Cate Modern

From: Vogue, 2001-07-01
Date added: 2003-10-02

Cate blanchett is a changeling, a chameleon, a shape-shifter. Onstage and on-screen, she's unrecognizable and she morphs from role to role, shedding a skin and growing another one. It's a dazzling talent. It makes her one of the most compelling actresses of her generation, and it's this that makes the directors fall over themselves to work with her - amending scripts, budgets, and shooting schedules to fit her in.
Interviewing chameleons can be tricky. The flesh-and-blood Cate Blanchett is elusive. Her light Australian voice is halting, and she doesn't finish sentences. She seems to slide in and out of focus. Writers barely ever concur on her eye color: "turquoise balls," one observed; "Palest blue, like shards of winter sky," wrot another; "deep slate," from a third. One journalist met her four times only to write a 3,000-word profile predicated entirely on her physical size, which eluded him throughout. Is she a tiny little thing? he fretted helplessly. Or a big, strapping girl? She wants to meet me first in a north London "organic pub," whatever that is. It's her neighbourhood, if such a ceaseless globetrotter can have a neighbourhood outside of a suitcase. I pick a seat with a clear view of the entrance because I want to watch her walk in. (Somebody has to check out this physicality.) So I look away for one millisecond, and she's suddenly materialised out of the air, already seated, looking both friendly and slightly hunted. Damn.
Oh, I see what the eye problem is straight away. her eyes change color. Pale, watery blue today, because she's wearing a cream jacket (Paul Smith, raw silk). When she stands up to take it off, they go green, reflecting the moss green of her cardigan. These cat's eyes, and her perfectly oval, high-cheekboned face, give her a very grown-up sexiness, a little like Romy Schneider's. Her nails are cut, not filed; her hair is twisted up anyhow; she's wearing not one scrap of makeup on her silvery-pale skin, no mascara, no lip gloss, nothing. She's tired. She hasn't been sleeping well, she says. She asks for water and sits fiddling with her wedding bands until they drop off and clatter onto the table, making her jump. She fiddles all the time. It's mesmerizing. She fiddles inside her clothes, yanking at bra straps. She fiddles around inside her bag, trufling out a dog-eared copy of American Pastoral, a corner turned down on page 55. "Extraordinary, extraordinary book," she says. "Have you read it?" (No. She gives it to me, ignoring protests. Next time we meet she is clutching aother copy, turned down at a later page.) She doesn't like hype. She like the small excitements of word-of-mouth recommendation, the more eclectic the better. A butoh dance group, performing something called Eggs Standing on the Edge of Curiosity: ("An incredible, incredible form. Have you seen much butoh?" No.) Ian Holm, the English actor. ("He was wonderful in The Sweet Hereafter. Have you seen his Lear?" No.) Sculpture at Tate Modern, the city's new showpiece gallery. ("Have you seen the Louise Bourgouis?" No.)
Tate Modern wasn't even open yet, but she was dying to go. So I rang up and asked if I could take her for a preview tour. ("Cate Blanchett? Oh, of course, of course! What day is she free?") She was there 20 minutes early. When I arrived, she was flapping her hands and blushing - she'd no idea it wasn't open yet; she'd no idea it was a special deal. She's genuinely unstarry (came by cab, left by tube). Art installers stopped hanging pictures to stand around beaming at her. We clambered over Bubble Pak and discarded planking, peeking behind a Rothko turned face to the wall. (I said, Mind your Armani. She said; "Gucci, darling!") One vast Louise Bourgeouis sculpture (a 30-foot steel tower) still lay in pieces on the gallery floor, while guys in hard hats looked up from their clipboards to the pieces and back to their clipboards, practically muttering, "Where's that, uh, bit that goes with this bit?" like your boyfriend with a self-assembly bookshelf. Blanchett was vibrating with pleasure, running her fingers over everything (no security guards in place yet) and almost swooning when she walked into a full room of Giacomettis. She likes tiny, delicate sculptures (and she wears tiny, delicate jewellery).
Who made that lovely sweater? I ask: It had a very curious techno-type finish on it. "This? Oh my God, it's completely been destroyed," she says, looking hunted, tugging at it. "I don't know. It's so old. I think it's completely lost it's elastic: "I'm not very good at looking after things." I thought it was meant to look like crumpled paper. "No - it's meant to look flat, but now it looks like crumpled paper." Oh, I see. "It's very hard to look well-groomed," she says plaintively. Well, it's very hard to sit next to a woman who looks drop-dead divine in a wrinkled sweater that's lost its elastic. Blanchett does have that most irritating habit - you read about it, but hardly see it - of tossing any old thing on and looking knockout. To me, she pretends to have a complete carelessness about fashion and style. Sge says she dislikes the conflation of film and fashion. Women with beautiful faces abd clever heads often says things like this. We don't neccessarily have to believe them. She tells me that she likes Nicole Farhi because "she's so sexy, isn't she?" and admires Galliano for his wit ("Wouldn't he do the most astonishing Magic Flute?"), and McQueen for the way "he channels everything through his drawings."

But when she meets Vogue's editors, she gives free rein to her fashion-y eye rather than her high-brow intellect, and they rave about her modern take on fashion: She has great, eclectic elegance and style; she's smart and focused; she can work a dress if it needs work, like a good model. ("Most actresses have a hard time acting for photographs," says a stylist who has worked with her. "Blanchett gets it, like a model. And you do not have to take care of the personality; she's completely unassuming. She takes direction.")
You can tell she loves fashion anyway: I have never seen a party picture of her looking less than enviable, either with or without benefit of crack Hollywood style platoons to help her. She never gets one thing wrong. The current chic is hard to judge, with its 'off' colors and tricky mix of modern and vintage, but she's instinctive. She knows about clothes. "I mean, it doesn't rule my universe," she says, as I nag at her about shopping an Oscar frocks, "but I've always loved fabric. My mother is a fantastic cutter." She made your clothes? "Yeah. She's fantastic. She doesn't do it so much now; but she's great. And my sister does wonderful costume designs."
Then she tells me about an "outrageous" purchase. "A few years ago, I bought some...you know that shop Lily er Cie? It's in Beverly Hills near the Four Seasons. Secondhand. Fantastic. I couldn't believe what I was spending on a jacket; I agonized. But I bought this beautiful...snake, snakeskin, might be python...vintage Gucci jacket." She fretted momentarily, as movie stars will, about environmental issues and saving the planet's pythons, but not for long. "I figured that it has already been made."

Anthony Minghella, who directed Blanchett in The Talented Mr Ripley, wrote a lyrical profile on her in the London Observer in which he praised her "remarkable transformation" and "the shedding of skin" that happens when the camera rolls. (When he left the editing room to meet with her, he writes, he barely recognized her offscreen.) This ability to morph gives Blanchett her enviable broad range. In Paradise Road, a Glenn Close vehicle, she was the scene-stealing reh-headed Australian nurse. In Oscar and Lucinda, she was the card-playing tomboy who shocked Victorian Sydney. In Pushing Tin she was unrecognisable as a Long Island housewife who (eventually) stood by her man. In Elizabeth, ofcourse, she was the only thing on the screen.
This fall, she expects to have to movies out back-to-back: The Man Who Cried, directed by Sally Potter, in which Blancett, Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, and John Turturro drift through Nazi-occupied France; and The Gift, a supernatural thriller directed by Sam Raini. If she were a 31-year old American actress with that résumé, se would by now have had her bosom slightly enlarged and her wide, gappy smile orthodonted to bland perfection. But Blanchett's a zesty twenty-first-century Australian blwon in from Down Under, so she hasn't, and (I believe) won't. If she were American, with her astonishing looks and talents, she would also be well on her way up a defined career path, pitching for big-money roles in big-budget movies. But she doesn't do this. She's always chose directors and scripts that intrigue her, and she's not about to stop.
The films she's currently shooting in New Zealand are very big-budget, indeed - J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, which Peter Jackson is directing. "I'm really looking forward to it," she says, "because it's not a territory I've ever stepped into before technically." I search my memory for female roles and remember it was an hombre kind of series. Gandalf? Frodo? Bilbo Baggins? Whom does she play? "Galadriel." I don't recall Galadriel. "Queen of the Elves," she says, "Small but significant." Hmmm. Not nearly significant enough to break the $20 million barrier, even if she already has been fitted for prosthetic elf's ears.
"What do you want that much money for?" she challenges. A small silence grows (during which I think busily about what you or I, personally might want that much money for). "I can pay my electricity bills," she continues. "I can afford to...fly home and spend time with my..." Blanchett takes forever to come to the point and veers off at angles. Offscreen, her voice is agonizingly slow and she's the best deliverer of the unfinished sentence I have ever met. She likes to leave things half-formed, curling through the air, like cigar smoke. Eventually, she says, "But who knows? In five years' time, if I'm placed in that position, then I'll have to make those choices. But I'm not actually creating those choices."
Indeed. Things "happen" to Blanchett; things, she says, "follow me around," things, "are meant to be" or "not meant to be." In addition to the two films she's already shot this year, she has three more scheduled, perhaps the most anticipated of which is Heaven, a Miramax project that will be directed by Tom Tykwer, whose previous film was the celebrated Run Lola Run. (I'm pleased to see that she's being beckoned into the Miramax family, like Gwyneth and, more recetly, Toni Collette: I like a healthy mix of art and commerce myself.) What all this means is that Blanchett will be working through January 2001 with directors and scripts that intrigue her.
The Gift intrigued her. She plays a psychic mother of three who lives in rural Georgia. The script is co-writte by Billy Bob Thornton. "It just sort of kept following me around. Everywhere I'd turn up. Billy Bob mentioned when we were doing Pushing Tin that I should read it. You have these conversations all the time - 'You'd be great in it; you should do this' - dime a dozen. And then I read it. And suddenly Sam was on it, the sublime Sam Raimi. I think the things you're meant to do, you just can't escape them. "I can't tell you how much I enjoyed working with Sam. I think he's an extraordinary, extraordinary human being. He's so respectful; he wears a suit to work every day, and after a couple of weeks, a lot of the crew members started wearing ties to work. So he has this effect on people. It's really curious to watch him - he sort of inhabits all of the characters. And he'd be in the corner, and I realized after a while that he's been watching me do an action, and he was parodying the action when he wanted to give me a direction. I watched him do it with other actors as well. I'd hate to see him do Xena: Warrior princess."
Sam Raime didn't want to make The Gift with anyone else. Annie Wilson, the character Blanchett plays, is in every scene of the movie, he days. "It was essential that audiences believed in this woman." He'd seen Elizabeth and Oscar and Lucinda. "And in both cases, I saw that she was a woman with a soul." He's still editing the movie when I call him in Los Angeles. he laughs gently when I pass on her "sublime Sam" phrase; he refers to her as "Miss Blanchett" with nice old-fashioned formality; and he says his whole crew recognised that her acting is "magical." Different people kept sayin how moved they were by scenes she was doing. "Not dramatic scenes, necessarily. Small moments. They recognised that what they were seeing was true. That she's experienced something in her life - and she takes that and re-creates it in context." Raimi then brings the magical Miss Blanchett down to earth pretty briskly: It was a hard schedule, everyone working long hours and six-day weeks. "And she was in every shot of the film. She was always ready to perform. She was never 'resting in her trailer.' She took not a minute's break. She was tireless. And in great spirits. It's all about the work with her," he says. "Just about the work."
Blanchett visited bsychics in L.A. when she was rehearsing the role. She went along unrecognized as "Mary Smith," ut she "really felt lke [psychics] jsut read the trades. There's not many people in L.A. who don't work in the film industry. They kept seeing awards popping into my horizon. They were all obsessed with awards." Is she sympathetic to the existance of psychic power? She says that psychics have told her she must be. "You know, you must be attuned because you're an actor, dah-dah-dah, you're sensitive," she says. "When my father died, I willed and willed and willed - for years - the see something. Just because you have to have confirmation that this person hasn't dissapeared. And nothing happened. So you can't force things.
Blanchett's father was an American, from Texas. He was in the Navy, and after he met and married her mother in Australia, he went into advertising. Ther have three children - Cate, the middle child, between an older brother and a younger sister. When she was ten, they were pulled out of a Melbourne cinema to be told that their father was dead of a heart attack at the age of 40. It's a story she resists talking about. A reference she once made was distorted and has been used against her. "I'd - I'd - I was making some joke about the CIA, that my father was American -" she says, trailing off. I remember the reference, and the subsequent misrepresentation: "'Cate Blanchett is barking mad. She believes her father was -'" and she cuts me off to finish the sentence. "'kidnapped by the CIA!' Yeah." She laughs.
I wonder if the sudden death had made her fearful of her own mortality. "I've always thought about death," she says. "I've always been acutely aware of my mortality. But I can feel myself being released from that now. I don't know whether it's getting married. It just feels like over the last three years, I'm being redeemed from something. Not that I have been oppressed by anything - oh, God, one always sound so self-help book. I think it's because I'm in the middle of the thought myself - it's very hard to articulate." Her marriage clearly makes her very happy. "Our little month off has come to a close so quickly," she says. She met her Australian husband, Andrew Upton, a script editor and writer, in Sydney, and they married three years ago. They're very domestic. They're often seen shopping together in local supermarkets. "I like bowls," she says, dreamily. "There;s a fantastic kitchen shop across from the Cross in London - Summerill & Bishop." She'll need a house to put the bowls in, instead of the temporary camps she has in London and Sydney. "We'll settle," she says, "We'll really settle." Then she thinks about their whirlwind life and amends it to: "We're going to try and settle. But as soon as we do this, it's like, Off! We're off now! Andrew will come and go. He's coming to Australia and then - I mean - he's doing his stuff with his Australian theatre company. It's good that we're going back now."
Blanchett spent her honeymoon filming Elizabeth in England, half the globe away from Australia and her brand-new husband. "Since then we said, 'Never, ever again.' It's not just a relationship, really. It's really not worth it." She tries not to talk about her marriage, but you glean what you can. This past spring, Upton was smiling beside her at London parties as she glowed for the social pages in her stylish outfits. "I mean, I've been incredibly lucky that he's able to travel with me, and - you know, I've been looking after him, this last stretch - he had a deadline to meet." Me (mock-cencorious): What do you mean, "looking after him"? Cate (mock-innocent) "Making him lunch! Packing him off to the gym!" She bursts out laughing because he's so much the better cook. "My version of lunch is opening the Covent Garden soup. And then" - she begins to gasp with laughter - "I can't get it open!" (Covent Garden soup comes in a ferocious cardboard carton that defeats amateur hands.)
"This is the weirdest thing," she says. "What's making me panic now -and you always have to have something to panic about- is not the fact that there's no work. It's like, Oh, gosh, my entire life is full of work. What will happen to children? 'Honey, I forgot to have kids.'" She thinks it's dangerous to schedule children. "To say, 'I'm having a child in July...' July means nothing. July's just when it pops out. And how do you know how you're going to feel when you've given birth? You may want to take the next ten years off." That awesome thought suddenly silences her. "I've talked a lot about why one has children. Is it just profound narcissism? Or do you have them because you're suddenly aware that you're mortal? I think you just have 'em 'cause you have 'em, really. They happen to you."
Like everything else. "I can't believe the year, the way it's mapped out for me," she says. "Because after Elizabeth -I could just feel it- there was a sense of what I should be doing, and I just went, Not ready to go there. I don't want to take on everyone else's expectations of what it means to play the lead in a film that does reasonably well at the box office. That's not the path I'm on. I'm not interested in making decisions out of fear -to be grabbing at something in case it goes away. If it goes away, it goes away, and it really wasn't meant to be." She says over and over that it's "luck" or "fate" that makes her the actor most wanted, that keeps her on this whirlwind, that makes writers and directors long to work with her. I say the talented Miss Blanchett makes her own luck. She has the gift.

Vicky Woods

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