Los Angeles Magazine Dec, 1999

THE TALENTED MS. BLANCHETT.
Author: Melissande Clarke


AFTER GETTING AN OSCAR NOD FOR HER UNCANNY PORTRAYAL OF QUEEN ELIZABETH, SHE BYPASSED THE BLOCKBUSTER ROUTE FOR CHARACTER ROLES AND STAGE PLAYS. BUT AS FAR AS HOLLYWOOD'S CONCERNED, CATE THE GREAT STILL RULES

WHEN ANTHONY MINGHELLA, writer-director of The Talented Mr. Ripley, began his search for an actress to play Meredith Logue, a character with considerably more impact in the movie than screen time, he wanted someone "like Cate Blanchett," he says, "someone with her distinctiveness. But I knew she wouldn't do it." The part was small, and Blanchett was white-hot--fresh off Oscar and Lucinda opposite Ralph Fiennes and approaching a Golden Globe win and Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her turn in Elizabeth. Why would she want to take a backseat to Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, Ripley's stars? At his agent's urging, Minghella asked her anyway. He was amazed when she said yes.

"It told me a lot about her," he says now. "Her compass is not steering her toward a star vehicle; it's steering her toward movies and directors who intrigue her." Indeed, Blanchett has made seven films in the past two-and-a-half years, playing characters so wildly diverse that audiences are hard-pressed to recognize her from one to the next. Meeting her in person is like viewing yet-another creature altogether. Gone is the frizzy orange hair of Lucinda; the over-coiffed crown of Elizabeth; the high, hard do of Connie, her Long Island housewife in Mike Newell's Pushing Tin. Looking comfortable in a Sydney, Australia, photo studio, the slender, 30-year-old Australian actress brushes aside wisps of damp, blond hair that fall across a remarkable face, a composition of features that can arrange and rearrange themselves from goofy to stunning in the blink of an eye.

She is wearing jeans that give a glimpse of pale tummy and are fashionably turned up at the hem. Her black faux-fur vest, worn over a tiny white tee, is by Nicole Farhi, and her sunglasses have Gucci written all over them. But be the first to tell her she was nominated one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World," and she affects mock relief, saying, "There you go. I can breathe easy." Blanchett is remarkably nonchalant about the trappings of fame and her good fortune. As far as she's concerned, it's business as usual--she's still seeking out interesting roles; she's just had a pay raise. "I've come out of working in theater, where you earn absolutely no money and you can't pay your electricity bill, to being able to buy a leather jacket and not having to worry about it," she says.

Blanchett has just flown in from the Paris set of The Man Who Cried, a surreal drama directed by Sally Potter (Orlando) and costarring Christina Ricci ("She's fantastic") and John Turturro. Blanchett plays a Russian cabaret dancer and has her first serious love scene (discounting the soft-focus roll with Joseph Fiennes in Elizabeth), with Turturro; she found the celluloid intimacy "something to be gotten through." Which is what she and her costar did. "We met the day before, had an afternoon of rehearsal with Sally, and the next day at seven in the morning, we had to be in bed together," she says incredulously. "We were looking at one another, going, `This is the weirdest job. I don't really know you, and you don't really know me--what are we doing?'"
To the rest of the world, it's obvious: Blanchett is making quite a name for herself. "She's heart-stoppingly good," says Minghella. "She's an exhilarating actor." He had heard as much from Ralph Fiennes (whom he directed in The English Patient) and from friend Shekhar Kapur (who directed her in Elizabeth) and had seen it for himself in her Oscar and Lucinda performance. So when Blanchett signed on to Ripley, Minghella changed his script, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel, to show her off. "We were all honored she took the part," he says. The film, set in Italy in the late '50s, is about an American named Tom Ripley (Damon), who is sent to Italy to find a compatriot charmer named Dickie (Law), who has escaped his family to live the high life with a beautiful woman (Paltrow). Blanchett's character, whom she describes as "an ingenue who falls unwittingly, and unfortunately, in love with Ripley," does not even appear in the book and was "only a passing moment of Ripley's experience" in Minghella's initial drafts. "But having gotten that instrument into the film," he says of signing on Blanchett, "I wanted to play it as much as I could."

Shooting in Italy with Oscar heartthrob Damon "was a bit of a circus," Blanchett says with a laugh. "It was like working with a rock star." Wherever he went, a ripple of excitement unraveled the gathered crowds. "At first they thought he was Leonardo DiCaprio, and they were screaming 'Leo! Leo!' at him," she says. "And when they realized who he was, it didn't make any difference."

Blanchett met Paltrow for the first time on the Ripley set, even though both had been up for the Best Actress statuette at the Academy Awards this year (Paltrow won) and were seated only one row apart at the ceremony. "I can't really recall a lot of the specific details of the night," Blanchett says. But her scene-stealing John Galliano gown, with its daring back of netting embroidered with delicate blossoms and a tiny bird, showed a newfound wisdom. "A year ago, I honestly thought you just went to a shop and bought a dress and that's what you wore," she says, sipping a low-fat latte. "Honey, it doesn't work like that," her handlers advised, and a stylist from Elizabeth's Gramercy Pictures with a bulging contact book and Hollywood know-how came to the rescue. Which was fine by Blanchett. "It meant I didn't have to have conversations about clothes," she says with relief.

SARTORIAL DISTRACTIONS ARE not at the top of Blanchett's agenda. "Cate is completely about the work," says Minghella. "She arrives for the work and leaves after the work, and she's not in the market for anything other than the work at hand." Fellow Aussie and Elizabeth costar, Geoffrey Rush, remembers that even while studying at Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art, Blanchett's focus was generating heat from her audiences. "I was sharing a house with [drama teacher] Lindy Davies, who was directing Cate in a final-year production of Electra," he says. "Lindy had alerted me that she had an astonishing young woman in her class, and I went to see the play. Indeed, she was an extraordinary performer."

Blanchett graduated from NIDA in 1992 and two years later, at 25, won the Sydney Theatre Critics Circle Award for her role opposite Rush in David Mamet's powerful two-hander Oleanna. Ironically, she had originally considered the play, about a pompous university professor who is accused of sexual harassment by an unstable student, "a misogynist piece of crap." But because it made her so angry, she decided she "had to do it."

It is a strategy that saw Blanchett rise to prominence on the Sydney theater scene in record time. She tackled the roles of Miranda in The Tempest and Ophelia in Hamlet, earning a reputation as an inventive actress who wasn't afraid to take risks. In 1996, she made her first feature film, Bruce Beresford's World War II POW drama Paradise Road, and managed to stand out in a crowded cast that included Glenn Close and Frances McDormand. The word was out. Australian director Cherie Nowlan next hired Blanchett as the perfect blond bride in her black comedy Thank God He Met Lizzie not long after seeing her in a "pretty bizarre play" called Kafka Dances (which won her another Sydney Theatre Critics Circle Award). "I couldn't stop looking at her," Nowlan recalls. "She'd covered her face in white pancake makeup, but I could see underneath that she was very beautiful. It was a performance from a pretty original, unusual actor. And, like everyone else, I thought, `This girl will go off--it's just a matter of time."

Prescient praise as it turns out. Blanchett's next film, Oscar and Lucinda, sent her into orbit. Director Gillian Armstrong had a tough time convincing Fox Searchlight that Blanchett had the clout to carry a film opposite Ralph Fiennes, but the end result was a Technicolor calling card for her female lead. When Kapur saw a promo reel of Blanchett as Lucinda, the feisty gambler and all-around fish out of water, he knew he had found his Elizabeth.

After her Oscar nomination, Blanchett could have hitched herself to any big-budget vehicle and sped off into the limelight. But with an Aussie's typical disregard for protocol, she chose instead to take smaller; more challenging roles. She perfected her Tri-Borough accent as Connie in Pushing Tin with John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton, and donned petticoats and an English accent as the indomitable Lady Chiltern in An Ideal Husband with Rupert Everett. "I love the fact that, after Elizabeth, she quite consciously went into films that were ensembles," says Rush, who won 1996's Best Actor Oscar for Shine. "It suggests that she's laying down a long-term plan to be an actress, not a star."

Between film commitments, Blanchett squeezed in a season of David Hare's Plenty at the Almeida Theatre in London. Her performance divided the critics. "Cate brought this ferocious energy and almost non-English inner life to it, and I think that perturbed people," says Rush. "But it is exactly what the play is saying." The reviews left a mark. Blanchett is in Sydney for a lightning-quick visit to attend the opening of Cyrano de Bergerac for the Sydney Theatre Company; her husband, writer Andrew Upton, translated the story from the French and wrote the adaptation. She says she resisted the temptation to read the reviews (which were raves) of the play. "Part of me wanted to get all the papers, but after my experience with Plenty, I decided, `Who's interested in what they have to say?'"

Blanchett's hectic schedule does take a toll. She is jet-lagged and doesn't know what day it is. She fossicks in her voluminous Kate Spade green suede carryall, unearthing earplugs and a packet of miso soup stashed by her mother-in-law, with whom the couple are staying in Sydney. It is this sort of behavior that makes her husband call her a rodent. "He says I'm a little rat," she laughs. "I live in this bag, and I wake up in the night and start scratching around, pulling out bits of paper." In fact, the couple, who married in 1997, travel together as much as possible and have been living out of "a suitcase the size of a small African village" for the past two years. The beachside apartment they own in Sydney is rented out, and home is more often than not a hotel room or a part-time apartment on the road. As a result, Blanchett has become "quite phobic about packing." Recently, when the pair had a two-day commitment in London, Blanchett couldn't bring herself to repack. "I freaked," she says. "I couldn't touch the zip. I said, `I can't do it. I can't do any more packing.'"

Although the constant traveling is debilitating, having Upton around restores her sanity. "He's incredibly supportive," says Blanchett. "I wake up in the morning, and I can't quite believe my luck." So she found it particularly difficult when she had to leave him soon after their wedding to shoot Elizabeth--which she says was like being at the "helm of a really enormous ship."

"Andrew is a great stabilizing influence, and she missed him terribly," Kapur observes. "When he's with her, it's that thing of `He's here now--I'm okay.' He gives her a great sense of confidence in herself." As does her family, whom Blanchett prefers not to discuss. Her mother June, a former school teacher; younger sister Genevieve, who was the set designer on Cyrano; and older brother Bob, who is in the computer industry, "are very individual, special people who I don't want to always be referred to in reference to me," she says. Her late father, an American who worked in advertising and met and married her mother in Australia, died of a heart attack when Cate was 10. As a child, she wanted to live in a haunted house on the off chance they might meet up again.

"The day Dad died, I was playing the piano, and he walked past the window and I waved good-bye ... and he died," Blanchett says in Joan Sauers's book Brothers and Sisters: Intimate Portraits of Sibling Relationships (Heinemann Australia). "After that, I thought I would have to kiss everybody good-bye before I left the house. It was like I had an obsessive-compulsive disorder. I'd just be going down the street to get some milk, and I'd do it. If I had to come back in the house because I'd forgotten something, I'd have to go through the whole ritual again." That was a long time ago, but at the Sydney photo shoot, when a visitor leaves, Blanchett shakes her hand warmly and says, "Drive safely." She means it.

Blanchett would like to start her own family. "Yes, yes and yes--sooner rather than later," she says. And this is one movie star who doesn't give a fig about the consequences. "Fortunately, my agent in America has two children, and she's not phobic," she notes. "A lot of people say, `Imagine what will happen to your body!'"

Perhaps it's a preparatory nesting instinct that has Blanchett focusing on having a home. And couches. "I was talking to Christina [Ricci] the other day, and she was talking about her house and her dogs and the furniture she's getting from Morocco, and I said, `Do you have a couch?' She said, `Yeah, we've got a couple of couches.' And I thought, `She's 19 and she's got a home life.'" For now, Blanchett must be content with ripping pictures of sofas out of magazines and squirreling them away in her carryall for future reference.

At the current rate, it may be some time before she gets that couch. After finishing The Man Who Cried, she is set to star in The Gift, cowritten by Billy Bob Thornton and directed by Sam Raimi. And then she's off to New Zealand to play Galadriel, the elf queen in director Peter Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Once again, her appearance will morph. "I'm tickled," says Blanchett. "I'm being fitted for prosthetic ears."

COPYRIGHT 1999 Los Angeles Magazine, Inc.