Rachel Griffiths

An amazingly versatile Aussie actress (and Juliette Lewis doppelgänger) who's made her biggest impression stateside on the small screen, Griffiths joined a traveling theater troupe after being rejected by acting school. Her breakthrough role came in the hit 1994 comedy Muriel's Wedding, in which she played the shy title character's exuberant but doomed best friend. Griffiths' electric performance earned her an Australian Film Institute Award and effectively launched her feature-film career in her homeland. She spent the rest of the '90s alternating between indies and mainstream flicks, usually in supporting roles: the cousin of the bride in My Best Friend's Wedding, Johnny Depp's unhappy mom in Blow (even though she is five years his junior in real life), and a famed flautist in the biopic Hilary and Jackie, which earned her an Oscar nod. But when she signed on to the lauded HBO drama Six Feet Under as a super-dysfunctional sex addict, she found herself squarely in the spotlight for the first time in her career. During her tenure, she racked up two Emmy nods and a Golden Globe award, married artist Andrew Taylor, had two children, and still found the time to appear in occasional films and even direct a short herself. Although the series ended in 2005, the next year she returned to TV in another dysfunctional-family drama, Brothers & Sisters.