Cate's flying high

Playing the daunting role of Katharine Hepburn has confirmed Cate Blanchett's status as an Australian film icon, writes Nick Papps

From: The Courier-Mail, 2005-01-15
Date added: 2005-01-16

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Arms crossed against the cold, Cate Blanchett looks out at a frigid New York skyline. Outside it's -15C and 49 floors below, the footpath is crawling with rugged-up New Yorkers.

This is Blanchett's fifth or sixth interview of the day and it's not even lunchtime, but as she turns from the window and says hello, the tall Australian looks anything but flustered.

Blanchett is in the middle of a media blitz for her new Martin Scorsese film, The Aviator, about billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. The film is largely set in the 1930s and 1940s and, as Blanchett takes a seat, it's hard not to notice she looks as if she's just stepped off the movie set.

Wearing high-waisted vintage Louis Verdad pants, a brown Juicy turtle-necked jumper and vintage necklace, this 2004 version of Blanchett would not look at all out of place in Howard Hughes's Hollywood.

Blanchett plays screen legend Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator and it's a performance which has been praised around the world as a hot tip for the Oscars. This week she was nominated for a best supporting actress gong at the Screen Actors Guild awards for her performance in The Aviator.

Generally considered a barometer for the Oscars, the SAG Awards will be presented on February 5, 22 days before the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences presents the Oscars.

As the 35-year-old settles into the interview, she says she had been "completely" intimidated by the idea of playing Hepburn and found it hard to watch the film at its New York premiere the previous night.

"It's very confronting watching your films, particularly this film, because the weight of expectation about whoever is going to play Katherine Hepburn is enormous," she says.

"It's verging on an impossible task but when Martin Scorsese asks you to do it, of course you say yes." Scorsese picked Blanchett for the role after another Australian, Nicole Kidman, pulled out of the part. The director was attending a Hollywood awards ceremony when his wife spotted Blanchett and said "that's Kate" – and Scorsese agreed.

Kate Hepburn is not the first strongwilled woman Blanchett has played. The Melbourne-born, NIDA-trained actor has made a career out of playing strong women from her breakthrough Golden Globe-winning performance as Elizabeth I in 1998's Elizabeth, to her title role in the 2001 World War II spy drama, Charlotte Gray, and then 2003's portrayal of murdered Irish journalist Veronica Guerin.

Blanchett's impressive body of work, which includes the blockbuster Lord of The Rings series of movies, has firmly established her as one of Hollywood's leading female actors. And as the former Melbourne Methodist Ladies College pupil says, getting to this level in the industry was no accident.

"Your career is a product of the choices you make," she says. "There's this myth that actors are just puppets and people tell them what to do – and it's not true, you make choices about your career, you decide how public you're going to be or how not public you are going to be. It's what you say no to as much as what you say yes to.

"Sometimes you make the wrong choices and sometimes it doesn't work."

Blanchett uses Hepburn to illustrate her point.

"The inspirational thing about Hepburn is she had many, many failures," she says. "If a film doesn't make money, it doesn't mean it's not good. "But a lot of her performance choices, particularly early in her career, didn't necessarily work, but she kept going and kept growing and she kept developing, and she took risks which I think is really important as an actor.

"It's important to fail because that's how you develop. I have failed . . . and I am not talking necessarily about a critics' perception of your failure, it's how you personally feel about your work.

"I am always falling short of my expectations and that's what propels you on to get better, and, hopefully, I am a better actor than I was when I first started out. You want to have developed, you want to grow.

"Just because you are terrified of failure is absolutely no reason not to do something. It's the reason to do something."

Clearly Blanchett's philosophy is working because with one Golden Globe already on the mantlepiece for Elizabeth, a Golden Globe nomination this year for The Aviator and a Oscar for best supporting actress being tipped, Blanchett is Australia's hottest acting property.

This is not the first time Blanchett has been tipped to win an Oscar. In 1999, she was expected to take the Best Actress gong but lost to Gwyneth Paltrow who has since disappeared from the A-list amid a series of dud films.

Interestingly, Paltrow's career slide would not be a total shock to Blanchett who says she received some good advice from her writer husband, Andrew Upton, in the lead-up to that 1999 Oscar night.

"My husband is a wise man, and he said to me at the time, you don't want to win, because then where do you go from there," Blanchett says.

"He said it's far better to sort of keep arriving than ever to arrive, and maybe that's the feeling about Marty – people yearn for him to win an Academy Award, but in the end what is it.

"But look, let's hope he's holding one."

She's been married to Upton for seven years and the couple have two children, a son, Dash, aged three, and another boy, Roman, born last April.

Blanchett and Upton recently decided to leave England to head back to Australia after reportedly buying a $10 million home in Sydney.

"I think with two children and the pull of family it's very important to us," she says. "It's where our heart is."

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