By Erin Free
“When I lived in Porpoise Spit, I used to sit in my room for hours and listen to Abba songs. But since I’ve moved to Sydney, I haven’t listened to one Abba song. That’s because my life is as good as an Abba song. It’s as good as ‘Dancing Queen.’”
Awkward, desperate to be loved, confused, and sweet-beyond-belief, Muriel Heslop (Toni Collette) is the ultimate ugly duckling. The sad, frumpy daughter of Bill Heslop (Bill Hunter), a major player in the small coastal town of Porpoise Spit, Muriel dreams of getting out of her sunny, glittery, but dead-end hometown, where her bitchy “friends” treat her like an unwanted hanger-on and her family tags her a useless no-hoper. Nobody cuts Muriel any slack: when she catches the bouquet at a wedding, her friends slap her down straight away. “Throw it again,” they moan. “You’ll never get married.” But when she takes advantage of an accidental blank cheque courtesy of her parents (leading to her sister’s now famous smirk of, “You’re terrible, Muriel”), Muriel turns her life around, eventually moving to Sydney after reuniting with a confident, affirming school friend (Rachel Griffiths), and then getting caught up in a marriage of convenience with a South African swimmer (Daniel Lapaine). Once obsessed with weddings and being married, Muriel soon sees the hollowness of her dreams, and starts to live her life realistically. As funny as she is heartbreaking, Muriel Heslop – as so winningly created by writer/director, P.J Hogan – is a true cinematic dichotomy: she’s larger than life but painfully recognisable at the same time.
This was the role that launched Toni Collette to Australian and then international stardom, and she is utterly brilliant, capturing all of Muriel’s quirks with creative zeal. “It did seem predestined in a way,” Collette said of the role on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope. “When I was making the decision to leave NIDA, my agent and very good friend, Ann Churchill-Brown, told me about this script. It hadn’t been financed yet, but she thought I was perfect for it, and that was the end of that. I was concerned. I ended up leaving the play I was doing, and thinking, ‘Well, life goes on and we’ll see what happens.’ And pretty much a year later, I remember thinking about what she’d said and calling her up, and she was like, ‘Oh, that’s really weird. They’ve just called and they’ve got the money and it’s happening.’ Usually when an actor goes in for an audition, the agent will suggest ten or fifteen actors for a part, but my agent just wrote ‘Toni Collette.’ So she put it out there that she had complete belief in me doing it.”
That sense of belief truly paid off…
