Hello magazine profile:
Since scoring an Oscar nod for her portrayal of the virgin queen in 1998's
Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett has been at the top of every casting director's wish list. It came as no surprise, therefore, when her portrayal of Katherine Hepburn in
The Aviator landed her one of coveted gongs.
Cate was born on May 14, 1969, in Melbourne, Australia, to schoolteacher June, and Bob Blanchett, a Texan naval officer who came ashore in Melbourne and never left. Sadly, her father died when Cate was just ten years old, a tragedy which resulted in his daughter growing up to be fiercely independent.
After spending time travelling, Cate enrolled at Australia's National Institute Of Dramatic Arts, and within a year had appeared in Timothy Daly's
Kafka Dances and a production of
Oleanna by David Mamet. She went on to become the first actor to win Sydney's Theatre Critics Circle's Best Newcomer of the Year and Best Actress of the Year awards concurrently.
Resisting studio pressure to go with a "name" actress, director Gillian Armstrong cast Cate opposite Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes in the well-received
Oscar And Lucinda. And when
Elizabeth director Shekhar Kapur saw the result, he knew he'd found his queen.
Wary of being typecast and reluctant to take the traditional Hollywood path marked out for ingenues, Cate opted instead for supporting roles in
Pushing Tin and
The Talented Mr Ripley."I'm in revolt against the expected or the obvious," she says. And despite her relatively minor role in
Ripley, many believe she provided the emotional centre of the film. Since then she's been hard at work, shooting five films back-to-back, including
Bandits, Charlotte Gray and
The Shipping News, alongside
Kevin Spacey.
Somewhere along the way she found time for husband screenwriter Andrew Upton, who she met back in 1996 while she was performing in a production of
The Seagull. It was hardly love at first sight, however. "He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant," said Cate later. "It just shows you how wrong you can be. But once he kissed me that was that." The two were married in 1997 and welcomed their first child, Dashiell John, in December 2001.
Despite her now internationally high profile, Cate has kept her feet firmly on the ground, as one incident in an LA eatery underlined. When approached by a waitress who said: "You look so familiar. Do I know you?", Cate replied, "I just have one of those faces..."