The Aussie actress who gives Nicole Kidman a run for her money and it's not Margot Robbie

Rachel Griffiths would probably be as famous as the likes of fellow Australians Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Margot Robbie if she wasn't so fussy. By her own admission, the 57-year-old Golden Globe winner, Oscar contender and four Primetime Emmy Awards nominee has caveats when it comes to choosing projects.

"I've got a thing when I'm approached to do a movie or a show and that's asking, 'How long? And how far?'"

Famous for Muriel's Wedding, Six Feet Under and Brothers & Sisters, it's intriguing to imagine some of the toles she might have inhabited were she less particular.

Born and raised in Melbourne, where she is still based, she sighs: "What I'm offered is almost never in my hometown. I also ask, 'How much?' because that algorithm also has to work. I can't go to France for one year to do an underground underpaid film set in a quarry."

When we speak Griffiths is almost in France, in the principality of Monaco, but only for a few days to serve on the fiction jury at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival. And as if she hasn't given enough caveats already, she adds one more about what will lure away from her homeland.

"I also want to know how good something is going to be, because I don't do things I don't believe in," she says.

"Last year I had to pass up a really amazing opportunity, and it was something I would have loved to do but it just didn't suit the algorithm. It was too long and it was too far away and, as a mum, you just kind of make those decisions."

Rachel has been married to Australian artist Andrew Taylor since 2002. They have three children: Banjo, 21, Adelaide, 20, and Clementine, 16.

Ultimately, she decided to stay at home with Andrew and the kids rather than commit to the show, which she politely declines to name. "And I didn't lose any sleep over it," she smiles. "My husband was like, 'We could make it work' but I couldn't because it meant I couldn't get back if anything happened to the family."

It's her second visit to the festival in two years and this time she's accompanied by daughter Adelaide. "I felt so looked after and had such an amazing time last time," she says. "So when I got back I told her, 'If I was ever to be asked to be on the jury I would bring you with me'. When I got the email she was like, 'I'm packing'."

I wonder if as a jury member she's watched some of the shows in contention and thought: "I wish they'd cast me in that"?

"No, because if it's good then that means that actor is really delivering. It's very rare when you're watching something where one actor is falling so short that you're thinking 'I could have done it better'. I don't have that envy thing."

Her own show, the based-on-truth comedy drama Madam, scooped the Best Creation prize at last year's festival. Filmed in New Zealand, it was just a couple of hours' away by plane and ticked all her boxes for leaving home.

In it she plays Mackenzie 'Mack' Leigh, an American mother of two who ends up running an "ethical" brothel in New Zealand where sex workers are kept safe and properly paid. The series is based on Antonia Murphy's memoir of the same name. Griffiths says she was interested in the "femi-nomics" of the women and spoke to sex workers as part of her research.

"Many of the women were single mums and the head of households - they were just making the same decisions that I do, namely, 'How long do I have to work for, for how much money and how far away is it?'."

She has her theories as to why some women choose to go into sex work instead of "working minimum wage at the supermarket for 50 hours".

From what she's gleaned, they're pondering: "I'm only bringing in so much money and I'm paying someone to take my kids to school and put them to bed. But with sex work, I'll do eight hours, I can meet all my family obligations, pay my taxes and be a law-abiding citizen. Given all that, it's kind of weird that we have shamed women for making that very rational choice."

Rachel read Murphy's memoir. "And that was a gift. Normally you're wondering about the backstory, but it's all there in the book. But I thought she should be a little bit more of an everywoman.

"She had a very privileged upbringing - she went to one of America's best schools and she was at Columbia University by the time she was 17 - but I wanted her to have a little more Sheryl Crow in her.

"What makes the story really relatable is that she's a perimenopausal woman who has just had enough of doing everything, treading water and not getting ahead."

Ahead of the role, Griffiths also enjoyed "a boozy dinner" with Murphy.

"I thought I might get some stuff out of her that she didn't put in the book. I took her out and I made her drink at least three martinis, so we had a loose kind of catch-up where I could ask deeper questions."

Educated at a Catholic girls' school, Rachel Anne Griffiths wanted to be an actress ever since she saw Roots on TV. She studied drama and dance at college, did some theatre, then landed the role of Toni Collette's best pal Rhonda in the 1994 sleeper hit Muriel's Wedding, winning a couple of Australian best supporting actress awards in the process.

She was Oscar-nominated for her portrayal of flautist Hilary du Pré, sister to Emily Watson's Jacqueline, in Hilary & Jackie, but she took some flack from the real du Prés for tapping into Hilary's jealous side.

"Various parts of the family were not happy about the lens that that was told through," she admits. "Like, 'You made it into the Rachel Griffiths show and misrepresented this and that'."

More movies followed but her big breakthrough came in 2001 on TV, when she signed on to play the emotionally unstable Brenda Chenowith in the HBO drama Six Feet Under (for which she received a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Award and two Emmy nominations) about an American family running a funeral parlour.

Asked if she felt like a pioneer for playing an unconventional, unapologetic character in such a taboo-busting show, Griffiths defers to its creator Alan Ball.

"He was a great pioneer in terms of representation, especially for queer characters," she says. "TV at that time was also very male and very white, but he brought in Latino characters and African-American interracial relationships, none of which was done back then."

Then there was Brenda's passionate affair with Peter Krause's Nate, about whom Griffiths gushes.

"Instead of writing Brenda as a kind of accessory to humanise Nate, Alan allowed me to have my own stage to to be a fully fleshed-out, very complicated young woman, neurotic and traumatised in a way that we hadn't really seen before."

She's equally impassioned when talking about Muriel's Wedding, saying: "Again it was an incredibly groundbreaking piece of work because it was a film made in 1994 where two women are often not talking about men.

"Paul [the director Paul Hogan] also tapped into the theme of the outsider, which we hadn't seen represented in a lighter way.

"I had one gay guy come up to me on the streets of New York. He was in his 50s and he was crying as he told me, 'That movie meant so much to me'. When I asked him why, he told me that Muriel's Wedding was about the tribes we find and the families we create, and it blew me away that it landed for him like that."

Speaking of families, from 2006 Rachel found herself at the heart of a dysfunctional one as tough cookie Sarah Walker in the TV drama Brothers & Sisters, for which she earned two more Emmy nominations.

"But playing a functional family would be a bit dull," she laughs, "although I would argue that that show was aspirational because at the end of the day every sibling is talking to every sibling, no-one's been cancelled and Mum gets all the kids round every Sunday night. I'm lucky if mine call me once a year!"

Since the show wrapped in 2011, she's done a few movies and dabbled in directing, but the small screen is a big passion, especially when it comes to the representation of women. She's still waiting to hear if Madam will be picked up for a second season but she's hopeful.

"Women watch television, I watch television when I'm doing the laundry, folding socks or cooking," she says. "I didn't go to the cinema for years and years, because I was too tired [after becoming a mum]. Women are never going to stop demanding to see themselves represented authentically on TV."

And Rachel Griffiths won't stop acting on television. So long as the schedule, location, project and pay are right, that is.

• Madam is now available on demand on Now TV. For more about the Monte-Carlo Television Festival go to tvfestival.com