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CABLE GUIDE MAGAZINE - November 1999GOLDEN CATE
Filmdom’s top actors and directors are queuing up to work with Cate Blanchett after marvelling at her tour-de-force performance in Elizabeth. But, she tells Garth Pearce, she doesn’t want to become an ‘acting machine’.
Cate Blanchett had everything to prove. The unknown Australian actress was playing Elizabeth I, known as the Virgin Queen, for the Lahore-born Shekhar Kapur in a film about the English monarch. What’s more, in this version, the Queen was no longer a virgin.
For Blanchett, 30, the pressure was clearly getting too much. When I first went to see her - at a splendid reconstruction of Elizabeth’s coronation in York Minster, founded in the 7th century and doubling for 13th-century Westminster Abbey in London - she suddenly decided against talking about the role. A message was being passed down - she couldn’t get her mind around describing what she was attempting to achieve.
It was more than a year later, in the less historic surroundings of London’s Dorchester hotel, that she finally consented to an audience. Gone are the long, red wig and heavy brocade clothes. What remains is blue T-shirt an jeans and shoulder-length fair hair. There is also on important addition: she has won the BAFTA award - Britain’s equivalent of the Oscar - for best actress.
Many sighed with relief when she won, perhaps reflecting that they were spared another emotional speech from Gwyneth Paltrow, who pipped the nominated Blanchett for an Academy Award for her performance in the rival period piece Shakespeare In Love.
That said, Blanchett has achieved great things on screen. And her lusty scenes with 29-year-old Joseph Fiennes, who plays her lover, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, have managed to re-write history in a believable style. “There was no firm evidence that Queen Elizabeth lost her virginity to him,” says Blanchett. “But there is no evidence that she didn’t. we have never claimed that it is historically accurate - whatever accuracy is. My take on it was that she had a very harrowing upbringing, so would have had loves and hates of her own.”
In the film, we meet her aged 21 in 1554, dancing in royal gardens. We leave her four years later, hardened by her lover’s betrayal and wearing a mask of white make-up to declare to the court that she is married to on-one but England. Blanchett did not look over her shoulder at past performances of the character, which include Flora Robson in Fire Over England in 1937, Bette Davis in The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex in 1939 and The Virgin Queen in 1995, and Glenda Jackson in BBC’s Elizabeth R in 1971. “What happened before did not really matter,” she says. “I was not going to learn anything that would help me in what lay ahead. I had to find her independent spirit, a wicked sense of humour and youthful passions, which no film has focused on before.”
She has a crisp delivery. Even when I observe that she has enjoyed screen love affairs with both Joseph Fiennes and his more famous brother Ralph (in Oscar And Lucinda), she interrupts: “Comparisons are odious. They are completely different people and different actors.” In what way? “Ralph is complex, with an intense screen presence and wicked sense of humour. Joseph is incredibly beautiful to look at, a real trickster and very deadpan with the wind-ups.”
Blanchett grew up in Melbourne, one of three children raised by her mother after the death of her Texan father when she was ten. She attended the city’s Methodist Ladies College: “It gave me a love of music and performing, “ she says. “I played seven instruments at some point and it was one of those schools that taught you that girls can do anything. I directed plays when I was there and found it really stimulating.”
She was able to go directly from Sydney’s National Institute Of Dramatic Art into a string of stage plays, including a production of David Mamet’s Oleanna, opposite Geoffrey Rush (an Oscar winner for Shine, he also appears in Elizabeth), who played a university lecturer accused by her of sexual harassment. “So where could I go from there?” she asks. “My standards were very high right away.”
She remained working in theatre until a debut film role in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road, quickly followed by the comedy Thank God He Met Lizzie. Her agent sent Elizabeth director Kapur a promo tape on the very week he was appointed. He told me: “She had a timelessness and a different kind of beauty. There was a translucence of the skin and paleness. I felt instinctively that she would be perfect, although I had never heard of her. Once we screen tested her, it was obvious that she was right.”
If Blanchett’s working trip to the other side of the world, to film in a succession of draughty English castles came as a culture shock, then she does not admit it. She had married screenwriter Andrew Upton only a few months before. “It’s not conducive to the gypsy life I lead, to have a husband, “ she intones. “Life has become very busy and we see each other when we can.”
Blanchett’s career already looks set to follow a similar path to fellow Aussie Nicole Kidman. Earlier this year, she was back in historic costume, this time Victorian, as Lady Chiltern alongside Minnie Driver and Julianne Moore in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. She is currently starring in Four Weddings And A Funeral director Mike Newell’s Pushing Tin, a black comedy set in the stressful world of air-traffic controllers, with John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton.
There is also the forthcoming The Talented Mr Ripley, co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon. Directed by Anthony (The English Patient) Minghella, the film gets its Stateside release later this year before arriving on British screens next year. “The things I have ended up working on are not those I have really run after, “ she says. “I find myself in a really good position. But I am not an acting machine. I can only do so much.”
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