AN OSCAR? NO THANKS

She loves life and she loves acting. But Cate Blanchett has never quite caught up with the fame game. Despite being on the Hollywood A list, she talks about her career with the enthusiasm of a beginner It doesn't even bother her, she tells LESLEY O'TOOLE, that some people consider her role in The Talented Mr Ripley as insultingly insignificant.

CATE Blanchett is describing the time she spent in Italy filming The Talented Mr Ripley. "It's all one big drunken blur," she laughs. So she partied madly then? "Oh, I love that word, party," she says with relish. "I didn't want to leave the apartment my husband and I had. It had an extraordinary roof terrace overlooking the Vatican. It was to die for."

Had these words been spoken by an up and coming actress, perhaps on her first visit to the Continent, no one would be surprised at their degree of enthusiasm. That they come from a star who is safely perched at the top of the Hollywood A-list after winning a slew of accolades last year for her brilliant performance in Elizabeth, takes a little explaining.

The truth is, Blanchett refuses to see herself as a star. Never mind that she is now making another major film - The Gift, opposite Keanu Reeves and directed by Oscar-winner Billy Bob Thornton.

Disregard the fact that Steven Spielberg reportedly wanted her to star opposite Tom Cruise in the now-delayed Minority Report. "Oh, I can't talk about that," she blushes, failing to quash the rumour, as she'd surely prefer.

It is simply the way Blanchett is. The Australian actress, who was brought up in Melbourne by her mother after her father's premature death, has a genuine joie de vivre which permeates every gesture and sentence. She expresses her gratitude for her station in life with utmost humility. For her, best of all was the gratification which came when Elizabeth found an audience in America. "We just thought we were making some obscure film in the North of England," she says.

She laughs wildly again at the suggestion that her small role in Ripley - alongside Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law - is insultingly insubstantial. "That's such a load of rubbish and a lot of people have said that to me, which I find so weird."

That Blanchett steals the film from everyone but Jude Law, who has a much showier role, is not at all surprising; she is eternally grateful to director Anthony Minghella, who wasn't embarrassed about the paucity of lines he offered her.

"When you speak to most actors who are interested in acting, they want to work on good scripts and with good directors," explains Blanchett. "They want to be asked to do things they haven't done before. I don't think I'm alone in that desire.

"I was so flattered that Anthony created this role for me. My character, Meredith, doesn't even exist in the novel. He amalgamated four types with whom Ripley came into contact, and his genius is that he was able to make something functional and information-bearing into a living, breathing character."

BLANCHETT describes Meredith as a "cultish debutante who is a little bit presumptuous and incredibly eager to reinvent herself. She's not very worldly, but she becomes more so through having her heart broken so badly. She faces her situation with enormous dignity and probably grows up in a way she wasn't expecting."

Though Minghella suggested Meredith was probably the sort of girl who devoured romantic fiction, Blanchett drew instead on time she herself spent in Italy as a teenager. "Not unlike Meredith, I had my heart broken in Italy," she says. "In Australia, we all take this trip, after high school and before university, when we become responsible and sleep with as many people as we can."

She guffaws. "No, but I did travel around for about seven months, hitchhiking. I stayed with nuns in Italy, so it was pretty different this time around. I had a particularly bad time in Turkey. I lost my wallet, so my best friend and I had to stay in a bunker with no lights. I could see lumps on the bed and there were eight big Turkish men with beards in there. It was a bit like Midnight Express."

Blanchett returned to Australia and began a fine arts and economics degree, set on a career as an architect or political economist. "I wanted to be a painter too, but realised early on that I wasn't gifted enough. I loved economic politics in school, though and I thought if I went into that, I'd be on the frontline of making important decisions."

Instead, like her designer sister Genevieve, Blanchett found herself feeling more artistic than analytical. "My mother was very supportive when I made my decision to be an actress," she says. "She used to ring my friends in the early days, asking if I had enough money and could pay my bills, but to me she seemed very supportive."

Her Texan father died when Blanchett was eight. "Living in the suburbs of Melbourne and having an American father was really exotic. People wanted to come round and hear him talk.
"Then he died and, as any young child might, I thought maybe those scary CIA people had taken him."

These days, the wolves are nowhere near Blanchett's door. Though, unusually, she is still motivated by the quality of the part and the acting involved rather than the number of zeros on the pay cheque.

ASKED IF she was disappointed about losing to Gwyneth Paltrow in the Oscar race last year, she laughs her head off. "No, I was relieved! I was really excited to be there but with all the talk about who was going to win, it was so easy to have the joy of being nominated taken away. "Suddenly I was in a horse race and I'd thought we were all just making films. That may have been a little naive of me. And the conversations I had about clothes! More than I could have dreamed possible."

Blanchett was then about to open the London West End run of David Hare's play Plenty and took time off from rehearsals to attend the Academy Awards ceremony. Typically, her personal Oscar highlight was "going back to rehearsals the next day, to these people that I so loved and who were so supportive of me. Knowing we were going to be on stage in the West End the following week was so exciting."

Here, Blanchett clearly found something of a safe haven, where she was admired for her acting ability rather than for her sojourn in Hollywood.
She admits that the Oscar odyssey affected her, but she appears to have ridden out the storm admirably. She credits the support of her family (she also has an older brother, Robert) and husband of nearly three years, Andrew Upton, with keeping her sane. At the mention of her husband, the Australian screenwriter of Babe, with whom Cate lives on the Sydney waterfront, she becomes remarkably sentimental.
"He's so wonderful," she sighs. "Either he comes to where I'm working or I go where he is."

So is she comfortable riding the fame train now? "I feel like I'm doing OK now with managing all that, but it was hard in the beginning.
"There were so many interviews and so many people asking questions. My head was filled with garbage and I had to clear it out. That's my responsibility as an actor. "That whole journey can make you a little more self-conscious and precious about the choices you make, but in the end that's all rubbish. "You just have to make the decisions you want to make and I knew after Elizabeth that I wanted to work in a way that was more fun, where I wasn't so much the focus of things."

She succeeded in not being the focus in films such as Pushing Tin, alongside John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton and scene-stealer Angelina Jolie, An Ideal Husband and, of course, Ripley. "I feel like I've set the limit very high," she says. "But it's depressing to work on things you don't believe in. I must have that - and of course a certain number of lines and a ripping good yarn."

She is joking about the lines. "If the characters have great dialogue like Anthony Minghella writes, and you're going to be photographed by John Seale (who won an Academy Award for The English Patient), well, it doesn't get any better than that."

DOES SHE really never feel a little like a movie star? "There seems to be this strange concept that if you get nominated for an Oscar, you become a Hollywood star. I've always made choices based on the challenge that something gives me. Even in my life, I don't like doing something I did the day before. I like to try things out, private things that may or may not work. It's important to find that out as an actress. All the other stuff is a by-product and I can't help but find it hilarious.
"It's like this game that we all know we're playing but pretend we're not. But we all know how it works and everyone knows how you get where you get. Ultimately, you work your 10-hour day, agonise over what you've done, then go out and publicise it. All people are really interested in is who you are dating and what you're wearing.

"I don't mean to be flippant about it, but I'm not American, I'm not English - I'm Australian. We have a small, vibrant industry and I've been fortunate enough to have made a couple of films that have opened up other areas for me. I just hope that continues."
Cate has a good giggle before concluding: "I really feel like I haven't even started yet."

The Talented Mr Ripley opens on February 18.

© Express Newspapers, 2000

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