Vintage Dame

Cate Blanchett exhumes Hollywood’s golden era

Comments (0) By Ella Taylor Wednesday, Dec 20 2006

...continued from page 1

I’ve spent three days looking at Blanchett’s movies, and there’s not a shallow performance among them. Unless, oddly enough, you count the one that won her the Oscar, in which she gives a broad, manneristic imitation rather than an interpretation of Hepburn. That’s hardly her fault, since Scorsese hasn’t excelled at creating female roles. “My knees were sweating when Scorsese asked me to do it,” she admits. “I relished the chance of working with him, because female roles in his films, let’s face it, don’t come up very often. When I had the first conversation with him, I don’t think I really registered what he’d asked me to do. I just said, yes, of course, I’d love to. And then I got off the phone and said to my husband, ‘He’s just asked me to play Katharine Hepburn in a film about Howard Hughes.’ And he went, ‘Oh my God, that’s gonna be tough, playing Hepburn in color.’ And I said, ‘Oh shit.’ I sat down in a chair and stared at the floor for a long time. And as it sank in, I thought, you just get on with it.”

Getting on with it seems to be Blanchett’s mantra. She brings a no-nonsense Aussie practicality to her fame and her work, and I get the sense she’s not the sort of person you’d ask about her personal life without risking rebuff. When I do ask if she comes from an acting family, she twinkles away, then mischievously offers the opaque reply, “Everyone comes from an acting family.” There were no professional actors in her family. Her father, a Texan of French descent who died of a heart attack when she was 10, was in advertising, her older brother is a computer programmer, and her younger sister is a former set designer who’s moved into architecture. What Blanchett calls her “playful endeavors” as a child were very much supported by her mother, a Melbourne teacher, and she did a lot of acting and directing in high school. But when her art teacher urged her to go to drama school, she was horrified. “I had a very strong sense that I must be able to look after myself.” At university, she was interested in the political side of economics, but had no facility for the number-crunching side of it, and after taking a year off to travel, she entered drama school in Sydney. “For some people, it dampens their instincts, but I found it utterly galvanizing and focusing to be at drama school.”

Shrimp off the barbie: From L.A. to London, Blanchett remains an Aussie at heart (Photo by Kevin Scanlon)

More About

Blanchett’s first film role was in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road, in which she played an Australian nurse captured by the Japanese in World War II, and she was charming opposite Ralph Fiennes in Oscar and Lucinda. But since then, as with The Good German, more often than not she’s either the best thing about the movie (she brought life to the incoherent 2005 Australian drama Little Fish, in which she played a former junkie struggling to stay clean) or way too good for the role (as the wife of John Cusack’s flight controller in Mike Newell’s Pushing Tin) or terrific but too little seen (as a bored American heiress in The Talented Mr. Ripley). In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, she wasn’t much more than a pair of pointy ears. Given her ubiquity, it’s strange that Blanchett still hovers on the periphery of the A-list. Of her Australian compatriots — Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, the up-and-coming Abbie Cornish — only Toni Collette shows anything approaching her range. And Collette lacks the charismatic presence, the habit of filling up any screen that frames her, that surely landed Blanchett her only lead role to date, as the Queen of England in Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 movie Elizabeth, for which she received a Best Actress nomination. At the tender age of 29 and without apparent strain, she brought off the difficult task of transforming Elizabeth from a lusty, naive girl into a seasoned politician canny enough to reinvent herself as a virgin, married only to England. “And no authority,” Blanchett says when I bring up the film, adding merrily, “A bit like working in the film industry, isn’t it?”

Blanchett has never positioned herself as a fixture on the Hollywood scene. She and her husband, the Australian playwright and screenwriter Andrew Stanton, and their two young sons have lived all over in recent years, though mainly in London and Brighton, on England’s south coast, an outpost for many expatriate Australians. She comes across as ambivalent about Hollywood stardom. “I think it depends who you’re speaking to as to how bright my name shines,” she says. “I always feel as though I have one toe in the industry, and that’s the way I like it.” Enough to have moved back to Sydney recently, where she and Stanton signed a three-year renewable contract as joint artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company. “I’m Australian in every sense of the word,” she says. “My landscape references, all my internal photographic memories, are from Australia. It’s the culture I most want to give back to.” Her contract leaves her three months a year to do other things, and Blanchett shows no sign of neglecting her film career. Given the chance, she’d work with some seriously dead directors (Kurosawa, Kieslowski) and some live ones she’s already worked with — Scorsese, Soderbergh, Jarmusch and Sam Raimi, with whom she did The Gift.