Low Profile

She an A-list actress who defies catagorisation. And off-screen she likes to remain elusive. Here, Cate Blanchett takes a rare step into the spotlight to talk to Stuart Husband about work, motherhood - and taking risks.

From: You, 2003-07-01
Date added: 2003-09-02

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There's a mobile phone ringing somewhere in the background. "Is that mine?" asks Cate Blanchett distractedly. "It's my first one. I've only just got it." What? A genuine A-list Hollywood actress and Oscar nominee (for Elisabeth), with the world's hottest stars and directors constantly clamouring to work with her, and she's been mobile-less all this time? "Yup," she say delightedly. "My agent insisted that I get one. But I never answer it. I suppose I should keep it switched off, but it has such a pretty ring."
No wonder people describe Cate Blanchett as elusive. But it's not simply her Nokia-free state that they're referring to. Since her big break in Oscar and Lucinda in 1998, her skill as an actress, allied to her singular looks - the razor-sharp cheekbones, wide, sensual mouth and stunning slanted blue eyes - has garnered attention, acclaim and a slew of roles as diverse as the slatternly wife in The Shipping News and the ethereal Lady Galadriel in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. But the 'real' Cate Blanchett is still somewhat opaque. Anothony Minghella, who directed her in The Talented Mr Ripley. cheerfully confessed that he'd worked with her for weeks and adored her, but felt like he didn't know her at all.
So what do we know about her? She was born in Melbourne 34 years ago, and shares a hard Aussie and a spirit of earthy irreverence with her compatriots Nicole Kidman and Rachel Griffiths. She married Australian writer and director Andrew Upton six years ago, and they have an 18-month old son named Dashiell, or 'Dash' (After Dashiell Hammett, her husband's favourite author). Cate has been based in London for the past few years, without any of the hoo-ha attendant on more notorious expat residents, such as Madonna (though if you frequent organic pubs or classier homeware stores in the Islington area, there's a good chance you might run into her). And she seems genuinely indifferent to the showbiz trappings that others in her position rush to embrace. "She's great," says a friend when I mention that I'm talking to Cate, "but she's on a different level. With someone like, say, Demi Moore, you want to know who she's dating or how buffed her body is or whether she's bonkers. Cate Blanchett seems, well, above all that."
"That's a great reaction," laughs Cate when I put it to her. "I'll accept that! Look," she continues, "we all know how it works. Some people are really great at pushing themselves forward, and they'll use whatever it takes to stay in the spotlight. It's all about keeping the gossip mills churning. And more power to them, because there are certainly enough people out there who want to read about that stuff. But I'm the opposite. I like to keep my head down, do my job, and try to keep to hoopla to a minimum. It's the work that's important to me."
Ah yes, the work. Cate's latest film, Veronica Guerin, is a biopic of the journalist for the Irish Independant whose crusading reports on the Dublin drug trae in the mid-1990s led to her being threatened, beaten, shot and finally murdered by the city's crime barons; a death that galvanised the anti-drug movement and led to mass arrests and changes in the country's drug laws. The film is directed by Joel Schumacher and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who are better known for wham-bam extravaganzas like Batman and Robin and Armaggeddon, respectively, than more sensitive material. "That didn't give me pause for thought," says Cate. "I didn't want to be leaping out of helicopters firing Uzis. But it was part of the attraction of the film for me - that they wanted to do something completely different."
Another part of the attraction was reincarnating a woman Cate describes as "an extraordinary life force". Normally, she confesses, she's allergic to biopics, "particularly those with a woman at the centre; you think it'll be some worthy, noble "woman's film". Veronica would have abhorred being portrayed as some kind of saint. Sure, we've had to smooth out some of the edges, but I still think you get the sense of this flawed, contradictory woman who loved football and her husband and son just as much as her journalism."
Cate spent a month in Dublin, talking to Guerin's family, friends and colleagues, and studying videos of her. "It's hard to play a real person who people have such strong memories of," she confesses. "You can co-opt certain mannerisms, but, at the end of the day, I'm not there to be a mimic; I mean, I look nothing like Veronica for a start. People would tell me these incredibly contradictory things about her, which was great, because somewhere in there lay the person I was going to play. The fact that some people are hated as well as loved, prevents you from portraying them as Joan of Arc."
The Irish papers have taken issue with the film's verisimilitude. "We sort fact from fiction!" trumpeted one, before going into forensic detail about Guerin's precise relationship to the various gang members. Cate's main concern, though, has been to gratify Guerin's family. "I was most nervous about them seeing it," she says. "I felt this responsibility to them, because of course they are still grieving over the loss of this incredible member of their family. They told me I'd captured her essence, which is the best you can hope for. I think her motivations, the reasons she kept putting herself in danger, were pretty obscure, even to herself." she shrugs. "There's a certain level on which everyone's unknowable."
Cate could be describing herself; her enigmatic air could simply be down to the fact that she's never seemed to analyze or question her own motivations, preferring to trust her instincts. As a child, she thought she would become a visual artist rather than an actress, though neither of her parents was artistic. Her father Bob, a Texan advertising executive who decamped to Melbourne, died of a heart attack when she was ten (she has a younger sister who is a theatrical designer, her brother is a computer programmer). One day, he was just gone," she says. "Children adjust very quickly to such circumstances, but I'm sure I'm still working out his absence in my head." She wrapped her economics course at the University of Melbourne for the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney "on a whim". But she was always a "dreamy type", and loved the emotional challenge and make-believe of acting. She was a complete unknown when director Gillian Armstrong insisted on casting her in Oscar and Lucinda, beginning the fantastic word of mouth that quickly catapulted her on to the A-list. But she had already left Australia to go travelling with Upton, whom she married within five weeks of meeting. "One day we were talking, then we were kissing, and then we were on the road," she says. "We didn't like eachother at first, then we did, and we've been brilliant ever since."
They got as far as London, where they simply stopped, because "it felt right". Similarly, Dash' arrival last year "just seemed like the right time. Andrew and I are incredibly laid-back about these things," she laughs. "We don't obsess. We just do what feels right for us." She takes a similar approach to her roles, opting for smaller parts in the likes of The Shipping News, as well as the leads such as Charlotte Gray (it's a measure of the esteem in which she's held that even when the films are duffers, as in the latter case, she seems immune to the fallout). Some see this as wilfully perverse. "Do they?" she asks, genuinely bewildered. "Well," I say, "With someone being in your position, it's assumed that the 'character' parts are a bit of a come-down."
"Oh well," she says dismissively. "Those people can go off and worry about something else. I just do what interests me. Maybe if I had a huge mortgage and seven children my choices would be informed in a different way, but I'm fortunate in that I can try things out, take a leap in the dark. It's terrifying, but great. It should be a risky job, but it can become a little safe at times," she concludes. "People might actually hate what you're doing, but at least your reasons for doing it are valid."
At one point, Cate did six films back-to-back; Veronica Guerin is her first film since Dash's birth. "I though long and hard about going back to work," she says. "Being a new parent is pretty intense; the outside world becomes this distant, surreal place, and your friends run away because they can't really handle it. But in the end, I took him on the set with me. He was three months at the time, and they're in such a cocoon at that age; as long as they're fed and have their routine, they're pretty content. He's completely engrossing; he's just taking his first steps. It's brilliant when things are happening for the first time; you want to be there to see that and document it." At the moment, Dash is getting over his first bout of jet lag. Cate's just back in London from four months of filming 'The Missing', a western co-starring Tommy Lee Jones, in Santa Fé. She's also in the process of moving house. "We're staying in London, though I really fancy Brighton; it's so elemental down there, and they have that stone beach, which is so exotic for me; I'm used to miles of golden sand." Does she miss Australia? "I do," she says, "though my husband has a play on in Sydney last year and we went back for four months. Dash got to see his gran and aunt and uncle. I love the fact that it's so far away,and the lifestyle's so different." there's a wistful pause. "But having said that," she continues, "I love England on a summer's day. It's glorious, the light's so soft and mellow." So this is home now? "Sure," she says, "as much as anywhere is."
Cate's time for arranging cutlery drawers ad re-painting skirting boards will be severely curtailed by her reanimated workload; she's playing Katherine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator(research: "watching loads of great old films"), then starting on the film version of Patrick Marber's hit play Closer. In fact, she's keen to get off now. "I haven't seen my husband all day," she laments. "And," she adds archly, as the phone starts ringing forlornly once more in the background, "no offence, but I want to get back to living my small, quiet, elusive life."

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