The hectic life of Ms Griffiths

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.