And beneath it all lies a G-string

Sure, Cate Blanchett has Oscar-caliber talent and posh modeling gigs. But Katy McColl discovers a few resume-worthy quirks as well.

From: Jane, 2003-11-01
Date added: 2003-11-15

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Cate Blanchett has just called my London hotel room, introduced herself in the crisp way of someone who has taken elocution lessons and given me what seem like profoundly weird, profoundly English directions to a cheese shop by “a gap in the road.” “What if I get lost?” I ask her. “I’ll bring my husband’s cell phone,” she says, and gives me the number. To be clear, I do not for a moment believe that Cate, international movie star, mistress of a $3.7 million home and mother of a 2-year-old child, does not have a mobile. She just doesn’t want me to think I have her number, so to speak. La Fromagerie is an un-air-conditioned nook with a rustic communal table in the back. And it is so freakily quiet, despite the whirr of a stationary fan, that there’s no way I’m doing an interview here. Then Cate shows up. She’s wearing metal-framed sunglasses and carrying the same black-chain-strapped Chanel bag I saw on the arm of a burqa-clad woman outside of Harvey Nichols. The first thing I say is, “Can we leave? I feel a bit self-conscious here,” and she looks relieved. I think it’s because (a) this request makes me seem like an amateur and (b) I’m wearing braids. She smiles and leads me around the corner to a restaurant where she asks—one part polite movie star, one part regular—if we can use the upstairs dining room for an interview.

She’ll flash her wares to strangers

Looking down, I realize that Cate’s gauzy, bias-cut black dress, which is fastened with a ladylike rhinestone brooch, is not the kind of thing you’d wear to a Presbyterian ice cream social. It’s so sheer that I can see almost every inch of her black G-string. Naturally, I follow her up the stairs. Cate’s been described as answering questions “acidly,” to the point where one journalist wrote that after a handful of meetings, he still had no idea who she was. But within the first seven minutes, we order coffees (“I don’t think it’s sexy to give up anything,” she says about caffeine), she’s telling me she lied about her age in high school in Australia so she could get a job at an old folks’ home, and she slyly goes on to explain that she and her husband, Andrew, ended up in London almost by a fluke. “We thought we’d just rent a place for a year…and then the baby was born.” And with a rip of the Velcro of her day planner, she is showing me a picture of her son, Dash. She seems to have tucked the snapshot into her book for my benefit. Which is endearing in the way that it’s proud, dorky and eager to please. And I’m not just saying that to be nice. She has already told me that she never reads the stories that result from her interviews, because it should be a “conversation.” Allow me to translate that for you: Journalists can be cranks.

She likes to turn the tables on you

Now that we have a green light to play fast and loose with the facts because Cate will never be the wiser, let’s get into some of my “theories.” Thirty-four-year-old Cate is a smart bird who likes to play dress-up and is, in fact, playing a version of herself when we meet. She is also contrary, which means that the less I ask for, the more she gives me. It also explains why, given that everyone always told her when she was growing up that she should become an actor, Cate insisted on studying economics and art history before applying to the National Institute of Dramatic Arts. And she turns down movie roles if they’re similar to ones she’s done before—she’s portrayed everyone from the Virgin Queen in Elizabeth to a Lord of the Rings elf to a sexalot in The Shipping News. Her latest is the title role in Veronica Guerin, a true story about an Irish journalist who was murdered by drug king-pins who got kids hooked on heroin while they were building equestrian centers and wearing hats to la-di-da parties. Aside from the fact that her portrayal is super-moving, I respect her for interviewing people who knew Veronica and for not just choosing roles that make her look good. “Are you in a re-lay-zhon-sheep?” she asks me playfully in a Pepe Le Pew accent, while stirring milk into her espresso. This must be what she means by a conversation, because she ends up asking me a lot of questions, like, “Do you envision your own funeral?” (she thought about hers all the time until she turned 17) and “Do you know why a lot of colonic therapists go to Santa Fe?” (she breezed past this one before I could dig for more details). When I tell her that I met my boyfriend on a blind date, she says, “I love that old-fashioned thing. It’s always nice to have a recommendation. However, I know someone, my friend’s sister, who got happily married by placing an ad in the paper.” Proving herself a contrarian once again.

She made dirty films with her hubby

Cate’s clearly gaga over her husband of six years, an Australian playwright named Andrew Upton. He adapted Foucault’s Pendulum, and, in fact, kind of looks like a professor. Hot damn. Cate and Andrew co-own a production company called Dirty Films, a name they came up with “one drunken night.” So far, they’ve made only one nine-minute film, called Bangers, which is Brit for sausages. The Internet Movie Database describes it this way: “Julie Anne cooks dinner for her mom in a most interesting manner while having an enlightened conversation with Mr. Funny Bones.” Cate gesticulates a lot. When I ask about her perfume, she comically sniffs different parts of her dress before declaring, “Clinique Aromatics Elixir.” And when she talks about Andrew, she lifts her arms in the air and shakes them like someone whose science project is due in the morning and is trying to get the attention of the clerk whose just closed up the only store in town that sells poster board. “He’s a really energetic man, my husband,” she explains. But they didn’t exactly hit it off when they met. “He was going out with someone who I really liked, and I was going out with someone who was a friend of his,” she says. “And then both those relationships dissolved. He thought I was aloof, and I thought he was really arrogant. It’s very Darcy and Elizabeth. That’s very cliché, but it was. And then we were at a dinner party one night, and we just started talking about Turgenev and A Month in the Country and I don’t know…then very, very, very quickly we were getting married.” At this point, Cate is sitting sideways with her feet up on the seat of the chair next to her. She’s folded over, stroking her legs and looking up shyly. There’s a big bruise on her knee. The whole thing’s very sensuous. Then she straightens up and says strongly, “When you know, you know.”

She lies

Cate’s always threatening to quit acting, so I ask if her fantasy is to open a shop or something. She answers that she’d rather work “with the environment.” Then she tells me about her summer vacation, which was supposed to be one of those two-week beach trips but was downgraded because of scheduling conflicts to one night in a London hotel. “We don’t have a television at home, so I thought, ‘Let’s actually watch the news.’ And there was this report on mini-nukes that the American government wants to develop—which means they already have developed—in the war against terror. This is a government that’s so concerned with chemical weapons, yet they want to develop nuclear weapons that are five megatons. I thought, ‘It’s all over.’” I start to tell Cate that the news in the U.S. means taped footage of the staged rescue of Private Jessica Lynch and exclusive interviews with disgruntled reality-TV stars. But she breaks in, apparently guilt-ridden. “I lied,” she says, then confesses, “We do have a television. But the tube is kind of broken, so we were watching some film the other day but we’re only getting half the subtitles. I’m going to have to get fluent in Swedish or get a flat-screen.” Still, her is such a little lie—especially compared to all the government duping—that she should be pardoned, I think.

She's a wee bit paranoid

Cate says she’s obsessed with texture right now—they have 14 people coming for Christmas this year, and she wants to finish redoing their kitchen and a bathroom by then. “Andrew’s circle of intimacy is like this,” she says, tracing the size of a Frisbee on the table, “while mine is more like this.” Think gingersnap. Which helps explain why she listens really intently, but avoids making eye contact when talking about herself. “I kept a diary as a 12-year-old and then my brother read it, and I said, ‘I’m never, ever doing this again.’ And I got one of those electronic organizers because I was worried that if someone found my address book, they would see someone’s name they recognized. So every day there would be a different code and there was no system because most people’s aliases always change anyway, but I couldn’t ever decode it so I’m back to my Filofax…in order to decode all of my little language, I had to be like Nancy Drew.”

She says “fuck”

She invites me to come with her to the playground to pick up Dash and tells me on the way about being on location in the desert years ago and how “fucking hot” it’s been in London. I’m so excited that she swore, I write it down in my notebook straightaway. When we get to the playground, the soft, tawny-skinned Dash spots Cate and grins like an otter taking a bath. I think about how she told me that she was recently doing a photo shoot with Karl Lagerfeld, and Dash told a woman who was fretting over her hair that it looked, “gorgeous, fabulous, dahling.” Cate had laughed and said, “If this is the way my child talks, what does that say about me?” I’ll tell you what it says. She’s not all prim Pimms and cool elegance. She may be a lady who says that when she’s filming a movie, even on her days off, she’s “got one foot in the invented world we’re working on.” But the character she’s playing when she’s playing herself is secretly flamboyant—like a pink mink lining in a khaki raincoat. Cate picks up a community newspaper and brings it over to show me a photo of the ocean. I’m expecting her to stay something about her outrage over sewage washing ashore, but she just smiles and says, “Wouldn’t this make a great poured-rubber floor?”

Typed up for cateblanchett.net by Bethany! Thanks!

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