Telegraph 2002

The Cate Conundrum
Cate Blanchett is not afraid to spurn blockbuster roles yet Hollywood still loves her. David Gritten finds that her ability to transform herself makes her as much an enigma on screen as off, Portrait by Julian Broad

The more time you spend around certain people, the less you feel you have a handle on their personality. The Australian actress Cate Blanchett is unquestionably among them. She is an intriguing case, a walking, talking contradiction; an extremely famous figure, she somehow manages to withhold all but the bare facts of her life from public consumption. Thanks to films such as Elizabeth and The Talented Mr Ripley, she is among the world's most respected actresses, and Blanchett has duly weathered the public's gaze, looking willowy and glamorous at various film festivals and Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe ceremonies. Yet she remains an enigma. In the past two years, I have met her three times and talked twice with her on the telephone. Candidly, I feel I know her about as well as I did when I first clapped eyes on her. Blanchett is almost apologetic about this: 'I'm not a particularly direct person; so to talk directly about my work or my life isn't something I like to do. I guess I retreat from it slightly, so you're not completely yourself.' She gives a Sphinx-Iike smile: 'But when is one completely oneself, anyway?'
You could easily dismiss this as understandable defensiveness in the face of press attention. But work colleagues have been known to say exactly the same about Blanchett. Anthony Minghella, who directed her in The Talented Mr Ripley and co-produced her new film, Heaven, has said, 'The fact is that, although I've worked with her, I barely know her.' The most chummy and clubbable of men, Minghella added that he would be hard pressed to say more than three things about her with absolute confidence.
The intriguing thing about Blanchett is how successfully she transfers this private elusiveness into the public realm. She is chameleon-like: each time we meet, my mental predictions about how she will look (is she tall or medium height? Is her hair reddish or blonde, long or short? Turns out quite incorrect.
It says much for Blanchett's skill at self-concealment in public that many people in Britain assume she must be based in America or her native Australia. In fact, she and her husband, dramatist and screenwriter Andrew Upton, live among us, occupying a spacious three-storey Georgian house in a peaceful, fashionable part of Islington, north London. They stumbled across the neighbourhood when Blanchett was appearing in David Hare's Plenty at the Almeida Theatre nearby, and now they share the house with their seven-month-old son, Dashiell John, and a small white nondescript dog called Egg; 'I love living around here,' Blanchett sighs contentedly. 'There's an awful lot going on -Sydney seems tiny by comparison. But you can still see the sky.'
For the record, her hair (through which she runs her fingers repeatedly as she talks) is blonde today, with a zig-zag parting. Sitting opposite her, I assess what Blanchett, 33, really looks like. She stands 5ft 8in, and is undeniably striking; in any room one's gaze would turn to her pale complexion, her piercing gaze and the imposing architecture of a face highlighted by killer cheekbones. When Blanchett smiles, she screws up her eyes and her large, expressive mouth spreads across the width of her face.
But that's just today. Who knows how she will look the next time she's seen in public? She can look different from film to film, and sometimes within a single film; consider her metamorphosis from headstrong girl to imperious monarch in Elizabeth. This ability to mask herself makes her unlikely celebrity-gossip fodder, to put it mildly. Which is absolutely fine with her.
'Andrew and I aren't seen at as many parties as other people,' she reflects. 'And a lot of my friends who I'm closest to, it's taken a long time to get to know them. You can't get to know someone in an interview. You can pretend, and put on a gregarious face. But I think there are levels of intimacy and I'm not interested in putting on a show, really.'
After her huge international breakthrough in 1998 as Elizabeth (a performance for which she was Oscar-nominated) Blanchett could have sat back and accepted only hugely lucrative lead roles in sure-fire hit movies. Instead she has often opted for smaller parts: as the socialite Meredith Logue in Ripley, as a New Jersey housewife in Pushing Tin, and cameo roles in The Shipping News and Lord of the Rings (as the elf queen Galadriel). Her work is inevitably praised. and even if she makes a mediocre film (Charlotte Gray) or a downright bad one (The Man Who Cried), Blanchett never gets blamed. Revered in the industry as someone who will imbue any film with class, she can pick and choose her roles.
We discuss what motivates her to work. 'Maybe I don't know, and maybe I'm not interested in knowing,' she broods. 'But I certainly didn't get into acting to reach some mythical apex from which I could reign supreme for 18 months, or however long you're allowed to stay up there until you get kicked off by the next one with good breasts. I cannot tell you how little that interests me.'
A lot of actors talk the talk about their indifference to their films' money-making prospects, but Blanchett is genuinely unconcerned. Heaven proves the point. Based on a 60-page draft of a script by Krzysztof Kieslowski, the stern, rigorous Polish art-house director who died in 1996, it is partly in English, partly Italian, and defiantly uncommercial.
Blanchett plays Philippa, an English-born teacher in Turin, whose husband dies from an addiction to heroin. She vows to avenge him by killing his rich drug dealer, planting a bomb in his high-rise office building. But her plans go badly wrong; innocent people, including children, perish while the drug baron escapes. She is detained and grilled by the authorities, among them Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi), a novice Italian police officer several years her junior. He falls desperately in love with her and helps to plot her escape to Tuscany. Their relationship soon becomes extraordinarily intense; they both shave their heads and start dressing alike, in jeans and white T -shirts. The police hunt them down in the countryside, but the film's climax is dreamy, abstract and open to interpretation.
Even leaving aside its underlying themes of redemption and salvation, it's a forbidding film. After all, we're presented with a heroine who commits a terrorist act; the mere notion of a fatal explosion in a high-rise tower summons uncomfortable memories of September II. (It was actually shot in the summer of 2000, well before those real-life atrocities.) But when I comment to Blanchett that Heaven is a hard sell commercially, she bristles visibly.
'Isn't it interesting we're even sitting here having this conversation?' she says acidly, 'It's fascinating we're so concerned about the success of a film being connected to its box office, when we all know it's bound up with distribution. We all know the majority of American audience don't like reading subtitles, we know it's made in two languages and we all know September 11 happened. Of course it's difficult,
'And there's another tough turn for an audience. Even with the devastation Philippa feels, and with her remorse and unfathomable grief after killing four innocent people, she still sets out to kill that man. If she was a good Christian she would see the error of her ways. But what would Blanchett herself say to advance the film's merits? 'Well,' she muses, 'concept of an act of terrorism being explored from a spiritual perspective, with some sense forgiveness of an unforgivable act, is quite an interesting thing to be dropped into the collective unconscious at the moment, I think.'
This hardly sounds the most compelling pitch to a sizeable audience. 'I don't know how they're going to sell it,' she shrugs finally. 'So you're right- who's going to see it?' As she says, she's not one for putting on a show.

Rewind almost two years, to a hot Tuscan afternoon in the ravishing hill village of Montepulciano. A scene in Heaven, where Philippa makes a terrible confession to Filippo, is being shot in the imposing 17th-century cathedral overlooking the main square. I tiptoe inside, where Minghella and co-producer Sydney Pollack look on side-by-side, wordless on cushioned stools.
Near the cathedral's high altar, filming continues even as devout locals arrive to whisper their prayers. But there is no need to call for a respectful hush; the atmosphere on set is already quiet and intense. Blanchett is working at getting this emotional scene just right. Between takes, German director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) summons Blanchett and Ribisi, and the trio huddle, conferring in whispers for several minutes. 'That's the way it's been,' Tykwer confesses later, smiling bashfully. 'The three of us -Cate, Giovanni and me -we're absolutely obsessed. We don't seem to talk about anything but this movie any more -and about what it's about, which seems to be so much.' This intensity, says Blanchett, sometimes spilled over into heated argument: 'Tom and I would verbally wrestle with one another -passionately so, because we both cared deeply about the outcome. I loved debating with Tom. That's what it was. I had the same relationship with [Elizabeth director] Shekhar Kapur. It's a respectful debate, but an uncensored one.' Clearly no one bore any grudges; Tykwer tells me later, 'What Cate is able to achieve on screen is unbelievable.'
And here are the lengths to which she will go to do it: in her trailer, she sought gruesome websites on the internet that show what happens to bodies when they are mutilated by an explosion. 'It was horrible,' she shudders. But was it useful? 'Yes. The level of horror Philippa feels at the misfire of her plan is terrible. "Every time I close my eyes I see them," she says in one line. I didn't know what that was, in my safe, middle-class happy existence. So I took off the protective eyeglasses and saw a little bit of it.'
Outside the cathedral, Minghella is effusive: , After Ripley, I humiliated myself with the amount of praise I wanted to shower on her at every opportunity. Every director I know who has been in her orbit is infatuated with her as an actress.'

Such lavish compliments barely impinge on Blanchett's day-to-day life; when we meet, her main concern is for Dashiell (named after classic crime novelist Dashiell Hammett) and his teething problems. Would she like more children? , Absolutely. I think when you're in a loving relationship -and our son is a remarkable little creature -it's an absolute joy. You speak to lots of people our age about having kids, and there's a fear. Or they'll say, "I'm too selfish." But it's opened up a whole new universe to us. Maybe we were ready for it, but it's so exciting. I'm loving it.'
Blanchett was born and raised in Melbourne, the second of three children. Her father was an American naval officer who met her mother, then a schoolteacher, and settled in Australia, taking a job in advertising. He died of a heart attack when Cate was 10. Cate went to a rigorous private girls' school, then to Melbourne University, where she studied economics and fine art, taking a year out aged 18 to visit Europe and north Africa as a penniless backpacker. On graduating she enrolled at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art. Her third-year portrayal of Electra was reportedly so electrifying that its director, Lindy Davis -who was then living with the actor Geoffrey Rush - came home and sang her praises to him. A few months later Cate was on stage opposite Rush in the title role of David Mamet's play Oleanna. Her career was launched. And her screen test for the film Oscar and Lucinda was so brilliant that director Gillian Armstrong hired her on the spot, and her co-star Ralph Fiennes personally called Fox executives in Hollywood to reassure them that this unknown had what it took.
Motherhood will not stop her career. Since Dashiell's birth in December (she missed the premiere of Lord of the Rings because she was in the labour ward) she has already completed a film in Dublin, playing Irish investigative journalist Veronica Guerin; she took her baby son on set. She hopes to star opposite Brad Pitt in a film to be shot in Australia this autumn, and expects to return to the stage Down Under next year. But her schedule has slowed down since a spell culminating in her pregnancy when she made five films virtually back to back. Andrew Upton, a more low-key character than even his wife, acts as her career sounding board. Together they have a small production company, titled Dirty Films. 'A lot of people !, hang up when they hear that message,' says ;" , Blanchett. The couple have collaborated only once, years ago, on a small short film, 'Bangers' shot over one weekend, that cost A$3,000 (about £1,100). 'We'd like to work together, but he does things independently of me,' she says. 'We're not interested in vanity projects.'
In fact, for someone so committed to acting, she blows hot and cold about it. 'I oscillate a lot,' she admits. 'It depends on the day. I can meet a schoolgirl in the supermarket who's just seen Lord of the Rings, and I think, wow, I've just been part of an epic fable that has introduced this child to Tolkien. How important is that? And how rewarding.' On the other hand, there's media intrusion. 'You have to answer for the fact that you actually caught a bus to go to a meeting. There was some fuss in the media about that -that I caught a bus! And I think, God, my job's silly.'
On balance, though, one suspects she'll tolerate it. There's even evidence to suggest that , since her baby arrived Cate Blanchett has lightened up a little on the work front. 'I don't necessarily think every job I do is going to, re-shape the universe,' she says, her enigmatic smile flashing again. 'I just do what I like to do. And so far, I've been lucky.'
Heaven opens on August 9.