Evening Standard Metrolife July 2003

Roles of Attraction

With parts as hard nosed Irish journalist Veronica Guerin and fiery film icon Katherine Hepburn coming up to add to her Elf Queen Galadriel, Cate Blanchett tells Ryan Gilbey why she's loving every minute of doing exactly what she wants.

Meet Cate Blanchett - Oscar-nominated actress, sophisticated sex symbol and, above all, woman who knows what she wants. When the 34-year-old, Melbourne raised actress tilts her head playfully, runs her hand through a fork of platinum hair and admits, 'I can be fairly strong-minded,' the sense of understatement is overwhelming. Blanchett looks slim and toned in her figure-hugging peach-and-black top and black trousers, but her presence is subtly forceful, laced with a hint of devilish mischief that tells you she knows how to enjoy herself. 'I don't care how many lines i have in a script,' she trills happily. 'I do what I enjoy.'

A good example is Anthony Minghella's 1999 hit The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which she had scarcely more than a cameo as bubbly heiress Meredith Logue. 'I looked at the script and said, "I want to do that part."' She mimes pointing to a tiny speck of dust. 'Anthony said, "Are you sure you want such a small role?"'\ I thought that was such a strange attitude.'

Perhaps it is this undimmed determination that makes her upcoming role as Katherine Hepburn, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, feel like the one she was born top lay. You don't have to strain too hard to imagine the posters proclaiming 'Blanchett is Hepburn' - the two may already be close to equal in spirit and fieriness. 'I never actually met Hepburn,' she reflects, ' though who she was at 96 would have been incredibly different from who she was at 28, which is the age I'm playing her. That's when she was box-office poison. No one know what to do with her, and she had to buy her way out of her contract.'

Katherine Hepburn might have sprung from a different world than the journalist Veronica Guerin, whom Blanchett portrays in her latest movie, but both women were cut from the same resilient cloth. Guerin was an uncompromising Dublin newshound whose dispatches on Ireland's drugs trade led to her murder in 1996 at the hands of ghouls she had exposed. In the film, she marches from one scoop to another, brushing aside threats and violence the way most people shake off a nasty cold. Blanchett bravely makes it clear in her performance that Guerin is relishing the beating and bullets that come her way. 'Well, wouldn't you?' Blanchett booms. 'Her attitude was, "If I've been shot, I must be on the right track."' With a lilting Dublin accent, a feathery hairdo and an all-purpose smile that flashes on like a searchlight, Blanchett's Guerin resembles nothing so much as a tenacious Avon lady. 'People always talk about her toughness, so I deliberately latched on to her more feminine aspects, ' she says. 'For example, she had a great relation ship wither her hairdresser. And she always wore earrings. It would have been too easy to characterize as some sports-loving beer-swilling hardnut.'

As a new mother - young Dashiell, by her husband the screenwritier Andrew Upton, is now 18 months old - Blanchett also appreciated the struggles that Guerin had to endure for the sake of her own child. 'Parenthood is constant juggling act. When I started filming Veronica Guerin, Dash was nine weeks old, and I thought, "How can I leave him?" But it's even harder leaving for work now that he's older.'

She will need to become accustomed to it if her career continues at this dizzying pace. Since her 1997 film debut in the Australian PoW drama Paradise Road, she has barely paused for breath. She made an almighty splash five years ago in Elizabeth, for which she received her Oscar nomination, and then boldly demonstrated her versatility by plumping for the most unusual roes on the block. She has now played everything from a bored, brassy housewife (Pushing Tin) to a twitchy clairvoyant (The Gift) and a mystical elf Queen (The Lord of the Rings triloty). Whether or not she has a game play, everything is going right. 'It's a scream,' she laughs. 'Growing up I could never decide what I wanted to do - there walways seemed so many choices. Being ana ctor means youj never really have to decide because you're really just trying out different things. It's a form of prologed restlessness.'

Restlessness is right. Although she now lives in Brighton (they bought a house there last year from Jimmy Caulty, formally of poop provocateurs the KLF, no less) with another home in Sydney, she has only just returned form New Mexico, where she shot The Missing, a Western starring Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind). Before that is released, audiences will see her in The Return of the King, the final installment of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, where she will reprise her small but pivotal role as Galadriel the Elf Queen. The importance of Galadriel means that Blanchett's presence seems to prevail the trilogy, despite the act that she only spent three weeks on the production.

'Those films will be long, long remembered,' she beams proudly. 'And it's all human experience, right?' She stops and corrects herself. 'Or elvish experience, anyway. I tell you, I honestly had no idea how to prepare to be an elf. What do you do? You read the books. You put on the ears. Beyond that...' She gives a a helpless shrug, sand it hits you that whether she's playing housewives, royalty or movie stars, it makes no difference: Cate Blanchett's having a ball.

Veronica Guerin opens Fri 1Aug.