In Style August 1999

Fantastic Voyager: As her film career soars, so do her frequent-flier miles. The talented Cate Blanchett reveals her secrets for taking off in style.

Marshall, Leslie

In just a few hours, actress Cate Blanchett will be onstage at London's Albery Theater, holding forth with considerable dramatic intensity to a capacity crowd in David Hare's play Plenty. But for the moment she is relaxing and laughing, remembering a scene that occurred just yesterday. "Andrew and I were walking on the heath, and there was a father and son chasing after this beautiful Lassie dog that had a stolen sandwich in his mouth," she says, recounting an outing that she and her husband, screenwriter and film editor Andrew Upton, took to the countryside on her one day off. "I thought, I would love to be part of that image, chasing that dog. I said to Andrew, 'We can't get a dog, because we're running around too much, but can we get a hamster?' He said, 'Nooo, we can't get a hamster.' Then I actually found myself saying, 'Could we get a mouse? What about a mouse?'"

Such are the sacrifices that come with international success as an actress: constant travel, no real home, no pets--not even a mouse. "I sort of feel like I've been traveling since I was 17," says the 30-year-old Australian, who in fact has journeyed all over the globe for much of the last decade playing plum theater and film roles. But it was her performance last year as England's Virgin Queen in Elizabeth--a role that won her a Golden Globe, an Oscar nomination and often breathless critical praise--that catapulted Blanchett to a new level of fame. She is now officially a star--though the self-effacing and thoughtful Blanchett dismisses the notion with a slight shrug. "I know how privileged I am to be in a position I never expected to be in. I'm so lucky to be doing what it is that I love," she says quietly as she sips a double espresso at London's Covent Garden Hotel, which was her temporary home during the months spent filming Elizabeth. "I don't have a sense that it's going to last forever. There is a sort of obsession with newness and freshness."

The world's fascination with Blanchett may not last forever, but given her starring roles in Plenty and in three new movies since Elizabeth--Pushing Tin (a comedy about air-traffic controllers), An Ideal Husband (an Oscar Wilde adaptation that opened in June) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (director Anthony Minghella's follow-up to The English Patient)--it is sure to last for a good long while.

And she carries her new public role well. At first glance, Blanchett seems like any stylish young woman: She's wearing Earl jeans, black Gucci boots ("I have to take them off in airports--the steel toes set off alarms") and a short, grayish-blue Burberry leather jacket that ignites her similarly colored eyes. But after a few moments talking with Blanchett as she dips and swoops from one topic to another, it's clear she's an unusually composed and analytical person. Actors in rehearsal, she says, addressing themes about her craft, sometimes "move to clarity far too quickly, so once they get to performance, they are only trying to clarify the clarity" and they end up "only playing one strand. Whereas if you allow yourself to enjoy the confusion, you actually have far more logs to keep your fire burning." She pauses, gently furrowing her handsome brow, and adds, "I don't think that Western culture has a particularly high tolerance for confusion. We need to set things in stone. We're very impatient."

Just what accounts for this young woman's impressiveness? What was she fed for breakfast in Australia? Nothing unusual, it turns out. In fact, Blanchett, who grew up in Melbourne, the middle of three children born to an Australian mother and a Texan father, seems to have had the classic normal childhood. She took ballet classes, read Nancy Drew books, bombed around the neighborhood on her bicycle, and watched The Brady Bunch and MASH. What did not make for a typical childhood was her father's death when she was 10, a loss that affected her deeply. "When you see the authority figure in your life and the person who is responsible for your security and who you love more than anyone else in the world--your mother--weeping uncontrollably, it teaches you something you never forget," she says. "As much as life is about the search for happiness and elation, you do accumulate a lot of loss and a lot of pain."

When conversation touches on her personal life, Blanchett's comments are carefully considered but contain a note of tenderness. "I'm wearing my wedding rings," she says, glancing down at her hands. "That shows I've had a day off [from Plenty], because I normally don't wear them during the week. I don't wear them in the show and I'm terrified of losing them. I tend to put them on every night. I don't like sleeping without them."

It was two years ago, one week before she was due on the set of Elizabeth, that Blanchett and Upton married in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. "We met through friends and didn't really get on at first," she recalls. "We did a film together, and then we worked on Thank God He Met Lizzie and became friends. Then he kissed me and that was it. It was just very easy. The choice made us, we didn't make it."

Although they eventually plan to establish a home in Sydney, Upton joined Blanchett in London for the duration of her Plenty run and, for the first time since their marriage, they have settled into an apartment. "I go into homeware shops and fantasize about what it would be like to have a real home," says Blanchett. "But I think those things happen at their own pace in their own time. I do hope to have children, however. Sooner rather than later, I think."

One of Blanchett and Upton's strategies to survive their demanding schedules is to travel together as much as possible and to visit each other often when other commitments necessitate separation. "People get put off by the flight to Australia, but I actually love it," says Blanchett, who once made the 24-hour trip from England to Sydney, and back again, for the pleasure of spending 27 hours with Andrew on the film set where he was working. ("Absolutely worth it," she insists.) "I find it difficult to read on sets, but I like flights because you can catch up on films you haven't seen and read in an uninterrupted way."

Still, travel can be a strain, and over the years, she has acquired certain accessories and strategies to minimize it. To combat homesickness, she carries a fleet of photos, plus a soapstone statue of a reclining woman that was her mother's. An aromatic travel kit helps ward off motion sickness and travel fatigue, and a favorite Nicole Farhi shearling coat is turned inside out to serve as a blanket on planes.

Upon arriving anyplace, Blanchett always looks for the best local sources for espresso and sushi. Her love of sushi is actually one of her acting strategies. "I find it's the only thing I can really eat before a show--it doesn't repeat on you. I don't like things that repeat because to taste the food takes me back to where I was hours ago--takes me out of what I'm doing onstage."

Portable dictionaries are another travel accessory. "When I'm reading a play, I've got to know what it is that I'm saying. If you say 'I hate you,' the word 'hate' can have so many shades of meaning. If you're stuck, you can look the word up. Oh, but please--I don't sit there and read the dictionary!" she adds with a laugh. "I forget things as soon as I look them up."

Could "centeredness" and "success" be two words Blanchett has looked up recently? She certainly seems to be expertly playing both of them--in her private and her professional lives. Strolling down St. Martin's Lane, on her way to the Albery Theatre, she pauses at a flower stand. "Oooh!" she exclaims as she leans over to admire a bouquet of unusual-looking flowers--Ixia--resting in a bucket of water. "They're so lovely, aren't they?" Blanchett says, as a few passersby, struck by her own long-stemmed loveliness, nod their agreement. A few moments later, she pauses again, this time to consider where she might be in 10 years. "I don't know, but I hope it will be with children," she says. And then, lightly touching the side of that famous brow, she smiles broadly and adds, "And I hope I've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of laugh lines."

-QUOT-

"I'd love to go back to India and China and to the west of Australia. I'd go back to Italy in the blink of an eye. I love traveling," says Blanchett.

"I can't remember the last time I went to the gym. When you are moving around so much, you simply fall out of the habit."




COPYRIGHT 1999 Time, Inc.