The New York Times Magazine November 9, 2003

What the Camera Sees in Her


Assessing Cate Blanchett. By Daphne Merkin

Cate Blanchett is not, at first glance, conventionally beautiful; indeed, her strong face can, from certain angles, seem almost plain. Her cheekbones look less enviably sculptured than they do on-screen, and her gorgeously ripe mouth shows up less than it does when it is slashed with crimson, as it is in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and Charlotte Gray." Her ears (as she points out, lest I fail to notice) are bit, and she wears her hair scraped back in a non-do. She is not, in fact, immediately recognizable until you get up close and see those extraordinary wraparound eyes, long, narrow and searching pale blue. Show-stopping eyes that register emotions with a clarity that conveys some Platonic essence of whatever the emotional in question is. So, I think, this is what it means to be photogenic -- to have the kind of face that veils its magic until it meets up with the camera.

It's a Saturday afternoon in October, and the 34-year-old actress and I have been having lunch at the Four Seasons hotel, smack in the middle of New York's shopping heaven. One of the first things I realize about Blanchett is that she is a very unsuperficial person. She is, in fact, incapable of sounding superficial even about topics like the hazards of fame, but since she moves in a world of mirrored surfaces, she wants to make sure I haven't mistaken her for some tinfoil, penny-ante movie star. "You're not going to talk about clothes are you?" She sounds genuinely panic-stricken, as if I had unearthed an incriminating detail from her deep past that no one has confronted her with until now.

Blanchett speaks in a beguiling tumble of words with an elegant, lightly accented voice that is not quite placeable, and this is the first time in our tw hours of hopscotching conversation that she has sounded anything other than unfazably low-key. Except when she is being wildly enthusiastic (two of her favorite adjectives are "extraordinary" and "fantastic"), she tends to be wryly deflating of herself of other peoples' perceptions of her. "I don't live in the media, " she declares. 'Well, you will one day, won't you?' people always say. As though all actors aspire to do the same thing. " Detouring briefly to the subject of her childhood, she explains that as a middle child, she was left mostly to her own devices. I don't ask whether it was her father's death when she was 10 that triggered her interest in acting, on the assumption that she is tired of having this neat scenario presented to her as a profound insight, but she sees fit to confide that Gregory Peck and Alan Alda stood in as "substitute fathers" when she was growing up. She talks about her growing family; she has been married to the screenwriter Andrew Upton for six years, she is the mother of Dash (short for Dashiell), who will be 2 in December, and is three months pregnant. We discuss her beginnings in theater, where she cause a stir almost from the moment she started performing. Geoffrey Rush, whom Blanchett worked with in David Mamet's "Oleanna" when she was in her early 20's, was a mentor. She recounts that when Rush, whom she had idolized but didn't know, called to say he was looking forward to working with her, she sat in her apartment, perspiring ("I didn't know there were sweat glands in my elbows, but I discovered them"), listening to his "mellifluous voice" on the other end. "I thought: I'm talking to Geoffrey Rush. I'm about to start working with Geoffrey Rush. It can only go downhill from here."

The subject of clothes has come up because Jessica Paster, Blanchett's stylist cum friend (or friend cum stylist, depending on how much credence you give to a friend part) has shown up at the table to take the actress out for some fresh air (which I take to be a euphemism for shopping spree). While Blanchett takes a call from her husband, which has come through on Paster's cellphone, the stylist informs me that she has worked with Penelope Cruz and Uma Thurman, and I inquire into the provenance of the silk kimono like top (Cloe) that Blanchett is wearing over jeans and pointy, kittenish heels. The two of us are discussing the ubiquity of nail salons in L.A. when Paster's client cum friend returns and expresses dismay at the fluffy turn the conversation has taken. She is clearly less at ease chatting about what she calls "the lipstick side of things" than when she is analyzing her subliminal connecting with her characters or when she is explaining, with a lot of animated arm gestures, her favorite moment during her theater period: "What I love," she explains, "is when you're transported into the collective unconscious --that magical place between audience and stage when you both jump up."

Still, her initial response to he mention of clothes strikes me as a bit hyperbolic. Blanchett is, after all, regularly featured on magazine covers as a contemporary style icon and is a muse to cerebrally inclined designers like Karl Langerfeld *who flew her to Paris in order to dress and photograph her as Coco Chanel) and John Glliano (who designed the hummingbird-be-decked frock she wore to the Academy Awards in 1999). Earlier this year, Donna Karan succeeded in wooing Blanchett to represent the latest incarnation of the "real woman" the designer claims to have in mind when she whips up her costly and largely impractical couture collections.

S it seems puzzling at first. Why would a young woman who has succeeded in becoming "one of the most revered young actors of her generation" --as James Lipton solemnly describes her later that evening at an "Inside the Actors Studio" interview --be at such pains to distance herself from the starry aura and frivolous curiosity that attends upon having a certain kind of face and body attached to a certain kind of fame? In the space of less than a decade, Blanchett has become a coveted screen presence who adds instant cachet to any movie she is associated with. She is the soft of Uberactress that moved the director Anthony Minghella to create a part where previously none existed ("The Talented Mr. Ripley"). Sebastian Faulks sent his best-selling novel "Charlotte Gray" to Blanchett in hopes of interesting her in playing the title character in the film version. Brian Grazer, co-producer of "The Missing," a gripping neo-Western about an errant father's attempt t make peace with his daughter, which comes out later this month, tells me that he and the director Ron Howard always had her in mind for the leading role of a resourceful frontierswoman. he explains that he needed an actress who would be "believable and formidable" up against Tommy Lee Jones in a different role set in a barbaric time and place (New Mexico in 1890's). "You've got to feel the dirt in her hands," Grazer says. "At the same time, she has to have enough sex appear to hold the screen."

Blanchett is a closet workaholic, dashing from set to set without scheduling much time to luxuriate or enjoy domestic life, (Although her son and husband have already flown back home to London when we meet, she makes a point of noting that her son is almost always with her. "The longest we've been away from each other is three days.") She has touched down in New York just long enough to tape the "Inside te Actors Studio" segment before she returns to Los Angeles to put in a final on Martin Scorsese's film "the Aviator." (Blanchett plays Katharine Hepburn and Leonardo DiCaprio plays Howard Hughes.) Less than a week later, she will fly off to shoot the spring '04 campaign for Donna Karan and then begins work on a new movie, "the Life Aquatic," directed by Wes Anderson and co-starring Bill Murray. She has also been talking with Liv Ullman, whom she greatly admires as a director (she is a fan of Ullman's "Sophie" and "Faithless"), about playing Nora in a film version of "A Doll's House."

For such a breathlessly busy person, Blanchett is almost devout about living in the moment, which may be the truest legacy of her father's death. "I've always felt the shortness of time," she says. She's also too intelligent to let her ambition show. To listen to her, you would think her meteoric film career is has been more fortuitous than planned. She insists that she would be happing doing something else, that she needs to be convinced that the enterprise in question is worth her effort. "Each time I work," she explains, "I want to be seduced back." She seems adamantly unimpressed to find herself in the business of "Being projected 30 feet high." "film," she declares, "was never a mecca to me." It's hard to believe that she would be so ready to walk away from making movies, but it makes her charmingly insouciant, as if she were discussing amore mundane line of work, like bookkeeping.

She is currently starring in Joel Schumacher's new movie, "Veronica Guerin," about an intrepid Irish journalist who exposed Dublin's largely unreported drug problem and was killed in 1996 at the age of 36. Although Blanchett picks her projects carefully, she is wasted in a movie that would be entirely unmemorable except for her performance. She spends most of the film gamely acting the role of Lois Lane, girl reporter, banging on doors and asking bold questions of criminal types. The actress, who is as Grazer notes, "relentless in her effort to be authentic," talked to many people who knew Guerin and familiarized herself with the dingy Dublin neighborhoods where drugs were sold and used. but her character is essentially written as a stock type, free of introspection and the vicissitudes of a personal life thanks to a forbearing husband who takes care of their son while she is off making a name for herself. I wonder aloud whether the part of Guerin may have been too much a star vehicle, too much of a Julia Roberts kind of role. Blanchett listens and diplomatically responds. "Who knows," she asks, putting her finger on the existential mystery that underlies the construction of any screen persona, "who Julia Roberts really is?"

In the course of plying her craft, Blanchett has frequently been compared with Meryl Streep, whose mantle of thespian prestige she has inherited and with whom she shares a singular ability to impersonate all sorts of accents, from the broadest of Southern inflections to elf-speak. She is invariably described as chameleon like because of her uncanny ability to get under the skins of characters as diverse as a 16th Century queen who renounces her private life to rule her parlous empire ("Elizabeth") to a single mother of three with psychic powers who lives in rural Georgia ("The Gift"). "Maybe by 'chameleon' they mean forgettable," she says. It is an appealingly self-deprecating remark but not entirely off the mark. Blanchett's tendency to sink into the environment of the film and fully inhabit other lives includes within the risk of blurring her own physical presence whom you're watching. (A day or two before I meet her, I admit to a movie-aficionado friend that I can't recall what role she played in "The Talented Mr. Ripley," and he sheepishly concedes that he can't remember, either.) It was said of the great English character actress Peggy Ashcroftt that she didn't have a face, and in the sense of not seeming to be fixed in her own physiognomy, Blanchett doesn't have one, either.

What is less frequently mentioned, though, is the way in which Blanchett has, despite her own residence, subtly mutated over the course of time into a bona fide movie star. She wards Chanel and Prada, doesn't carry her own room key and moves with an entourage of handlers. But unlike some of the talented actresses of her generation, like Nicole Kidman, whose considerable abilities often disappear under the scrutiny of the tabloids, Blanchett has risen to the top of a brutally competitive profession without appearing to have sacrificed her creative aspirations or her grounded, just-folks quality. However she has done it, she has skillfully avoided being pawed by the fawning pop press, with its fickle affections and malicious innuendoes. One way I have of gauging what I take to be the actress's relatively low celebrity quotient (or q factor, as it's called) is the utterly blasé response of my 14-year-old daughter -- who would have been beside herself with excitement at ht thought of meeting Gwyneth Paltrow of Kirsten Dunst -- to the fact of my breaking bread with Blanchett. She didn't even request that I bring back an autograph.

The actress's disarming presentation of herself as a person who has just happened to wander into the limelight and doesn't' find Being Cate Blanchett all that fascinating is either a tribute to her authentic sensibility -- or a brilliantly disingenuous piece of marketing. Perhaps because she is more securely moored than is usually the case with people who look to be applauded for portraying someone other than themselves, Blanchett is able to draw on the same abundant curiosity and receptivity that she uses as an actress to endear herself to the many strangers who claim her time and attention. I've no doubt that all of us go away, thinking, that we alone have been privy to her funny, self-aware ruminations, just as I have no doubt that she offers a more reflective self to me that she does to the hip young journalists form Jane magazine and Black book. But in the end, the only thing that really matters is how incandescently real she comes across on the screen. "She seem just such a normal woman at heart," observes the film critic Richard Schickel, "no matter what emotional issues festoon her roles. She's played queens and she's played ethereal fantasies, but she never goes ditzy in the role. Even when she's trying to build a glass house in the outback, there's something down-to-earth in her manner."

I'm not sure how she has managed to bring off this balancing act -- between the claims that seductions of celebrity as opposed to the considered and serious impulses that have guided her personal and professional choices so far -- and it will be interesting to see if she will continue to do so as the pressure to live up to her Hollywood billing increases, My hunch is that she intends to keep her $10,000 red-carpet ensembles as beside the point as possible..