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In Style November 2001

Cate From The Heart: Hollywood chameleon Cate Blanchett has five new movies on the way, not to mention her most anticipated production of all--a new baby.(Features)
Friedman, Vanessa



Right after Australian actress Cate Blanchett found out she was pregnant (which she had fantasized about for years), she was due on the set of the upcoming film Charlotte Gray to run a military obstacle course. "I mean, a real one!" she says, laughing. "Running, cycling, jumping off stuff." It was the middle of the worst English winter in years, and she was scared. "It wasn't their fault," she says now, referring to the director and crew. "They didn't know." And as far as she was concerned, there was no option: She did her job, ran the course, and gave it all she could. "The thing was, I was only five or six weeks along, and you don't want to tell anyone then," she says. As she says this, Blanchett, now five months pregnant, is back in London, cup of chamomile tea at her side, a huge red Tod's Carre (the company's must-have bag of the moment) at her feet. She is wearing camouflage capris, a long-sleeve black T-shirt, black slides and no makeup. Her hair is short, choppy, and very blond. On one wrist two bangles clink; on her ring finger is a plain wedding band and, above it, a ring adorned with two diamond hearts. The ring hand rests lightly on her burgeoning belly. Relating the obstacle-course story, she looks both serene and fiercely happy. Her blue eyes stare intensely ahead, her generous mouth arcs up in a smile, and her cheekbones curve into scimitars. If this were a film, John Williams music would swell, the camera would swoop in for her close-up, and the audience would well up. But then she wrecks it all.

"God!" she snorts, rolling her eyes. "I spent so much of that film cycling! There's a lot of action in it. Every day I'd go to the set and it was, 'Bloody hell! I'm on a bicycle again?' I felt like the Wicked Witch of the West." Then she looks down and starts. "Oh my God," she squawks. "My fly is undone!"

So there is Cate Blanchett: a goddess who keeps gleefully falling over her own clay feet. "She is a true, honest, gutsy girl with great empathy and intelligence," says Gillian Armstrong, Blanchett's director on Charlotte Gray. "She's incredibly beautiful. Plus she has a very Australian sense of humor, which keeps her feet truly on the ground." As a performer she is an emotional acrobat, gracefully somersaulting her way from tragedy to comedy to ecstasy. According to Geoffrey Rush, who has known her since she was in drama school, "A 15-year-old in a teen flick is probably out of the question, but other than that, she's pretty formidable." Witness the coming season, which will see a run of Blanchett films strung out over the winter like icicles under the eaves. First up: the Butch Cassidy-esque caper film Bandits, in which she plays a "neurotic fantasist"-bank robber opposite Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis. Then there's her cameo turn as the elf queen Galadriel in Lord of the Rings and another as Kevin Spacey's ex-wife in The Shipping News. Early next year is Armstrong's adaptation of the WWII novel Charlotte Gray, in which Blanchett has the starring role. Finally comes Heaven, written by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski, in which Blanchett plays an English teacher in Italy who descends into a purgatory of drugs and crime. If Hollywood had a Mount Olympus, she'd be Aphrodite and Athena, with a healthy dose of Lucille Ball, all rolled into one.

"Cate is a drop-dead glamorous person who could easily trade on that, but instead she's like a gardener, thinking about long-term seasonal changes," says Rush. "She's a serious actress and an A-list star."

She is also a tired actress and star, however; the films were made back-to-back, and she has essentially been on the road for the past year. "It's been exhausting," she acknowledges. And hard on a personal level. "Andrew [Upton, her screenwriter husband of four and a half years] and I try to travel together as much as possible, but we knew it was going to be a problem last year. Going into it we said, 'This will be month on, month off.' We had some great reunions, though." Her eyes slide sideways and she gets a naughty grin on her face. "We conceived on Charlotte Gray."

Little surprise she is happy to trade the romance of on-set assignations for the banality of everyday life. "I've been nesting big time," she says. "I spent three and a half hours yesterday ironing--though I probably won't do it again for another two years." She has also been organizing and sporadically cleaning. "The other day I found a 'pregnancy list' I had written ages ago," she says. "I write things on scraps of paper and then put them in whatever book I'm reading at the time. It's the only way I remember anything; one of the casualties of working so intensely is you forget just as intensely. Anyway, I riffled through this book and found this list of things to do when I was pregnant, starting with finishing my university degree [she left the University of Melbourne, where she was studying fine arts and economics, after two years]. I've missed the reapplication moment for that one. Truth is, I don't think I'll have time for any of them. All I want to do is sleep and see friends."

She also wants to putter in her garden ("I've got a chamomile lawn") and bake corn bread. "I'm a good baker," she says. "I think you cook well what you like to eat, and I love bread. On my desert island all I would need is bread and Vegemite." Her one concession to pregnancy has been to take linseed oil and stuff herself with sardines ("fatty acid is brain food"). She says she's too "superstitious" to buy baby things--though she and Upton recently bought a car.

"It was scarier than buying our house!" she says. "All the cars I'd had before were hand-me-downs, and to go to a dealer and get a car--I almost freaked out with the responsibility." She ended up buying a silver four-door BMW, "like a responsible parent-to-be. They're safe. But I still thought, What am I doing buying a car? There's something so...mature about a car." But since the world first became aware of her in 1997's Oscar and Lucinda, Blanchett has grown up.

"She always had an extraordinary presence," says Armstrong, who also directed Blanchett in Oscar, "but she has become a master at the technical side of filming. And she has handled the fame thing very well. It's an extraordinary evolution."

No longer the 20-something Academy Award nominee for Elizabeth, she's a 32-year-old talent smart enough to say about accepting her role in Lord of the Rings, "When you're dealing with people's fantasies, there is an enormous intake of breath and you think, I hope I can live up to everyone's expectations. But of course you won't." And of interviews: "I think there's a difference between being defensive and reserved." And of life: "It's human to want to avoid pain and to desire success and happiness for your offspring, but part of one's experience as a human being is pain and you can't avoid it. If you spend your life running from it, you end up not taking risks."

Blanchett knows of what she speaks. When she was 10 her father, a Texan who moved to Melbourne to marry her Australian mother, died of a heart attack. Cate and her two siblings (she is the middle child) were raised by her mother. After leaving the university to travel, she ended up at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art. That education led to work with the Sydney Theatre Company, which led to her first starring role onstage, opposite Rush in Oleanna, which led to a role in Paradise Road, which led to Oscar and Lucinda, and so on. She and Upton met while she was performing in an Australian production of The Seagull and married before she came to England to film Elizabeth. When she talks about him, she has used the language of romance novels: "swept away," "in love," "we kissed, and that was that." Says Armstrong, "They've been as overboard as it is possible for young lovers to be. He's a very good influence on her--a very calm, sensible force." Blanchett remains close to her older brother, a computer programmer, and younger sister, a set designer, who both still live in Australia. Her child will be the first grandchild on their side; her mother will fly to London for the birth.

"It's weird to have thought about something in the abstract for so long, and then it's suddenly happening," she says. "I thought it would feel like you were possessed by an alien. But it just feels natural." As Blanchett says this her lids flutter downward and her cheeks flush. When she starts talking about how being pregnant has made her think more about her family and the lessons they have taught her, such as the need for independent thinking, self-respect, "and a healthy sense of irreverence," she practically starts to glow. But then her expression changes, her eyes turning squinty as if she is trying to keep the lid on a cackle.

"You know all the people walking around with enormous smiles, and you think, That's the smile of someone who's just had great sex?" she asks. "Well, it's also the pregnancy smile." Not to mention the smile of someone whose dreams are fast coming true.

-QUOT-

"Cate is part of the heritage of great actresses," says friend Geoffrey Rush. "She's a creative person and someone who is not interested in peddling the values of her persona. She brings her own oomph to a part."

"There's something to be said for English reserve. Being a movie star--like Bruce Willis--is a commitment. There are certain things I love to do that become hard to do, boring things like ironing my husband's shirts."




COPYRIGHT 2001 Time, Inc.