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70s Oz Actresses – 80s Oz Actresses – 90s Oz Actresses– 2000s Actors

Welcome back to my series on the film careers of Australian actresses and actors. Here we will look at Aussie actresses who made their film debuts (as an adult) in the 2000s. While many of these actresses also have important careers in television (and theatre), we will concentrate on the film roles these actresses have played.

While the 1990s’ ‘Golden Generation’ of the Australian actresses (Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Toni Collette, Rose Byrne and many others – see here) continued to be the most prominent Australian actresses in films during the 2000s, a number of talented new Aussie actresses have made their debuts in the 2000s and gone on to achieve success both in Australia, and increasingly, abroad in Hollywood and the UK.  This page will look at about 90 new Aussie actresses who have made films in the last 20 years.

The 2000s saw two trends which affected new Australian actresses:

America became a bigger option for young Australian actresses. The success of the best of the 90s Aussie actresses in America (Judy Davis, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and others) blazed the trail, which many other Australian actresses (the rest of the 90s generation, as well as younger actresses, and even some older actresses such as Jackie Weaver) were able to follow.  Some of the young actresses established themselves in Australian film and television before they moved to Hollywood, but others headed for Hollywood to start their careers in US television or movies.  America became a magnet which was much harder to ignore.

Television, which had always been an important career path for actresses, became more accessible, more rewarding, more prestigious and more lucrative, throughout the 2000s, as the rise in streaming services, with their proliferation of new shows, accompanied by the rise in quality drama series made by HBO (and later Netflix and others)

BY Josiah HughesPublished Nov 28, 2018