The Daily Mail February 2004

'If you have a good sex life, getting pregnant is bound to happen eventually'; Cate Blanchett, now six months pregnant with her second child, tells David Vincent why she is happy to miss out on the role of a lifetime for motherhood.
The Mail on Sunday (London, England); 2/8/2004



Byline: DAVID VINCENT

I woke up and I was naked, lying on black plastic, covered in wet plaster,' says Cate Blanchett. She waits a few moments to gauge my reaction to the Baconesque image she has conjured, her grey-blue eyes narrowing and staring unblinkingly in a way that is considered rude in all but the youngest babies, and then continues, 'I didn't know where I was. All I could see were people's feet and I thought, "OK, I'm going to die. I've been kidnapped by a bunch of weirdos."' There were no weirdos or kidnappers, however, just the 34-year-old Blanchett in her makeup room, starkers, collapsed on the floor.

This was her first inkling she was pregnant for the second time in less than two years. She is now six months gone.

Ironically, she had passed out while being body-cast for the prosthetic belly needed to play a pregnant journalist in Wes Anderson's film The Life Aquatic.

The director later sent her a note congratulating her on her Method acting.

'The only time I had fainted before was when I was pregnant with my son Dashiell, so I had an idea what was happening,' she explains.

'Getting pregnant wasn't planned.

We just thought we would stop being careful. And it happened straight away. It was an unplanned, planned thing. I have friends who have taken quite a while. You tend to hear only the disaster stories. The whole thing about women over 30.

'I think people get very tense about it, and worried. We just thought, "If it happens it happens." Two years ago, it happened straightaway. Now it has happened again. Usually, if you have a good sex life it's bound to happen eventually.' Blanchett had a much worse time in the early stages of the pregnancy than she did with Dashiell. 'I have been sicker this time, mainly more morning sickness,' she says in her mild Australian accent. Now, with just a few months to go until the birth, she is positively glowing.

Her skin, usually translucent, has a healthy touch of brownish redness, and her thick blonde hair falls in a feather cut to her collar bone. Her breasts are ' enormous, enormous - the size of an African nation', and her bulge is quite pronounced through her Sonia Rykiel green-and-black striped blouse.

Blanchett likes fashion labels. Other favourites are John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier, although she claims that more often than not her expensive clothes stay wrapped in plastic, 'because I always wear the same pair of jeans covered in baby yoghurt'.

Blanchett has just flown in from Rome, to promote her third film release in the past seven months.

The much-lauded political biopic Veronica Guerin was followed by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and this month it is the turn of the 19th-century drama, The Missing.

Ever since Blanchett barged her way into our collective consciousness in 1998 with her mesmerising rendition of a young Elizabeth I in Elizabeth, she has been singled out for praise.

There have been many successes, Oscar and Lucinda and The Talented Mr Ripley, for example. Even in the less successful films, Bandits, for example, she's come up smelling of roses. As Barry Norman put it, 'She is very good, even in truly bad movies.' There are no worries about the commercial and critical success of The Missing. Directed by Ron Howard, who swept the board at the 2002 Academy Awards with A Beautiful Mind, it is a Western with a difference. Set in New Mexico in the 1880s, it's a unique take on the genre, and develops into a suspensefilled horse-chase thriller.

Blanchett plays young widow Maggie Gilkeson, a homesteader and healer, whose father, played by Tommy Lee Jones, returns after abandoning her 20 years earlier to live with the Apache. She rejects his initial attempts at reconciliation, but is forced to accept his help when her eldest daughter is kidnapped by Apache renegades who plan to sell the child into slavery.

Blanchett arrived on location in New Mexico - pre-pregnancy - six weeks early to learn how to ride.

'All the physical stuff had to be second nature,' she says. 'My character had to jump on a horse the way I get in a car. I rode out with wranglers everyday, and thankfully, I'm a fast learner. I had a ball. I really miss that horse.' She smiles broadly, revealing the elvish grin that made her perfect as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. Her husband, Andrew Upton, a script and continuity editor, felt JRR Tolkien must have written the character for her. 'He says I have historical ears,' she chuckles.

She and her husband usually travel everywhere together, but today Upton has stayed in Rome to look after twoyearold Dashiell.

'It is such a short trip,' she explains.

'I was going to bring Dash, and then I thought that it would be too disruptive.' While Blanchett is obviously happy with the turn of events, she has had to make sacrifices. The most painful was accepting that, now pregnant, she could no longer play Anna in the film version of Patrick Marber's hit play Closer, a part that she had coveted for some time. When she bowed out, Julia Roberts snapped up her part immediately.

'It was very difficult. It was one of those things I had always wanted to do. I cried for half an hour. Then I thought, "I'm going to have a baby - what am I complaining about?"' Being a mother is clearly Blanchett's top priority. She even missed the 2001 premiere of The Fellowship of the Ring to be with Dashiell.

'I want to spend all my time with him,' she says. 'I called him this morning and Andrew said, "Say hi to Mummy," and he came on the phone, paused and went "Ciao bella."' He's really verbal. He is putting sentences together.

'The difference for me is that I can't take my work home. But acting is still a passion. I haven't had a lobotomy, I just value my marriage and my family above everything else.' Family bonds are a recurring theme in Blanchett's conversations. She is very close to her mother, June. 'Our son having a connection with his grandparents is important to me,' she says. 'It gives a healthy perspective on the process of ageing, on having a sense of family history.' One suspects that part of her desire to stay so bonded stems from the death of her father, Robert, of a heart attack, aged just 40.

Blanchett was only ten at the time.

It's something she will talk about, but only tangentially, referring to the tragedy as if it happened to somebody else.

'Children have a different mourning process. They are outwardly resilient and they incorporate that stuff. If your father dies when you are young, you don't become aware of it until you see your friends turning 18 and 21, getting married, having children - and their fathers are there at those events. You wish you had access to that experience.' This kind of circumspect answer is peppered throughout any chat with Blanchett. It is clear she likes to be in control of a discussion, and if subjects get too close for comfort, she pulls down the shutters. In the past, she's made such claims as: 'I've sort of forgotten my childhood.' Clearly, that is blatantly untrue. In fact, she's not averse to telling the odd lie. At the beginning of our meeting, I had asked her if she'd moved to Brighton.

I'd read in a newspaper that she had bought an 1820s townhouse, and was in the process of renovating it.

Her reply was an empathetic and slightly annoyed, 'No.' She turned away and started speaking to someone else. At another point in the interview, I repeated the question. Again, the answer was, 'No.' I persisted, and Blanchett smiled and said, 'I just don't want to talk about it.' That's OK, I replied, I'd just rather that you didn't- 'Lie about it?' she interrupted, laughing. 'And how do you know I'm not just lying the whole time?' Despite her father's death, Blanchett insists her childhood was idyllic. She grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne with her mother, brother and sister. She went to the local primary school and then to the nearby Methodist Ladies' College.

'I was one of those terrible doorknocking children who pretends to lose their dog and gets invited in for a cup of tea,' she says. 'I got into terrible situations. I was invited to lunch once and I had to sit there because the woman wasn't sure whether she had seen my dog. She thought she had, but her husband was coming home in ten minutes. And was I hungry? And would I like a bite to eat?

'My friend was waiting on her bike outside in the bushes. I didn't come out for an hour and she was thinking, "She's been abducted by some cult."' After school, Cate went briefly to the University of Melbourne, then travelled abroad for a year. On her return to Australia, she successfully auditioned for the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art. 'I did an obscure piece and everyone laughed,' she says. 'Maybe I got in on the novelty factor.' A couple of years later, Blanchett was starring at the Sydney Theatre Company in David Mamet's Oleanna. She appeared in two Australian films before her Hollywood debut in Paradise Road. In the blink of an eye, she was starring with Ralph Fiennes in Oscar and Lucinda.

It was a trailer for this that convinced Shekhar Kapur to audition Blanchett for the part of the young and not-so-virginal queen in Elizabeth. During all this brouhaha, in early 1997 Blanchett met Upton. By December, they were married.

Funnily enough, the first time Blanchett and Upton met, they hated each other. 'He thought I was aloof. I thought he was arrogant,' says Blanchett.

'Of course, that wasn't the case,' she quickly adds, laughing. 'We played poker one night with friends and we kissed.

Then we seemed to be getting married.' Since Elizabeth, Blanchett's career has gone from strength to strength. She is widely regarded as the Meryl Streep of her generation. Blanchett classes this as an honour. She is ready to defend the American actress from those who say her skill with accents - a Blanchett forte - makes her a mere technician.

'We are living in a time when mediocrity is celebrated,' blasts Blanchett.

'If an actress such as Streep does something that is virtuoso, it is considered to be showing off. I think it is just because people are in awe of her incredible technical ability and her power to affect an audience. She strikes me as being an incredibly instinctual actress.' Blanchett can be pleasantly forthright on any number of topics. She's called the marketing of films 'b*******'.

Asked by one journalist if she'd ever appeared in Neighbours, she retorted: 'Absolutely not. I'm an actress.' Asked by another the age of her mother: 'I don't know how old she is. I refuse to retain it. It's somehow distasteful to know how old your mother is.' On criticism of murdered journalist Veronica Guerin for putting herself in danger: 'We're living in cowardly times.

Apparently, a woman who stands up and fights for what she believes in is reckless and irresponsible. I'm not having it.' For the next few months, Blanchett is taking it easy, relaxing in London until her second child is born. Soon after she gives birth, she will return to Australia.

Upton has written a new adaptation of Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler for the Sydney Theatre Company, and Blanchett will play the lead. She is also to star in the film drama Little Fish, set outside Sydney.

After The Missing, Blanchett returns to the big screen in The Life Aquatic and The Aviator, a Martin Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as American tycoon Howard Hughes. Blanchett plays actress Katharine Hepburn, with whom Hughes had a passionate affair.

'It was an enormous challenge and not one I would undertake for anyone but Scorsese,' says Blanchett.

After her stint in Australia, Blanchett has only blank pages in her diary.

But she is not worried. 'You have to be prepared to be flexible. If you stick rigidly to a plan, what happens? Nothing.' She is also pleased that she'll be out of the public eye for a while. 'If I had got this job to be on the style pages of a magazine, my concerns would be different.

'The public side of it was never something I yearned for. Katharine Hepburn said that as a child she wanted to be famous. Of course she wanted to be a great actress, but she really wanted to be famous. Some people are like that.

I'm not judging it. My reason for getting into acting was different.' Nor is she worried her age will begin to preclude her from juicy roles.

'My career thus far hasn't been based on taking my clothes off,' she says.

'But I think the camera does tire of looking at you after a while, and you have to go away to come back. And, who knows what is going to happen when I have 17 children - I may tire of it myself.' That sounds suspiciously like a plan.

'Well, maybe not 17.' One should hope not. Otherwise it won't just be Blanchett thudding to the floor every 18 months, it will be her husband, too.

* 'The Missing' is released on February 27.