Australian actresses have lead or major roles in a range of American television programs and movies, but they aren’t always obvious, because most adopt American accents.

Here’s a list of seven actresses you might not know are Australian (well, presuming you’re not reading this from Australia)

Anna Torv (Fringe)

Yvonne Strzechowski (Chuck)

26 year old Yvonne Strzechowski was born in Sydney, and had only light acting experience before Chuck. A graduate of the University of Western Sydney’s Theatre Nepean, she had a number of minor roles on Australian television, before heading the States to try her luck.

Poppy Montgomery (Without a Trace)

36 year old Poppy Montgomery was born in Sydney, and moved to the United States at the age of 18. Montgmorey came into prominence with her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in the 2001 CBS mini-series Blonde, before landing the role of Samantha Spade in Without a Trace.

Melissa George (various)

32 year old Melissa George was born in Perth, Western Australia. Well known in Australia for her long running role on soap Home and Away, George moved to the United States in 1998, where she landed minor roles in movies including Dark City, The Limey, Mulholland Drive and Down with Love.

Her first big breakthrough was playing the role of Lauren Reed on the ABC series Alias in 2003. She’s since started or co-stared in a variety of movies, including The Amityville Horror.

Rose Byrne (Damages)

29 year old Rose Byrne was born in Sydney. Byrne made her television debut in 1995 in Australian soap Echo Point, before taking on a number of smaller roles as she developed her acting skills. Her first movie role was as Dormé, the handmaiden to Natalie Portman’s Senator Padmé Amidala, in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones.

After working her way up the ranks, Byrne has appeared in numerous films, and has been playing one of the leading characters in the TV series Damages.

Miranda Otto (various)

41 year old Miranda Otto was born in Brisbane, and is the daughter of well known actor (in Australia) Barry Otto. Unlike many of her fellow Australian’s, Otto started her career in movies, rising quickly to become a popular lead actress in Australian films.

Her break through role internationally was playing Éowyn, a shieldmaiden of Rohan, in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy starting in 1999. Her first major Hollywood appearance was opposite Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer in the suspense thriller What Lies Beneath in 2000. She also appeared in the TV series Cashmere Mafia, and opposite Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds.

Otto has not vigorously pursued a Hollywood career, dividing her time between productions in the United States, the UK, and Australia, including theater work.

Isla Fisher (various)

So good, Scorsese remade it without bettering it. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s two-mole thriller inspired The Departed, but Tony Leung and Andy Lau’s cop-crook tango throws deeper, darker, deadlier shapes than Damon and DiCaprio’s double act.

Lau/Mak’s inspiration was Face/Off, but they ditch those Woo-vian bullet ballets for the psychological subterfuge of a stylish urban-existential thriller.

“There’s no redemption of any kind,” Scorsese reckoned, tapping the tragic tenor of this gripping psychodrama of duplicity.

Killer Scene: Time stands still for the rooftop face-off.

King Of New York (1990)

Dark and nihilistic, King Of New York sears into the memory. Walken’s Frank White is paper rich but spiritually bankrupt, a mob boss back from the Sing Sing grave to rebuild his drugs empire.

Roaming the streets of the Bronx in his stretch-limo hearse, White is New York’s Nosferatu, sucking the life from the city’s veins.

“To this day,” says Walken, “when I go to an airport, all the cops, that’s the movie they know.”

Killer Scene: Hiring subway muggers: “Come by the Plaza Hotel, I got work for you.”

Donnie Brasco (1997)

Pacino ditched the Don to be a goombah, his aging mafioso Lefty Ruggiero too blind to realise the guy he’s tutoring (Johnny Depp) is actually an undercover Fed.

Originally slated for Pacino and Tom Cruise, then shelved when GoodFellas went into production, Donnie Brasco was resurrected by an Englishman, Mike Newell.

The foreign ear explains the loving attention to detail as mafia lingo is deconstructed and a beautiful friendship turns out to be a fugazi.

Killer Scene: Lefty teaching Donnie how to dress, walk and talk like a wisegu

The Killing (1956)

Can’t do the time, don’t do the crime: Kubrick’s racetrack stick-up unfolds in flashbacks, storytelling fractured to nail the fatalistic theme.

“A crime film,” said the director, “is almost like a bullfight; it has a ritual and a pattern, which lays down that the criminal isn’t going to make it.”

Kubrick’s OCD-editing flits from Sterling Hayden’s perfectly planned heist to the aftermath as his cool professionalism’s undone by the gang of squealers and bunglers he’s working with.

Tarantino nicked ideas for Reservoir Dogs, boasting, “This movie is my The Killing.”

Killer Scene: Elisha Cook’s turned worm: “The jerk’s right here.”

Tokyo Drifter (1966)

“Inspired lunacy,” reckoned Time Out. They were right on both counts. Seijun Suzuki’s yakuza run-around is your average gang-warfare flickplot-wise, locked’n’loaded by a crime boss’ struggles to “go straight”.

Twists, though, include a fractured structure, freaky effects, impromptu songs, near-slapstick gags, Pop Art colour coding (our hero is frequently coordinated to correlate with the wallpaper) and a villain who pretty much always arrives on screen sunglasses first.

With logic sidelined, are we talking style over content? Not quite: Suzuki extravagantly, exuberantly amplifies style to crack open and unpick conventional crime-flick content.

Killer Scene: A burly brawl in the “Saloon Western”. Insolent, pointless, well cheeky.

The Big Heat (1953)

Predating Dirty Harry and Popeye Doyle by two decades, Glenn Ford is the tough cop hunting the ruthless mobster who blew up his wife in Fritz Lang’s brutal thriller.

Shockingly violent for its day, this hard-boiled noir paints a bleak universe steeped in the kind of endemic corruption that was being uncovered at the time by the Kefauver Committee.

What unsettles, though, is the way women – beaten, burned, scalded and tortured – become the story’s collateral damage: sacrificial lambs caught in the cross-fire of a vicious new order.

Killer Scene: Lee Marvin’s psychotic gangster Vince Stone throwing hot coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face.

Carlito’s Way (1993)

“What might have been if Carlito’s Way had forged new ground and not gone down smokin’ in the shadow of Scarface?” wondered Rolling Stone magazine about Brian De Palma’s mesmeric gangster flick.

These days you have to wonder what the Stone guys were smoking not to see the neo-noir clout in the tale of mobster Carlito Brigante (Al Pacino) and his struggle to carve out a law-abiding life for himself.

Even without Sean Penn’s turn as a coke-hoovering shyster, this is scintillating stuff, from its dying man’s voiceover to its bone-cracking violence.

Killer Scene: Carlito uses a pool trick to escape a trap.

Casque D’or (1953)

François Truffaut eulogised the “tenderness and violence” in Jacques Becker’s fable of fleeting love doomed by the mob. Manda’s (Serge Reggiani) an ex-con going straight, Marie (Simone Signoret) is a mobster’s moll.

Bad news for him when he claps eyes on her… The action oscillates between verdant riverside scenes viewed through love’s eyes and claustrophobic backstreets where death lurks.

Both feel lived-in, Becker substituting pastiche for the higher goal that captured Truffaut’s heart: truth.

Killer Scene: Manda and Marie wake from a night of love.

Get Carter (1971)

It’s grim up north. It’s even grimmer when East End gangster Jack Carter (Michael Caine) arrives in Newcastle looking for the bloke who killed his brother.

Get Carter injects the Brit-flick gangster movie with knuckle-scraping brutality. Caine loved the realism: “The idea was to show that in real life, each punch grinds some teeth in, and just one thrust of the knife can open someone’s heart.”

Killer Scene: Giving a tubby Tynesider a beating: “You’re a big man, but you’re outta shape.”

White Heat (1949)

The inspiration for this gangster epic’s blisteringly mad and bad lead character Cody Jarret was simple, says writer Ben Roberts: “We synthesised Ma Barker down to having one son instead of four and we put the evil of all four into one man.”

The genius move though was squeezing that malevolence into the pint-sized Jimmy Cagney, here making his first gangster flick since 1939’s
The Roaring Twenties.

As the mom-obsessed psycho bouncing between homicidal wit and shuddering rage, he’s still one of cinema’s most chilling nutjobs.

Killer Scene: Hearing that his mum’s dead, Jarret goes berserk in a prison canteen.

Email those numbers to a Chicago scientist and you can take part in a citizen-science project that has implications not just for the furry tree-dwelling varmints, but for animals and ecosystems throughout the world.

The Chicago Academy of Sciences just revived a decade-old project that used citizen “squirrel monitors” to document the prevalence of two species of tree squirrels–the gray squirrel and the fox squirrel—in the Chicago area. The revived project is seeking data from people “no matter where you live, city or suburb, from the Midwest to the East Coast, Canada to California.”

And no matter who you are. “That’s why it’s so cool, because everybody can get involved,” Steve Sullivan, the project’s lead scientist, told me yesterday on the phone:

I have 7-year-old girls getting involved, I have grandmas at rest homes getting involved, I had the CEO of a record label email me the other day with her observations. It’s simple, it’s fun, everybody can do it, it’s great for the family, and ultimately it has potentially a huge impact. The more people that get involved, the bigger our impact.

Squirrels are easy to study—they’re essentially ubiquitous, Sullivan told me, they’re diurnal, so people see them during the day, and everyone has an opinion about them. And it turns out that squirrels are important to study for a couple of reasons:

• Scientists can monitor squirrel behavior to document the hospitality of ecosystems to many species. Squirrels share resources with other forest animals and migratory birds. When food is plentiful, squirrels stay close to trees, which offer them safety. But when they are hungry or ill, they will risk that safety and travel further for food. Scientists measure the distance squirrels travel from trees as a reflection of ecosystem health.

• It’s also important to study the American eastern gray squirrel, an adept survivor, because it has become an invasive species in other parts of the world. It has been blamed for declining numbers of red squirrels in England and western gray squirrels in California. Sullivan:

One of our native fauna is out there really screwing things up in Britain and scotland, and also in Italy. As I begin to understand the mechanisms of coexistence more clearly in our region, hopefully this will result in some solutions to problems that a species that is native here, but not native there, is causing.
The previous version of the study found gray squirrels associated with oaks and pines and fox squirrels associated with maples and elms. It found more gray squirrels in areas with apartment buildings and multi-story dwellings, and more fox squirrels in areas with single-family homes.

Fox squirrels were also more likely to thrive in areas with lots of cats and dogs, likely because they evolved at forest edges, where they were more likely to encounter predators. Gray squirrels evolved in forest interiors. What about black squirrels? They’re a variant of the gray species.

Sullivan is also studying the third major species involved in this study: the human squirrel monitors. He surveys his squirrel monitors at different points in the study to measure their knowledge and attitudes toward the environment.

If people can suddenly differentiate two species of squirrels that live in their neighborhood, and they begin to look at them with a more critical eye, does that mean that they then begin to be able to observe nature with more understanding or compassion or care or interest?”

Squirrel monitors can submit numbers, stories, or photos by visiting the Project Squirrel website.