The Sunday Telegraph September 20, 1998

The Arts: G'day to you Queen Bess Last year no one had heard of her. Now Cate Blanchett is one of the top female stars in Hollywood and playing Elizabeth I in a new film. She talks to Sheila Johnsto
Interview SHEILA JOHNSTON


The Sunday Telegraph

09-20-1998

CATE Blanchett's face is plastered all over Italy. "You can't escape it," she says, half-incredulously. "I was in a taxi in Rome the other day and I couldn't help it - I sat forward in my seat and said `oi, oi!' The driver turned around and took off my sunglasses. But he still didn't believe me. It was a weird moment."

There is, indeed, no obvious resemblance between the willowy blonde and the frowning, fiery redhead staring out from the posters for her new film about Elizabeth I. But one of Blanchett's gifts is her chameleon quality. "In Elizabeth she has a long, pale, horse-face," says the film director Mike Newell, for whom she has just played a New Jersey housewife in Pushing Tin, a comedy about, of all things, air-traffic controllers. "In my film she looks more like Dolly Parton."

Blanchett's own beauty is uncontested. Admirers rhapsodise about the peerless cheekbones, the turquoise-blue eyes, the almost ethereal paleness. Yet there is also a reassuringly down-to-earth quality to her. She is alert to other people. Most stars on the interview trail barely register the passing parade of supplicants, but she instantly remarks on a small change to my hair since we first met - briefly, in a crowd - more than a month ago.

"She has that Australian, g'day-mate thing, straightforward to the point of brisk," says Newell, who recalls commenting to her on her current productivity. The response of Blanchett (who is married to Andrew Upton, a script and continuity editor): "Pack 'em in before the kid!"

Last year she was still an obscure Australian actress known only for a supporting role in the prisoner-of-war drama Paradise Road. But a fierce media blitz greeted her sprightly performance as a lady gambler in the film of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda last spring. Early next year she will once again be everywhere: as David Hare's self-deluded Resistance fighter in Plenty at the Almeida Theatre; in Pushing Tin; and as Lady Chiltern, the wife of the compromised politician, in a screen version of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband.

At present she is shooting The Talented Mr Ripley, Anthony Minghella's follow-up to The English Patient. And after that? "Christmas, I think, is next," she says. "Remember that old thing, the family thing?" Meanwhile there is Elizabeth, which chronicles the Borgia-like cabals and bloodshed at Gloriana's court.

Blanchett proves a fount of information about her character. "When a political leader becomes indelibly etched on our memories because of the impact they had on history, they can become iconic. The biggest challenge for me was to try and find the domestic, emotional reactions Elizabeth had to her environment.

"A key to her was the dancing. She was incredibly aerobic and every morning she would do the galliard. She was well honed, and loved men who were very robust and could hunt and ride. It's reported that she would often choose her advisers by their ability to dance the galliard because, if they could remain calm and serene and engaged while performing these meticulous steps, she thought their minds would work that way too.

"I STUDIED portraits of her and read her letters. My bible was a book that Shekhar [Kapur, the director of Elizabeth] gave me called The Sayings of Elizabeth I. Her mental agility was astonishing. She swore like a trooper but she was also very literate and articulate. There's a lot of antithesis in the way she writes. Someone talked to her of marriage, and she said, `Love is the offset of leisure, but I've been so beset by duties I've had no time for love.' "

Not so this film's Virgin Queen, who enjoys a lusty liaison with Robert Dudley, played by Joseph Fiennes. Blanchett has now had the enviable privilege of being romanced by two Fiennes siblings (her co-star in Oscar and Lucinda was Joseph's brother, Ralph), but she remains discreet about their relative attractions: "They're completely different," is all that she will vouchsafe. "The only connection they have is that they're both good actors."

And she is untroubled by the attacks that have been mounted on the film by historical purists. "Drama is about creating exciting fiction and this project was not in any way interested in biographical accuracy. Shekhar kept saying `This is my Elizabeth'; he was liberated, I think, by the fact that he's Indian. Being both from the colonies, we have quite a skewed perception.

"Part of the excitement of the role was that it was such an electric, exciting period, and Shekhar has created a world a bit like Hamlet's court, where there is no trust and an enormous sense of dread. Elizabeth was deeply ambitious - in order to rule a country as chaotic as England when she ascended the throne, she had to have an enormous singleness of purpose.

"I never want to sentimentalise or over-sympathise with anyone I play because then you shy away from their unpalatable side. Take Margaret Thatcher - she did atrocious things to this country and to the world, but if you were playing her you'd still have to find the heart of the person."

Blanchett's collaborators agree on this uncommon instinct for finding the humanity in not immediately likeable characters. "We needed someone who can be quite hard, but who also has to have the audience's sympathy," says Barnaby Thompson, the producer of An Ideal Husband. "Cate can play tough, but she also has the ability to wear her soul on her sleeve. Lots of actresses can be charming and dazzling, but she has power and warmth, and that's quite a tricky combination."

That ability is used to the hilt in Elizabeth, which chronicles the Queen's steady transformation from a lively and libidinous young girl to the monstre sacre of popular myth. Blanchett recalls, "Last summer on the first day of filming, the first lines that were spoken were, `The Queen is dead, long live the Queen!' Princess Diana had died two days before. It was very eerie. They both grew up in the public eye, and it instilled in them both a strong sense of performance.

"But, unlike today, the monarchy then was only one step down from the divine, and Elizabeth really harnessed that aura of mystery. She came alive in a crowd. The thinner her personal life became, the richer her diplomatic life. Like her, I felt quite isolated during the filming; it was one of the most intense professional experiences I've had. And I could empathise with someone trying to retain her privacy in an incredibly public environment."

According to the movie, Elizabeth was a self-made myth, to a degree that even the most determined of stars, and the most draconian of publicists, can only dream of. Journalists interviewing Blanchett (for carefully vetted publications) were required - unusually - to sign a release form pledging not to spin off any gossip to less salubrious outlets.

But, as the actress insists, "You can go mad trying to control your image. In Elizabeth's day a painter would take a couple of months to paint your portrait. Now you can be photographed walking down the street in your pyjamas and there's nothing you can do - you just have to grin and bear it."

Elizabeth opens on Oct 2




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