Last June, Cate Blanchett took the podium at the Fifty-first Venice Biennale to open an exhibition by the 31-year-old Australian sculptor and -diorama-maker Ricky Swallow. She spoke of "pale ephemeral beauty," of "visceral stuff—blood and guts," of a "body of work" that's "like a chameleon."
Reminded of these turns of phrase recently in the Chateau Marmont's mock-Tudor lounge, the 36-year-old Melbourne-born actress and erstwhile art-history major parried the suggestion that they could be read as a kind of Blanchett manifesto. "God, I wish I had a manifesto," she joked, her diamond eyes glinting with mischief. "It would be so much easier."
But Blanchett isn't exactly one to complain. For her, it seems, overwork is impossible. In addition to touching down at gatherings of the international art posse, she's in the midst of an avalanche of projects suggesting she might, in fact, embody the Elven powers of Galadriel, the role she played with such comely ethereality in Lord of the Rings. Over the past year or so, Blanchett has wrapped shooting on Little Fish, portraying an ex-junkie in the award-winning Aussie release; Notes on a Scandal, in which she plays a teacher who gets mixed up romantically with an adolescent boy ("Morally, one of the most difficult things I've ever done"); and, in Los Angeles, The Good German, costarring George Clooney and directed by Steven Soderbergh ("He should be put into powder form and drunk"). There's still more on the way: a reprise of her Golden Globe–winning turn as the Virgin Queen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age; Benjamin Button, from the F. Scott Fitzgerald story in which a woman gives birth to a cantankerous septuagenarian; and I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan, in which, under the direction of Todd Haynes, she'll play, unreal as it seems, Bob Dylan.
Conversation with Blanchett is like a twisting road through the Outback; every curve opens onto unexpected terrain. "I'm very meandering, awful meandering. Nothing is linear." She's momentarily distracted by a spider inching its way down a nearby wall. "That's good luck," she notes matter-of-factly (Australians know their spiders) before going on to illuminate the challenge of inhabiting Dylan's iconic persona: "I mean, I can no sooner pick up the guitar than I can hold a car above my head." Still, you get the feeling she'll be honking a harmonica and strumming the entirety of Blonde on Blonde in no time.
In a black suit and an open-neck white blouse, the generous collar spilling onto her lapels, the actress known to Australians as "Our Cate" exudes—down to her two-tone wing tips and exposed ankles—California cool. For such an admitted outsider, Blanchett has no problem conjuring up lost Hollywood: the klieg-ready glamour of Lombard, the haughty sass of Hepburn. Her hair is scraped back, revealing that poreless, chalk-white face with the cliff-like cheekbones, which is an object of fascination around the room: The nearby clusters of chattering Cosmo drinkers are straining—hard—not to stare.
Blanchett may be the finest actress on the planet, but she's also the smartest girl in the seminar, the coolest kid on the block (she tells of tooling around the old neighborhood wreaking havoc on a pink BMX bike), and, it turns out, a doting mom and wife. This has been Blanchett's first real stint in Los Angeles, living with her husband, the playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton, and their two young boys, Dashiell and Roman. Her weeks here were spent shooting The Good German and shuttling the kids to day care in a Jeep Grand Cherokee. In December, she flew back to Sydney (where the Upton-Blanchetts are establishing their headquarters after years in Brighton) to support Upton's adaptation of The Cherry Orchard and to prep for her New York stage debut, playing the title role in Henrik Ibsen's formidable Hedda Gabler. The production, also adapted by Upton, has been wowing audiences at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
"It's war onstage," she says of the play, relishing her husband's reworking, which blows the cobwebs out of the musty drawing-room classic, paring dialogue down to Pinteresque stops and starts as a collection of buttoned-up Victorian-era busybodies and bureaucrats (including the oily Judge Brack, played by Little Fish costar Hugo Weaving) talk over, under, around, and past one another. Hedda, the stoppered-up wife of a tedious academic, is a role of such colossal status—previously played by Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, and Judy Davis—that the thought of bringing it new life can only be terrifying. But Blanchett cottoned to this "glittering creature" with a scary affinity for dueling pistols, and to Ibsen's enduringly corrosive take on modern life: "Given that it's post-Freud, post-Marx, post-Darwin, there's very few lies left, really, and the one lie that Ibsen deals with is love. Every time the word love is mentioned, it's like someone running nails down a blackboard."
For Blanchett, unlike Hedda, there's no treachery in love. She's rapturous about Upton: "His mind is amazing, and his textual analysis is fantastic." Textual analysis? It's enough to give bookworms everywhere reason to live. When asked—inevitably—about being a sex symbol, she parries again: "I don't think it's ever been my lot." Oh, come on. "Actors do need to charm because they need to attract an audience. But the whole definition of what is sexy—what is that? I think it's more about charm, isn't it, than sex appeal? Mystery, perhaps?"
How to answer? Charm and mystery, Ibsen and Dylan, motherhood and hard work—it can all be pretty seductive in the right hands.
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