Sunday, June 13, 1999Wilde Thing
'Elizabeth's Blanchett found another costume drama in 'Ideal Husband'
By STEPHEN SCHAEFER(Cannes)
Not so long ago, Cate Blanchett could sit unrecognized in a hotel bar. Today, the 5-foot-8 blond Australian actress looms as an international celebrity, thanks to her Oscar-nominated performance in "Elizabeth."In that modish take on musty historical dramas, Blanchett had the daunting task of transforming the English queen from a sweetly sensuous adolescent into an independent woman in constant danger of assassination and, finally, into the ultimate imperious monarch who depended on no man to rule an empire.
Cate Blanchett: "After 'Elizabeth' I knew I wanted to do something really different and I didn't necessarily want to 'carry' the film. 'Pushing Tin' [which opened and closed quietly in April] was that," said the actress, sitting in a club chair - in a Jil Sander scoop-necked dress with a weird, see-through mesh skirt - in a room on the top floor of Cannes' Carlton Hotel.
Currently starring in the hit London revival of the David Hare drama "Plenty," Blanchett arrived at the Cannes Film Festival just in time for the screening of her new film - an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play "An Ideal Husband," which opens in New York on June 18.
She managed two stage performances in London before leaving by private jet, arriving in France at 1 a.m.
"There's been interest, yes, in bringing 'Plenty' to Broadway and I love the play," is all she will say (until contracts are signed) about letting American audiences again see the work, which was a personal triumph for Kate Nelligan in New York in 1982 but less of a triumph for Meryl Streep in the 1983 film.
Blanchett's "Elizabeth" fans who rush to "An Ideal Husband" might be surprised to discover she is not exactly the star of the film.
The ensemble cast includes Jeremy Northam ("The Winslow Boy," and TV's "Sense and Sensibility") as the title character, Sir Robert Chiltern. Blanchett is cast as Northam's very moralistic wife, Lady Gertrude.
"Lady Chiltern is a really tough part in the film, perhaps one of the more thankless roles. But it's crucial. I was keen on getting somebody who was naturally sympathetic," says writer-director Oliver Parker, who adapted the Wilde play. "I was allowed to see some of the rough footage on 'Elizabeth' in the early days and I was blown away by her," Parker added.
While not the best known among Wilde's works, "An Ideal Husband," perceptively deals with the divide between someone's public image and their personal reality. The "ideal husband" of the title is Sir Robert Chiltern who finds his brilliant career threatened with the appearance of the blackmailing Mrs. Laura Cheveley (Julianne Moore).
Sir Robert is mortified, not simply because someone knows about the youthful misdeed that mortally threatens his public career but - equally critical - he fears losing the love and respect of his wife Lady Gertrude. He turns for help to his friend Lord Goring (Rupert Everett), who had an intimate acquaintance with the scheming Mrs. Cheveley. Minnie Driver plays Chiltern's marriage-seeking sister Mabel.
"An Ideal Husband" was filmed previously in 1947. That British production starred the late Michael Wilding (Elizabeth Taylor's second husband) as the dashing Lord Goring and Hollywood's Paulette Goddard as the blackmailer. In 1969, Jeremy Brett, who would became most famous as Sherlock Holmes on Public Television, starred in a British TV version.
Alongside "The Importance of Being Earnest," "An Ideal Husband" was Wilde's final bow as playwright and hitmaker. Witty and rueful, both were running simultaneously in London's West End in 1895 when the celebrated Irish dandy was found guilty of "gross indecency" after two notorious trials and jailed for two years. Wilde's conviction prematurely closed both plays.
Wilde's play was a hit a century later, in 1995, when a London company brought "An Ideal Husband" to Broadway.
Blanchett couldn't help smiling when she talked about Lady Chiltern, describing her as "a prig." "It would be interesting," she admitted ever so sweetly, "to play a prig who unravels. And the restraint, that quiet English restraint - that might be interesting to play. And this is a comedy of manners. Which was also part of the attraction."
Aren't actors supposed to "love" their characters, even if they're murderers, psychos or, God forbid, prigs?
"I don't believe you have to fall in love with your character. It's important to present the unpalatable flawed side of a character. You can't make the audience love a character," Blanchett said.For the few who saw "Pushing Tin," Blanchett was the standout marvel of a well-cast movie, playing a blond, bouffant-haired Long Island housewife with utter, unflashy authenticity. Her appearance and manner were so unlike anything she had ever done, it brought comparisons to Streep.
Asked about getting inside this very American, regular kind of go-to-the-mall wife, about losing all traces of the Cate Blanchett we've seen, the actress suddenly pumps herself up and out of her leather club chair and stands there. Her shoulders begin to hunch forward as she explains, "It started because I've got a friend who's got several kids, and she's got the 'mother stoop' because she spends most of her time stooped over, because she's used to dealing with little people."
Next up is the thriller "The Talented Mr. Ripley," with Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, which opens in December for year-end awards consideration. Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning "English Patient" writer-director, created the character of an American heiress especially for Blanchett.
Born in Melbourne, where she studied acting and went on to become a stage veteran, she still speaks with a pronounced Australian accent.
Traces of that upbringing - and her lack of concern with protocol - surfaced at the black-tie dinner following the festival's televised ceremony when, after arriving in the mirrored tent alongside international beauties like Heather Locklear, Kristin Scott Thomas and Sophie Marceau,
Blanchett's first order of business was simply practical: She hightailed it to the ladies' room with a girlfriend, wadding up the train of her dramatic black-lace Versace gown in her hand. Before dinner was over, she had quietly skipped out and headed back to London.
Married for two years, she met her husband, screenwriter and film editor Andrew Upton ("Babe: Pig in the City"), when she was shooting "Oscar and Lucinda," the period piece with Ralph Fiennes that first won her notice in the film industry.
Blanchett zealously guards her privacy, yet she does allow that filming "Ripley" in Rome, Naples, Venice, Palermo and Positano was "glorious" - not the least because "I finally had a honeymoon with my husband in Italy." Having a marriage that works is imperative to her. Blanchett's got something at home that thrills her more than any award, any live audience.
"I absolutely think it's paramount to have a life outside my work. It's the most important thing on earth," she declared during an interview when she first came to New York in December of '97. "Everyone is searching for completion with someone else. Some people find it in work or in life. I've found it in both, I'm one of the lucky few. I knew the minute - the second! - we met."
Smiling she added, "Not that we kissed the moment we met."Now that her work takes her for weeks or months at a time far from Australia, Mr. and Mrs. Upton seem to be managing quite nicely. "He's translating a play for the Sydney Theater Company and so he was able to bring his work with him," she explained. "Plenty" runs in London until July 24.
Blanchett's interest in doing a series of featured parts until she finds the right starring vehicle only looks like canny career thinking.
Unlike certain actors who decide practically by committee which movie or which part they'll do next, the actress follows her own instinct. "You have to make up your own mind, because at the end of the day you've got to turn up and deliver the goods. Of course, I ask other people's opinions. But it's you who has to make the connection with the script, and if you don't connect you've got nothing to give it.
"Oh, it's easy to be greedy," she continues. "But you'd only be bad [if you don't connect with the character]. I don't want to be one of those actors who moans 'Why did I do this pile of s-t!' There's so many films made nowadays, why not give it to someone else?"
Ultimately, though, Blanchett will do what matters most to Blanchett.
"Being a star in that clichéd sense," she insists, "doesn't interest me in the slightest."
Aussie Cate Online © 1999 Lin, Dean, Lance
800x600 screen size recommended.