Tatler 1998

Photos

Heaven’s Cate

The gods are smiling on Cate Blanchett. Playing opposite Ralph Fiennes in Oscar and Lucinda will propel her straight into the major league. Down Under, Maggie Alderson meets an actress on her way up. Photographed by Nicholas Samartis

‘Who exactly is this Cate Blanchett?’ That is a question some of the most famous actresses of our time have been asking recently. Followed by ‘And why has she got my part?’ Cate is the 28-year-old Australian who beat Uma, Winona, Sharon, Nicole and Meg for the role everyone wanted, starring opposite Ralph Fiennes in the screen adaptation of Peter carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda. Then, before that movie was even released, she went on to gazump who knows how many great British actresses (and definitely Kate Winslet) for the plum title role in the new film Elizabeth I (out in autumn.) But who is she?

Well, she’s an Australian actress, but her father was American. She’s an award-winning stage actress who illuminates the big screen. A great beauty, but one you remember more for her performance than her porcelain skin. She’s the Hollywood hot property of the moment who has no intention of moving to LA. Like the ‘proud square peg’ in a continent of round holes, as Carey described the character of Lucinda in his novel, Cate Blanchett defies easy categorization.

On the set of the movie, in an old wool store in the historic Rocks area of Sydney, Oscar and Lucinda (Ralph and Cate) were making the visit to the glasswords which is pivotal to the story. He shone and she glowed. Staying firmly in character between takes, and right through a photo opportunity for local press, they made an extraordinary pair: he, spiky, red-haired puppet; she, a rebellious Victorian miss with unruly auburn hair and guardsman’s trews under her tartan crinoline.

We all knew something special was going on. First, there was this kind of X-files energy between them. And then there were Cate Blanchett’s eyes: pale-blue and feline, they shone with an intensity and radiance that was quite unforgettable. We all agreed – as the cameras rolled, the set closed and we went off to write our stories - that this girl was going to be huuge.

Now, she is. But she’s got slightly mixed feelings about it. Not because she’s unhappy bout being able to work with great directors and interesting actors (she has just accepted another exciting role in Anothy Minghella’s latest project, The Talented Mr Ripley, co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon), but because she just doesn’t feel happy with the gossip and trivia that come with movie fame. When reporters at the New York premiere of Oscar and Lucinda asked Cate what she was wearing, she didn’t know how to pronounce the designer’s name - it was Alberta Ferretti.

When we meet on a sunny Sydney afternoon, it becomes clear that she’d much rather talk about anything other than Cate Blanchett: Doris Lessing’s autobiography, an exhibition we’ve both seen; or how about how great Ralph Fiennes was in The English Patient? She is not remotely in her own soundbites. ‘Here I am, crapping on about myself. You’ll think I could do it all day,’ she says, laughing with the self-deprecating humour Fiennes has fondly described, and pausing only to ask about the Tatler photo shoot. ‘Do they know my bum’s bigger than they think it is?’ It’s not, of course, and with the kind of table-flat stomach they seem to breed in Australia, she looks wonderful in all the clothes. But this is typical of her unprecious attitude.

‘I was talking to a friend this morning and I reached an all-time low,’ Cate explains. ‘I thought it was really unhealthy for me to sit and talk about myself – how tall I am and what breakfast cereal I like and what motivates me or whatever, because people don’t’ stop and analyze themselves that closely every day, and its’ like a beeline into therapy really.

‘So, I was saying to my friend, “I’m so sick of talking about myself”, and he said, “Well, it’s part of the job.”’ Such modesty does not come from the school of thought that has supermodels saying they want to be human-rights lawyers while accepting another 10,000 GBP to promote mascara. It’s just that Cate is a thoughtful woman in an industry which, at its highest level, can be very silly indeed.

In her analytical way, she is honest enough to admit to having felt star struck herself when, in the middle of filming Oscar and Lucinda, she went to a screening of The English Patient. ‘It was then that I realized the effect the enormous screen image has on your perception of an actor as a human being,’ she says. ‘I was a colleague of Ralph and so much enjoyed working with him. Then I saw him on screen and fell in love with him a an audience member and just could not reconcile this god, who was so extraordinarily sexual, with the unformed, gangly geek who I had been working with.

‘That’s the thing,’ she continues. ‘If someone can inhabit something completely on the screen, then it’s assumed that that’s what they are.’

But while, at heart, she understands why we, the public, fee on first-name, cereal-choice terms with movie stars, the Hollywood attitude to women really bugs her. ‘I do think that female actors my age are not expected to act so much. Their performances are discussed with reference to their beauty. Words like “luminous” and “iridescent” and “exquisite” are used with women, whereas people will talk about the “craft” of male actors, and I think that’s really shitty.’

Perhaps her ambivalence to the celebrity system is more understandable when you realize how fast it has all happened to her since she left drama school five years ago. Her first major stage performance, in David Mamet’s Oleanna, won her the Best Newcomer and Best Actress awards from the Sydney Theater Critics Circle, and unheard-of double.

She then promptly veered away from theater to make a couple of TV mini-series, both of which were critically acclaimed. Then she moved into film, doing three major movies in less than two years and wining the Best Supporting Actress gong (an ‘Ozcar’) from the Australian Film Institute – for her role in Thank God He Met Lizzie. And now, it’s the big time.

At least her most recent role – with Teflon forehead and bleached lashes as Elizabeth I – is probably the last for which directors will have to plead to be allowed to cast her. Even after Ralph Fiennes was secured, the backers of Oscar and Lucinda at Fox wanted a big name for the female lead to prop up what they felt was a ‘difficult’ film. Director Gillian Armstrong (Little Women, My Brilliant Career) wanted Cate. Indeed, she believed in her so much that she preferred to do the film for a smaller budget with Blanchett than for a bigger one without her. The result has proved Armstrong right.

‘We had a look at all the tapes and thought Cate was the best,’ Armstrong says. ‘We knew there was a special quality that Lucinda needed to have. Once had Cate tested, we realized she had it. She has an incredible sensuality on screen.’

It was the same with Elizabeth I. According to Blanchett, director Shekhar Kapur (The Bandit Queen) was having a casting nightmare. ‘People were saying to him, “You’ve got to have Madonna, you’ve got to have Bette Midler.” But when he happened to see a one-minute room for Oscar and Lucinda, he knew straight away he wanted Blanchett. ‘There was something about her face that was timeless,’ he says. Once again, a screen test convinced the producers to allow her to be cast.

Mind you, she was not the only controversial choice. As well as Ralph Fiennes’s brother Joseph (“He’s a very tricky little character. He’s a very naughty man and a wonderful actor,’ says Cate), the film features the acting talents of Eric Cantona. ‘I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t’ know who Eric Cantona was,’ says Cate. ‘But I think he was quite relieved because it meant he could just be another actor.

‘Richard Attenborough would just sit there, and it was like he was talking about the Second Coming when he was talking about Eric. He said he could understand why Shekhar wanted to cast him, because the way he can sense where a ball is going is the sort of instinctive response to thinks that an actor needs.’

After finishing Elizabeth I, Cate is on a longed-for break at her home in a Sydney beach suburb (not Notting Hill-like trendy Bondi–which she actively dislikes – more of a West Hampstead sort of area). She’s enjoying the sun (she uses an umbrella to protect her skin from ageing rays), doing lunch, making jigsaws and picking up her beloved husband, Andrew Upton, from his work on the set of Babe Two (he’s a script supervisor).

As in the best Doris Day movies, Cate and Andrew didn’t get along when they first met on the set of Thank God He Met Lizzie. Then he kissed her. ‘When he kissed me it was just an instant thing,’ she says. Instant but not short-lived. They were married last year, and a week later she was on a plane to England for a five-month separation while she filmed Elizabeth I. It was not a good experience.

‘Shocking. Appalling,’ she says. ‘Never to be repeated. It was awful. It was hell. It was a black, black night that went on for too long. He’s now flexible, so we can be together. It’s a constant negotiation, but I know that he is too big a part of me for us to be apart.’

It’s all part of what she describes as ‘the need to live parallel to my work’. It’s what makes her say wryly, when she’s asked if she’s going to Hollywood: ‘I’ve been.’ As she says: ‘I prefer to go to a place with a more complex reason for being there than just wok. I wouldn’t mind living in New York for a while, but that’s because I’m attracted to the city and I have friends there and it means that I’m closer to Europe than I am in Australia. But I love living here. Where d’you live?’

There she goes, trying to change the subject again. Cate, you’re going to have to learn to love the sound of your own voice as much as we do.

Oscar and Lucinda is released on 3 April. Maggie Alerdson is a senior writer at the Sydney Morning Herald.