost perfect example of a certain kind of rigid, colonial, Catholic education that forces you to leap out of it to get a life. She was a renowned stage actress before making it on screen as Rhonda, the hormonally racy mentor to Toni Collette's dowdy Muriel in Muriel's Wedding seven years ago. It quickly drew her into the international loop and now her life is split between Sydney, Los Angeles and London as one of the handful of Australians such as Collette, Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Geoffrey Rush who get on the plane to go to work.

'I've no idea where it's going. Sometimes I feel like Ulysses compelled to wander the earth. If I'd come from Britain or America I probably wouldn't have left home to start with. In Australia it's such a small industry. And there are so many talented people in it. When I think of the future, it's in Australia and it's in the theatre. I've all this wonderful experience to draw on now. I feel when I get to do Death Of A Salesman I'll understand it and I'll know what a David Hare play is really about.

'But right now Los Angeles is working well for me. Sydney to LA is not a long haul. It's manageable to get home for a week unless you're so in love, like Cate Blanchett, that you're prepared to do it for a night. LA to London is also manageable if you want to come home for about ten days.'

Griffiths grew up in Melbourne in a family she describes as many miles from the Waltons. Her father walked out when she was 11, and although she seldom saw him while she was growing up, they are now close. She and her brother lived with her mother who took her to everything from Japanese kabuki theatre to Indian dance and the touring Royal Shakespeare Company.

After Melbourne University, she went on to drama school which she found 'very holistic' and where she did a bit of everything. From there it was straight into community theatre - and she was soon writing and performing her own one-woman show titled Barbie Gets Hip. She has also written and directed a couple of shorts - Tulip, which did well on the festival circuit and played on Channel 4, and the upcoming Roundabout, which she co-produces with her ex-fiance-turned-best-friend.

'I don't know where home is,' she says. 'I have a house in Sydney, I share space in London and for the past six months I've been living in LA shooting a TV series [HBO's Six Feet Under written and directed by American Beauty writer Alan Ball and tipped as their next hit to follow The Sopranos]. I love LA. I love the mid-century architecture and at weekends go to look at open houses or visit flea markets. I work out and do yoga, eat properly, stay off the booze so I can go back on it in Sydney or London!

'I'm not a great "fun" whore, so don't get out to premieres and parties six nights week. I can't do "fun" and do my job. And I really want to work. It is so great to be in America during the Rushmore/Being John Malkovich/American Beauty/Steven Soderbergh kind of film movement. Some really great films are coming out of America right now.'

Her dialect coach duly arrives, and suddenly she hops effortlessly from New South Wales to deepest Texas. No great jump for Rachel Griffiths.

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