The Golden Age of Cate

Cover story As one of the most versatile actresses of her generation, Cate Blanchett has become a name synonymous with quality.

Cate Blanchett

With a breadth of repertoire that confirms her as one of the most versatile actresses of her generation, Cate Blanchett has become a name synonymous with quality. As her latest film, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, prepares to storm the Oscars, she tells Will Lawrence about her unorthodox route to stardom, and why a sense of fun is vital for success. When asked about her own position as one of her nation's most eminent exports, the Australian actress Nicole Kidman once said, "I'm certainly not the queen of Australia. That is Cate Blanchett. I'm no more than her handmaiden." Kidman, given the response to her most recent movie, Australia, may soon be struggling to maintain even that position, but few would argue with her assertion about Blanchett's regal status. The 39-year-old actress has worn a number of crowns - including both Tudor (as the English queen Elizabeth I) and Elfin (as Galadriel in The Lord Of The Rings) - although she has chosen a rather different path for her latest royal outing. This month, the Crown Princess of Hollywood reunites with her Babel co-star Brad Pitt, Tinseltown's own Prince Charming, in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, an adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's slim 1922 tale, which is coming to the screen courtesy of David Fincher (who directed Pitt in Fight Club).

"It's crazy, isn't it?" beams Blanchett when we meet in the Covent Garden Hotel in London. "It's a David Fincher film that's incredibly romantic. That in itself is intriguing. The story is about a man who ages backwards [Mr Button, played by Brad Pitt]. He's born old and gets younger. He meets my character when she's six, and then there is a point in their lives where everything is supposedly perfect; where they are the same age. Really, it's a story about people missing one another, and how in the end we are really all on our own individual journeys.

"If the timing is right, you can intersect with someone and form a lasting bond, while if the timing isn't right, you can end up feeling quite isolated. The film is really beautiful and quite haunting." As are many of Fincher's films, from Alien 3 through to Zodiac. However, given its release date, enormous budget (rumoured to be around $150 million (Dh768m)) and stellar leads, Benjamin Button surely stands as the director's best shot yet at an Academy Award . The film has earned 13 nominations - including Best Film, Best Actor (Pitt), and Best Director. Blanchett, however, misses out; the film's Best Supporting Actress nomination going to Taraji P Henson, who plays Benjamin Button's surrogate mother.

This is no reflection on Blanchett's performance. The nominees in her category this year, including Penélope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Viola Davis in Doubt, are sensational. The film is a wonderful achievement for Fincher; the master of extreme, inventive thrillers, proves wonderfully adroit at executing the unusual narrative, while the technical achievement is astounding. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is long, offbeat, even demanding at times, but the experience is one-of-a-kind viewing. Blanchett provides a delicate, dreamy foil for Pitt's eponymous hero.

While missing from the nominees list for the first time in three years, Blanchett will no doubt attend the glitzy ceremony next month. Last time, she was tipped for Best Actress, for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and for Best Supporting Actress for her part in the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan picture I'm Not There. In 2007 she received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Notes On A Scandal, while in 2005 she actually walked away with that gong, for her performance as Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. She has become a focus on the red carpet, too, regularly topping the "best-dressed" polls. Last year, when pregnant with her third son, Ignatius, she got the fashionistas cooing over her bump-friendly purple halter-neck gown by Dries Van Noten.

"You don't think about Oscars and things like that when you're making films, so I wouldn't even dare to expect," she says. "You never know whether something will work, whether it's playing Elizabeth or doing the Bob Dylan film, or playing Katharine Hepburn or doing Benjamin Button, where my character goes from six to 86 years old. You think, 'Gosh, how am I going to do that?'" In Blanchett's case, the answer to that question appears to be: with consummate ease. In Benjamin Button, she plays the dancer, Daisy, Button's midlife love.

"There's a real star-crossed lovers aspect to the film," Blanchett says. "And the real challenge for us is to examine in a non-sentimental way what it means to be in love with somebody. Because when one deals with an epic romance like this, sentimentality could be a problem." And has that been the greatest challenge? "Absolutely not," she laughs. "When it comes to telling a dark love story, we've got David Fincher, and he's the world's greatest cynic. By far the biggest challenge for me has been putting up with Brad, and how disgustingly in love with Angelina he still is. I've had it put in my contract that I won't work with him any more."

She is joking, of course, a wry smile spreading across her elfin face. In person, Blanchett is as charming as she is on screen. Her skin is very pale, almost luminous in the harsh hotel light, and she smiles often. If truth be told, she's rather excited. She and her husband, Andrew Upton, now run the Sydney Theatre Company, and on the day we meet her husband's play, Riflemind, opens at London's Trafalgar Studio 1, with the Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman directing.

The play was quite well received, although The Guardian theatre critic, Michael Billington, claimed that it appealed to few beyond the aficionados, while The Telegraph's Charles Spencer thought it "leaden" and "unfunny". But Blanchett, however, remains unperturbed. "I love doing the Sydney Theatre Company with Andrew. A couple of my friends who are married and who are working as either directors or actors look at us as though we are crazy, but at least I see him!"

the couple met in 1996, when Blanchett was appearing in a production of The Seagull. It was not love at first sight -"He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant; it just shows you how wrong you can be, but once he kissed me, that was that." They married in December, 1997, and now have three sons, Dashiell John, seven, Roman Robert, four, and nine-month-old Ignatius Martin.

Her children, Blanchett says, help her focus on her work. "You need to be engaged in the bigger picture, which is not about what's going on the catwalk in Paris or if my bum looks big in this. This is why it's so fantastic to be around children. They are completely uninhibited and they roll from one character to another, from extreme elation to misery. They are so free and in a constant state of play and you need to turn that on as an actor. As you get older, I think it becomes harder and harder. It is a fantastic place to be but I think, 'Surely I must grow up some time'. There's a Peter Pan quality to being an actor. With every job I think, 'Surely this must be it. Surely I am not going to do it all again.'"

In fact, some people were surprised that she became an actor at all; she was, at times, a shy child. She once described herself as "part wallflower, part extrovert". Is that true? "Possibly. People always say to me that they thought I was going to be an actor, but really that was the furthest thing from my mind, because I was too shy. It does take a lot for me to get up in front of people." When she did summon the courage to get up in front of people, Blanchett began her career in the theatre, starring in David Mamet's Oleanna in 1993. Thirteen years later, she directed her first production, returning to David Mamet's work, Reunion - "a beautiful little play" - performed as a double bill with the late Harold Pinter's A Kind Of Alaska.

"To get those two playwrights together was amazing. And we kept the same cast for both performances. I always look at my projects as a whole, not just my part in them, and often the character is the last entry point into the project. I'll think about and wish I had other parts, or I will marvel at a particular scene, which often I'm not even in. So going into stage directing seemed a pretty natural progression, although who knows if I'm any good at it."

Did the critics think that she was any good at it? "Actually, it was really well received; and I think a lot of critics really wanted not to like it. When you get to a certain point in your career and are known for doing one thing, people get their hackles up when you cross some imaginary border. It's often considered some kind of transgression. But I loved rehearsals, and working with actors I knew, and it was interesting to be on a different side of the conversation."

Blanchett's first screen performances came with the 1997 films Paradise Road and Oscar And Lucinda, the trailer for the latter prompting the director Shekhar Kapur to cast her as his Queen in 1998's Elizabeth (she reprised the role in the 2007 sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age). After Elizabeth, for which she received an Academy Award nomination in 1999, she could have gone down the celebrity route. Instead, it seems that her choices were dictated by a desire to avoid stardom. "Once you're perceived as doing something well, then that's what people want you to do. I realised after [Elizabeth], because of the scripts I was being sent, that people wanted me to do the same thing again. And I knew that if I did, I would die of boredom." So she interspersed heavyweight fodder with more commercial roles: An Ideal Husband, a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's sparkling satire, was followed by the odd little film, Pushing Tin, and the more obviously commercial The Talented Mr Ripley; after The Lord Of The Rings trilogy came Charlotte Gray, The Shipping News and Veronica Guerin. "Does anybody who looks for stardom actually achieve it?" she ponders. "There's no formula to achieving it, because you can choose a project that looks incredibly commercial and popular but it may not be the case. It's a lot to do with timing and luck. I've seen some extraordinary films, and have been involved in some that I think are very good, and they just hit the audience at the wrong time. "So you can't plan for success. Each step in and of itself is an experience, and thinking any other way is a pretty hollow way to live your life. I just thought that I'd give it a go. Where your career ends up is down to what you do with the opportunities that are provided. In the end, it's the way you navigate yourself through the media minefield. In the time I've been doing this, interest in cinema and actors has expanded exponentially. "I suppose destiny is something that is meant to happen, while fate is out of your control. Fate tends to have tragic ends, at least in drama. Certain things have happened; but I call it luck. I don't think that my life is so important that there's some higher power guiding it. I don't have a sense of a higher being. I think that I've been very lucky, and I don't know if I was destined to do this." Whatever destiny and fate's hand in Blanchett's progress, it was only once she was firmly established that she lent her talents to a string of big-screen blockbusters, most notably The Lord Of The Rings (2001-03) and Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008). "With The Lord Of The Rings, I just wanted to work with [the director] Peter Jackson. The role was oddly secondary and the consequences of playing it - the fame and the fans - were beside the point. The trilogy is, even a few years on, a remarkable achievement. And with the last Indiana Jones film, I agreed to do that because I've never done anything like it, and that seemed a good reason to do it. "I had always wanted to do something with lots of action in, and when Steven Spielberg says, 'Be a part of this,' I couldn't say no. I grew up with the Indy films, which made it seem a little odd on the first day of filming, knowing the iconography of the frame and then actually stepping into it. I've always been intrigued by how that particular genre works. And of course it was Steven. He's an absolute master and both he and Harrison Ford know it like the back of their hands. For me, it felt like going rally driving with people who know each and every turn." With Benjamin Button opening here in mid-February, Blanchett will then lend her voice to The Fantastic Mr Fox, an animated adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's classic. "That should be fun," she smiles. "I have read a lot of Roald Dahl to the kids." Do they like him? "Oh yeah, and we are really into a book called My Dad by Anthony Browne. It's all about a little boy and how great his dad is. He can eat like a horse and swim like a fish and he's wearing the same dressing gown dressed as a fish and as a horse. Also, the Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson. I grew up with them. The kids don't quite get it yet. It's a bit psychedelic for them but it's still fantastic." As for her other projects, she's lined up to star in at least three more films, including the western North Of Cheyenne; As Bees In Honey Drown, and The Dangerous Husband, a screenplay by Shawn Slovo, who adapted Captain Corelli's Mandolin As to which projects will come off, it remains to be seen, but we can be fairly certain that whatever film she chooses next, she'll conjure another stunning performance. Indeed, when she broke through in the late 1990s, her director on The Talented Mr Ripley, the late Anthony Minghella, said that she "could go on to achieve anything". Less than a decade later, it seems he has been proved correct. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button opens on Feb 19.