RETURN OF THE ICONIC BLONDE.

In an age of platinum airheads, Cate Blanchett is the last of a breed, the uber-blonde. Not quite a goddess, but certainly an icon, she has inspired thinking men to extraordinary eulogy. It's her cerebral sensuality that gets inside the male psyche - and doesn't do too badly at the box office either.
VERONICA LAMB meets her.

Feed the word "Blonde" into the Internet and you are at once confronted with several hundred jokes. "Q: What do get when you cross a blonde with an ape? A: A retarded ape." "A smart blonde, a dumb blonde and a unicorn are sitting around a table on which there is a $10 note: who gets the money? The dumb blonde, the other two don't exist." And so on.

America's Stanford University even has a lexicon of "blonde" medical definitions: "Artery: the study of paintings. Bacteria: The back door to a cafeteria. Cesarean section: a district in Rome." Meanwhile teenagers describe particularly dumb, girlish behavior as "blonde" and there are T-shirts that read "Natural blonde, please speak slowly."

Something has happened to the blonde in the '90s. That once potent symbol of the feminine sublime (Grace Kelly, Dietrich, Monroe) has given away to the Pammies and Kylies, the Danniis and Paulas - fastfood blondes for our times, pretty and bouncy and sexy for sure, but hardly the stuff on which legends are built. Even the contemporary deluxe versions of the blonde goddess - Gywneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz - despite their cool, superior beauty, are lacking in that almost otherworldly aura of perfection the originals exuded.

The closest thing the '90s ever had to the real thing was Princess Diana. And when she died, it seemed the last surviving symbol of superhuman blondeness died with her.

Then along came Cate Blanchett. The latest icon for a world in search of a feminine ideal on which to hang its fantasies, Blanchett is being eulogized abroad in the kind of breathless prose not heard since Diana stood on the steps of St. Pauls in her wedding gown.

In recent months, hundreds of column centimetres have gushed about the 29-year-old Australian's beauty, her presence, her devastating talent. The words "luminous" and "translucent" are those most commonly used to describe her. Shekar Kapur, who directed her award-winning role in Elizabeth, talks of her "ethereal quality". Gillian Armstrong, who gave Blanchett her big film break in Oscar and Lucinda, describes her as "magical" and "extraordinary". Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) has compared Blanchett to Meryl Streep, calling her the most exciting actress to have emerged in recent memory. He even expanded a part in his upcoming film, The Talented Mr Ripley, to accommodate her. The world has simply fallen in love with Blanchett.

How things change. Only a year has passed since she went to meet a famous producer in a Los Angeles hotel and hovered for an hour at a bar while he sat next to her, failing to recognise her.

But much has happened since then. She has won a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination for her role in Elizabeth, earned rave reviews for her lead in the London stage play Plenty, and scored showcase parts in no less than three hotly anticipated films, due out in Australia this year: the all-star psychological thriller The Talented Mr Ripley, the film version of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband and a black comedy, Pushing Tin.

Suddenly, Blanchett is a star whose time has arrived.

My first view of the woman behind the emerging legend is in a mirror. As I enter the seedy bathroom at the back of London's Almeida Theatre, a woman with her back to me is putting on lipstick. Blanchett has often been called a chameleon, but there's still no mistaking the translucent skin, pale blue, sloe-shaped eyes and geometric cheekbones in the small, round mirror. All I miss is the smattering of freckles. It feels like a perfectly set up shot from a movie, until she waves the lipstick and explains that it is one quick way of making the mental shift between rehearsal room and interview.

Later we are more formally introduced, and as we talk, she falls on a pile of lunchtime sandwiches, carefully extracting the smoked salmon and salad, rejecting the slices of bread. No wonder the fortyish clothes she is wearing hang just as the director intended.

When I mention her recent deification, she laughs. She laughs. I search her face, looking for that famous luminescence, the star quality.

The thing about Blanchett, as her friend and Elizabeth co-star puts it, is "the flicker". One minute she looks perfectly plain, "galumphing" says Rush, the next she is "strikingly beautiful.

It is this flicker that has so enthralled the directors, and perhaps too, her audience. Anthony Minghella recently wrote that Blanchett makes a remarkable transformation when the cameras start rolling. One moment she is unremarkable, the next she delivers a "hotline to the heart, the glimpse of the soul, tiny flashes of joy and pain. It's as if she's letting you into her secrets."

Shekar Kapur puts it another way, talking about the remarkable way her mind seems to take control of her body, expressing itself through her face and her eyes. "She's capable of retaining a whole performance in a shot."

It seems Blanchett's finely tuned talent fascinates just about everyone except Blanchett. She has seen Elizabeth just once. "I loved the film, but it was almost as though there was a black square over my face. Not that I was hiding from it, but it was impossible to truly see myself."

Does she agree with the consensus that her looks can be mercurial? "I've looked ugly, that's OK. The greatest compliment I think I've ever had was when another actor said I had 'an actor's face'...I'm as vain as the next person, let's face it, but it's really important to try and shed that vanity. I'm not opposed to looking what is commonly termed as ugly."

Blanchett was born and raised in Melbourne, the middle child of a school teacher and a Texan advertising man who died when she was 10. She does not like to talk about her family, all she will say is that her father "Lived fast and died incredibly young". Her older brother, Bob, works in computers and her sister Genevieve, is a theatre designer in Sydney.

As a schoolgirl, Blanchett enjoyed studying, but although she acted in plays and was on the school tennis team, she recalls being something of a loner. She went on to Melbourne University to study economics and fine art. "I had no particular goal other than to find out what it would be like to go on to university, go to a really big library, look up things in catalogues and fall in love."

But she soon became bored with her classes and, looking for something to keep her interest, she got involved in university theatre. A fellow student, recognising her talent, suggested she try out for the prestigious NIDA theatre school in Sydney. She did and was accepted, but she maintains she still wasn't really committed to being an actor.

Even now, despite the awards and accolades and fame, Blanchett says she is not driven by a burning ambition. "So many people I know are really goal focused. They see a point and want to go directly to it. I suppose that a couple of years ago, I thought I needed someone to ask a lot of me and that exists in the ether. But I don't burn incense and meditate on my desires. So far the right things have come along at the right time, and I don't want to interfere too much."

The first right thing that came along when Blanchett was still at NIDA: she won a coveted part in Electra, a modern version of the Greek classic. Though she was still in her third year, her performance created a buzz around Sydney, attracting the attention of the likes of Rush.

Within six months of graduating in 1992, she scored a role opposite Rush in the Sydney Theatre Company's performance of the David Mamet play Oleanna. The buzz that started with Electra gained momentum as Blanchett progressed to a string of impressive stage performances: Miranda in the Tempest, Ophelia in Hamlet, Mina in The Seagull. When the film roles came, they came thick and fast - she made seven in two-and-a-half years, Thank God he Met Lizzie, Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road and Gillian Armstrong's Oscar and Lucinda among them.

Armstrong told Blanchett the part of Lucinda would make her famous, and it did. Shekar Kapur "discovered" Blanchett when he saw a promo reel of the film, the swimming scene where Blanchett's pale face bubbles up to the surface. he has said he could see, in that one epiphanous moment, that Blanchett was destined to become a great actor. He wasted no time in signing her up for the demanding lead in Elizabeth.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Blanchet has mercifully not bounced straight out of high school into the high beam of mega-stardom. She is mature and balanced and ready for her time in the limelight. Those who have worked with the actor describe her as that rarest of commodities, a low maintenance star. She shows up on set well prepared and on time, she's professional, focused and passionate about her work.

Her other passion, of course, is her husband, Andrew Upton, a screenwriter and film editor whose editing credits include Babe: Pig In The City. They met on the set of Thank God He Met Lizzie, and it is clear she adores him. In a recent interview she was quoted: "I feel there's 12 great men who walk the earth and I'm married to one. the others, she said, include Geoffrey Rush and John Cusack, her co-star in Pushing Tin.

The couple call home an apartment in Sydney. Their dreams are familiarly suburban: they want to buy a house in Sydney and eventually start a family. But family life in the suburbs has had to be put on the back burner. "We've been married for two years and have only lived in hotels," Blanchett moans.

Particularly trying were the three months the couple spent apart during the filming of Elizabeth in 1997: she was on location in Britain while work commitments kept him in Australia. Blanchett describes the experience as "painful" and says they couldn't do it again.

Now, basing herself in London for six months for the duration of Plenty has given Blanchett a rare chance for a settled life with her husband. Upton is working on a screenplay and has taken his work to London to be with her.

She says she loves the semblance of domesticity their life in London affords ("Going out and buying crockery and cutlery is a deeply erotic experience") and she relishes the anonymity of living in a foreign city. In London, she say, she can walk down the street without being recognised - or scrutinised - a luxury she no longer has in Australia.

Still, Blanchett is far from jaded about her new celebrity. Though she came home empty handed, she says she had a ball at the Oscars. "I stayed up for 72 hours and have never laughed so much in my life. I can honestly say it didn't even occur to me that I would win, although it crossed other people's minds."

Blanchett is not sure what she will do when Plenty closes. There is talk of her starring in the film version of Mandy Sayer's Vogel winning novel Dreamtime Alice (possibly with Geoffery Rush) and she was offered, but declined, the lead in a biopic about Janis Joplin.

Whatever she does, it is certain the world will be watching. This, after all, is THE blonde we have been waiting for.

WITH JANE EDWARDES.

Sunday Magazine, Sunday Herald-Sun, 30th May, 1999.

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Aussie Cate Online © 1999 Lin, Dean, Lance
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