When Cate Blanchett finished making Elizabeth in 1998, she told friends—with an equal measure of certainty and dread—that she was afraid the movie might be her last. "I just thought, Well, Glenda Jackson played it. Bette Davis played it. And who the hell was I to come along from Australia and try to carry off the role of the monarch who completely transformed British culture?" she recalled not long ago. Blanchett shrugged, then laughed at herself. "It sounds silly now," she said, "but perspective is not necessarily an actor's gift—at least not this actor's gift."
Judging the quality of her own work may be the one talent Blanchett lacks. She won a shelf of awards for her performance as Elizabeth I, including the Golden Globe, and had little trouble holding her own against Jackson, Davis, and, some would argue, against the Virgin Queen herself. This summer, Blanchett ascended the Tudor throne once again for the sequel. The Golden Age follows Elizabeth beyond the conspiracies and wars that plagued her realm as she grew into the ruler who shaped an empire. The film was shot mostly on location near London, and I met Blanchett for dinner one evening at Home House, the imposing Georgian edifice on Portman Square that in previous incarnations has served as everything from the French embassy (at the time the Bastille was stormed) to the residence of Sir Anthony Blunt, the royal curator, Cambridge aristocrat, and Soviet spy. These days Home House is a posh, artsy members' club, the kind of place people join to make the point that clubs don't interest them. Blanchett strolled through the doors straight from the set, dressed austerely in a black suit and white shirt; her hair was loose; she wore flat black moccasins and no makeup. Her only jewelry was a silver bracelet inscribed with the word MAJESTY, a gift from Geoffrey Rush, her friend and costar in both films. On nearly anybody else the effect would have been stark, even funereal. On Blanchett it just looked cool.
The Godfather II notwithstanding, sequels often seem more like cinematic cash machines than serious attempts at artistry. Blanchett is aware of that but says she selects projects based on the director more than on any other criteria, and she has great respect for Shekhar Kapur (who also made Elizabeth). "The idea of playing a woman as she ages interests me, but of course I had reservations about it," she conceded when asked if she was concerned about the prospect of competing with the original film, which received seven Academy Award nominations (including one for her as Best Actress). "I am always running away from acting," she said. "So of course I wanted to run away from that. But I have a great relationship with Shekhar, and when Geoffrey said he would do it and then Clive Owen came on board, I couldn't say no."
The role of Queen Elizabeth would be demanding for any actress, even one as intellectually adventurous as Cate Blanchett. Yet, compared with some of her other recent choices, it almost seems tepid. Blanchett won an Oscar last year for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator. It takes at least as much chutzpah to appear as a colorized version of perhaps the most revered actress of the twentieth century as it does to play a queen. ("When I read the script, I thought, Now, how could anybody be egotistical enough to even attempt that role?") Another shrug and another laugh. Late last year, Blanchett appeared in the Australian independent film Little Fish and turned in a heartbreaking performance as a former drug addict whose good intentions never quite free her from a bleak past and hopeless future. Then it was off for a month to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where she appeared in a reprise of the Sydney Theatre Company's presentation of Hedda Gabler (in an adaptation by Blanchett's husband, Andrew Upton). The disaffected and compulsively neurotic Hedda, one of the most demanding roles in theater, is often seen as a sort of female Hamlet. Blanchett's reviews—which she has never read—ran the gamut from admiration to ecstasy. ("There are moments," Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, "that are drawn with such quirky and startlingly perceptive immediacy that you feel that Ms. Blanchett could be the greatest Hedda of all time.")
So much for running away from acting. In fact, Blanchett hasn't stopped acting this year; she starred with Brad Pitt in Babel, Alejandro González Iñárritu's epic of global connection and isolation, which won the Director's Prize at Cannes. Upon completing The Golden Age, she shifted gears completely, transforming herself into Bob Dylan for I'm Not There, Todd Haynes's disquisition on the enigmatic American poet, musician, and philosopher. Blanchett is one of several actors—including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Christian Bale—who appear as Dylan at various stages of his life. So, to sum up Blanchett's year this far, we have: one drug addict struggling to put her life together again; a Tudor monarch in her days of glory; a condescending, lonely neurotic; the victim of what will surely be seen as one of film history's most random shootings; and the man who is no doubt America's only link to both Woody Guthrie and Rimbaud. Not bad for the 37-year-old mother of two boys, both of whom are under the age of five. Still, audiences will have to wait until next month to see what may well be Blanchett's most impressive performances of the year. That is when both The Good German and Notes on a Scandal will be released.
"I like the trapeze aspect of my profession," she said of the ever-increasing demands she has placed on herself. "But I never make those decisions on a conscious level. I don't say, Hey, I want to do something shocking. Perhaps it is the need to be exposed and found out." At that she stopped and leaned against the 20-foot cathedral window that framed her pale silhouette. Cate Blanchett's beauty is undeniable, yet it is also difficult to deconstruct: She has an angular face and a broad nose. Her teeth don't always line up, and her pale skin makes her eyes seem almost shockingly blue. "I guess I have some sort of theatrical death wish," she said, slowly working her way through her complex theatrical motivations. "On some level, when I do these things, maybe it's the need to fail. To actually fail. It's a bit pathological, I know, but when I am working I like to drive right up to the edge of the cliff. I mean, if you are going to commit to something, you should do it all the way. That is what I believe. Why would you even bother to embark on the journey if you know, in the end, it's going to bore you?"
Blanchett seems to specialize in isolation and loneliness these days. Her performance in Babel is brief, yet she manages to convey more anguish and loss with a single weepy stare than many actors might muster in the course of a career. "I thought of the part a little bit like a haiku," she said. "I like trying to do a lot with a little. Five or six years ago, a director—who is a friend—told me that I had to stop taking small roles because it would be bad for my career. I said, Why? You know, it was as if each role you do is supposed to get you somewhere else. And that is not how I look at this profession. My playing Bob, for instance," she said, addressing the question of what would lead a blonde Australian woman to take on the role of a 65-year-old Jewish man from Hibbing, Minnesota. "It is insane," she said. "But the fact that I am a woman automatically distances me from certain requirements. And this film is a riff on the notion of identity; and Dylan is somebody who has spent his life escaping labels and is incredibly elusive and yet is claimed by so many people for so many reasons." She had been spending some of her free time in London during the filming of The Golden Age glued to Martin Scorsese's mesmerizing Dylan documentary, No Direction Home. "Who in their right mind isn't obsessed by Bob Dylan?" she said.
Notes on a Scandal, directed by Richard Eyre and adapted from a novel by Zoë Heller, is the story of two ruinous, intertwining obsessions. Blanchett plays Sheba Hart, a prosperous 30-something art teacher at a school for working-class boys. She has an affair with one of her fifteen-year-old students, and it destroys her life and family. Dame Judi Dench, through whose eyes the story unfolds, plays an aging and lonely spinster who also teaches at the school. When her own fixation on Blanchett is not returned in the way she had hoped, the older woman becomes vindictive. In the end, her fury ruins both of them. In Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, set in Berlin at the end of World War II, Blanchett plays one of the most engrossing and amoral villains to appear on-screen since Harry Lime blithely sold adulterated black-market penicillin in The Third Man. The challenge of portraying a sophisticated and profoundly alluring monster thrilled Blanchett. "It was an incredible experience," she said of the black-and-white period piece, in which she appears opposite George Clooney. "Our sense of what is natural and true has shifted so intensely in the last 50 years. We are used to modern language, modern violence, modern sex. This was a very different kind of acting and a different kind of film." Soderbergh agreed: "This is pre-Method, pre–Brando and James Dean," he told me. "The emotions of the time are external and very big, and it's not at all what modern actors are used to doing. So I was a little nervous when we started.
"That ended after the first take of Cate's first scene," he continued. "I pulled my head up from the eyepiece and just stared at my assistant director. There was nothing we could say; what she had done was perfect. It is not easy to play someone so evil with such immense subtlety, and I would have put up with any amount of horrific behavior to get the performance she delivered. But nobody is less of a diva. My only regret is that I never got a chance to have a personal conversation with her. To be honest, all throughout the shooting I was afraid to break the spell with some meaningless little intrusion."
By the time those films open in December, Blanchett will have embarked on a far more significant adventure. She is in the process of moving with her husband and sons—four-year-old Dashiell and two-year-old Roman—back to Australia, where she will direct the Harold Pinter play A Kind of Alaska at the Sydney Theatre Company. It will be paired with David Mamet's Reunion, which Upton will direct. She met Upton, a playwright and screenwriter, in 1996, and they were married the next year. The chance to work with him in their own country seems to genuinely delight Blanchett. Until this fall, they had been living in London and in Brighton, and had thought they might stay there. Two years ago, however, when Blanchett returned to Sydney to appear in Hedda Gabler, she felt a pull she had not noticed before. "I don't usually speak about feeling Australian," she said. "I am not a nationalistic person in any traditional sense. But if you look at people like Clive James and Peter Carey, they have been gone for a long time, but their wellspring of creativity is still in Australia, and I can relate to that.
"Andrew and I realized how much Australia meant to us. We saw the theater community in Sydney and we felt, well, we know you all; we have worked with many of you. We have tried to live a few other places, but something really hit us in the gut. It's just a feeling about what home is. It became clear to us, particularly after the children were born, that family and the theatrical community in Australia were a large part of who we are." Apparently, their son Dashiell shares his parents' sentiments. "We went back recently," Blanchett said, "and our son got off the plane and said, 'Mommy, I love this nation.' Literally said that right in the airport. And I thought, Whoa…where does that come from? He must obviously have connected to some feelings we were expressing."
Blanchett grew up in Melbourne and has an older brother and a younger sister. Her father—a naval officer from Texas who met her mother in Melbourne, married, and stayed to become an advertising executive—died of a heart attack when Cate was ten, and her mother raised the family alone. Blanchett was the drama captain at Melbourne's Methodist Ladies' College and then started university near her home, dutifully taking a conventional mix of economics and liberal-arts courses. She didn't enjoy it, though, and after a year decided to take a break and see the world. Eventually Blanchett's travels took her to Egypt, where she ran out of money. A friend suggested that she could earn some cash as an extra in an Arabic boxing film. It was hardly her road to Damascus, but when she returned to Australia, Blanchett moved to Sydney and entered the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Within a year of graduating, in 1992, she had become the first person ever to receive awards for both Best Actress and Best Newcomer from the Sydney Theatre Critics Circle.
Blanchett still had no particular interest in making movies. "I was reaching my use-by days before I made a film," she said. "I think I was 26. So I never had any expectations and really feel that ultimately the theater is why I got involved in this profession. It's the elasticity of time and the imagination that takes place on a stage that I find absolutely thrilling. I think that if I have to die, I want to die in a rehearsal room. There is something about a rehearsal room that is sacrosanct. It's kind of like a sleep-over; you don't want your parents to come in. What goes on there ought to be free and private."
Blanchett is not the type of actress who walks onto the set and asks her director what to say or how to say it. In 2004, for example, the director Wes Anderson cast Blanchett as Jane Winslett-Richardson in his film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Blanchett plays an aggressive and pregnant journalist with an odd voice and a screechy accent. The part was modeled loosely on the primatologist Jane Goodall, whose distinctive way of speaking is not easy to mimic. "Cate called me before we began and said, 'Do you want me to learn the Jane Goodall accent for my part, because it's tricky, so if you do I will need to work with a coach,' " Anderson recalled recently. He told her to do whatever made her comfortable in the role. It wasn't exactly what she wanted to hear, so she asked again. "I finally realized that she wanted me to tell her to get a coach and learn the accent," Anderson said. "Because when Cate does something, she wants to do it all the way. She wanted to get herself into that character. So I said, of course, hire the coach." By the time Blanchett turned up in Italy to shoot her scenes, she not only had mastered the accent but had figured exactly how she wanted to portray her character. "Some actors are learning their lines until the moment they start to speak," Anderson said. "Cate can visualize her entire performance in her mind before she ever says a word." Ask Blanchett about any of this and she will quickly change the subject. "It's boring," she said. "Ultimately, people are just interested in your performance. Nobody wants to see your homework."
I asked if her directorial debut should be seen as a break from acting or whether it might signify a more important change in her career. "Ask me in six months," she said. "I am not going to give up acting, if that is what you mean. But the camera tires of everyone. I constantly feel the troughs. The thing is that you have to be self-aware without being self-consumed. You have to know when it is time to bow out. It's very hard to do that. It's hard to say no. When I was a child, a lot of people said to me, 'You should be an actress.' And whenever anybody tells me what I should do, I perversely want to do the opposite. But now I am a bit more grown-up, and over the past few years several people have said, 'You should direct.' And for some reason they were talking about film, and that just doesn't interest me." I wondered if she actually thought she would like life better from the other side of the stage. "I don't think like comes into it," she said. "It is really a question of whether I am any good at it. I never had any real desire to be an actor when I left school. If I did anything in theater, I had thought it would be as a director."
Blanchett arrived in Paris the day after she completed filming The Golden Age. "Notice anything different about me?" she asked that night when we met for dinner. I didn't have a clue. "My eyebrows are back," she said, somewhat gleefully. Queen Elizabeth did not have eyebrows. (Blanchett is not the only actress to suffer that particular indignity for the role. Bette Davis shaved part of her head and had her eyebrows removed when she played Elizabeth. She later complained that they never grew back properly and that forever after she had to draw them in with an eyebrow pencil.) Makeup artistry has taken great strides in the past half century, so Blanchett only had to hide, not remove, her brows. She looked relaxed and relieved, and not at all in a regal frame of mind. "When I am done with a role, I leave it behind completely," she said. Just like that? "One hundred percent. Theater is the only thing that really feels retained. But when I finish with a movie, it is like it never happened. I guess it must seem bizarre. Even The Golden Age.… I finished filming it yesterday, and now it is gone. At a given moment, when I am working, the character is a matter of life or death. It is a passionate commitment. But they are just characters, and if you don't move on when you are done, I have no idea how you would function."
We discussed Notes on a Scandal, which I had seen that afternoon. Judi Dench so convincingly plays a twisted and conniving woman—brilliant but sick—that the tension made some of their scenes together almost unbearable to watch. "Judi is such a part of the national identity of Britain that people will be comfortable with her," Blanchett said. "They feel she is somebody they can relate to. If they had cast another person, it might have been much harder for the movie to work. And she is one of those actresses that I was really grateful to have the chance to encounter." Dench told me that she knew few actresses, and no others of Blanchett's age, who are so willing to take on risky roles. "What other actress could make you feel so deeply for a woman who, after all, has an affair with a young student?" she said. "In this world where celebrity trumps talent and where being a star seems far more important to many young actors than taking part in a craft with a real tradition, Cate, God bless her, is an actress."
Blanchett also seems mystified as to why, for so many people in her profession, the fame part of the equation seems more important than the work itself. "Why do so many people seek stardom as its own end?" she said. "I have a theory about the obsession with celebrity that seems to have consumed so much of our world: Don't you think it's just people trying to connect to something? It's just a bit of sadness, really, an odd perversion of intimacy. But it is also a sign of deep, deep depression, I am afraid. When one consumes mostly edible junk, it is often because you are depressed. When we consume mental junk—and only mental junk—well, your brain becomes a wasteland."
We were eating at one of those restaurants where men in tuxedos hover beside the table like hummingbirds. They offered wine, champagne, foie gras, and a special duck confit before we even saw a menu. Blanchett asked for a plate of vegetables and a glass of water. "Sometimes you just crave a little bad service," she said during one of the rare moments when the staff left us alone.
It's not as if Blanchett is Greta Garbo; she obviously enjoys the spotlight. But when she is not in it, she is pretty much off the grid. The first time we met she carried her husband's cell phone, which she uses mostly to show people pictures of her children. She has one of her own but only because her agent nagged her into buying it. Blanchett's brother is a computer programmer, but she and Upton are so electronically detached that they share a single E-mail address. Despite her prominence, there is at least some part of Cate Blanchett that clings resolutely to life in the slow lane. "How you set out on an adventure will pretty much dictate how you continue," she said. "I don't remember who said that what you risk reveals what you value, but I think that is absolutely true also of what you are prepared to sell. And there are certain bits that are just not mine to sell."
"Head First" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the November 2006 issue of Vogue.
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