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SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE - 24th October 1999Contents page:
“p.20 - CompliCated - She’s out of corsets for her new film role. But Cate Blanchett still seems to be highly strung” also: “Lesley White (pictured) interviewed the actress Cate Blanchett (see page 20). ‘Her cool self-assurance masks a terror of revealing herself to the world. Want to know about her background, her childhood, her parents, her husband? Forget it, snooper. What can she have to hide in a life she insists is perfectly ordinary?’”COMPLICATED
Cate Blanchett likes tinned tomatoes and her own bed. Her best friend is a social worker, and she thinks stardom is bad for your health. But is this all just part of the drama? Report by Lesley White. Photographs by Kim Andreolli.
Contrary to expectations I wasn’t wild about Cate Blanchett, with whom the rest of the world has fallen deeply and devotedly in love. Nor she about me, I fear. Returning to London from our edgy meeting in an Edinburgh hotel it occurred how rarely; given the reputation for media fatigue and prickly temperaments suffered by famous actresses, this hint of animus develops It is not that the delicate blonde was less clever and complex than she is painted, for she is so and more, but her contradictions make her an unfathomable frustration She is renowned when working for profound concentration, but also for skipping home as quickly as she can; one director, who claims to have been impressed and inspired by their close collaboration, frowns that at the same tune he hardly knew her. And there is another obvious problem. The deal on celebrity interviews is roughly this: you flatter the actor’s latest work, desist from dumb hairstyle questions and are rewarded with a nugget of personal revelation. Blanchett’s new film made this line of seduction difficult, since it lacks both the stature of her former triumphs and her creditably theatrical past.
British director Mike Newell’s Pushing Tin is a darkish comedy about Long Island air-traffic controllers, which builds its moments of near-fatal tension expertly and dares to show two highly bankable male stars behaving like brainless buffoons. Its stellar cast of John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton and Blanchett struggles gamely with a script that has them delivering lines such as “I need to have a life of the mind,” which is how a working-class wife tells the old man she’s going to her art class The director insists that the line is a joke; if so, Blanchett’s character, Connie Falzone, for it is she, lets it escape. Connie is a devoted wife and mother with too much gel in her hair, too much Lvcra in her jeans and the soul of an emotional rubbish tip, so willing to be put upon that she seems more pitiful than admirable. Blanchett, as we know, is brilliant at playing extremes: her tour de force possibilities as an actress can bring an implausible character to life and locate the subtlety in an overbearing one; she is the champ at mad (Susan Traherne in Plenty ), sad (Ophelia in Hamlet) and bad (Electra - with mitigating circumstances), but is she quite as good at playing ordinary? “I love the fact that Mike trusted me to do something I’d never done before.” she says of gum-chewing Connie, a woman who in real life would probably have been a more diverting combination of hard nut and soft centre but seems merely a dolt, her comic potential drowned in the pathos of an airhead spurned. She could not, for certain, be further from the needle-sharp woman before me.
Blanchett, 30, is curled on a couch, a cold starting to rouge the edges of her nose, her one defiantly inelegant feature. With its azure eyes, pale, sandy skin and honey-coloured hair, her face looks more of a natural phenomenon than a mask for the world, but we should not be fooled. There mar be a Dutch-doll delicacy about her, a Protestant severity, a confident gaze, but she is really braced against intrusion and impertinence. She has called her reputation for being scratchy a euphemism for being Australian, but it has more to do with a wall of privacy which surrounds her even as she is pretending to communicate something of herself. All the time while answering politely she is defying you to know her.
“She is a contradictory personality,” says her friend Jonathan Kent, who directed her in David Hare’s Plenty earlier this year and adores her. “She has great command of an apparent candour while retaining a proper privacy, she’s gregarious yet solitary, beset by doubt yet extrovert, witty yet melancholy... If the cliché about Cate is that she is a chameleon, it’s because all of those things exist within her.”
She is in jeans and little girl’s brown Fair Isle jumper, picking at its frayed-looking sleeves constantly, nibbling the plate of fruit placed before her. She has very short nails, cut rather than filed, and a simple wedding band She looks like a pretty but wilful child, squirming all over the velvet sofa as she talks, in an unconscious pantomime of escape, at one point lying almost horizontal For all that she is irritated by mention of her looks, she attends to them diligently. “The demarcation between being a model and an actress is so blurred,” she complains in a small and faltering voice which edges towards its subject. Yet she is also opinionated. The paradox of the hard-hat Australian with the delicate sensibility, the fashionista who disdains superficiality, makes her difficult to approach, or indeed to quite believe.
“I feel I’m being judged on how I look.” she continues flatly She later compares the Academy Awards to a catwalk, and laughs at the idea that a strategic frock can boost a career; yet Cate is hardly opting out of the contest. She is at ease with her body, in photo shoots striking exaggerated fashiony poses, such as grabbing her ankle, or lying kittenish, appealing to the camera. Her Galliano gown at last rear’s Oscars, where she lost out to the other Shakespearean contender Gwyneth Paltrow, was exquisite; her quick change today, into a beautiful velvet appliqué skirt, stiletto hoots and a suspiciously Gucci-esque leather jacket, attests to the tastes of a woman for whom clothes and image are something of a faith. And yet part of her abhors it; I wonder if she really was serious when she walked into our picture shoot asking to keep on her own clothes and make-up because, well, what was the point of more messing about?
Cate Blanchett’s big break was Oscar and Lucinda, Gillian Armstrong’s 1997 film of Peter Carey’s Booker prize-winning novel. She played Lucinda Leplastrier, a compulsive gambler and femme rnoderne in Victorian Sydney. Though not a big box-office hit - too quirky, with its heart-throb star Ralph Fiennes looking ugly and peculiar - Blanchett was a revelation. Before that was Paradise Road, Bruce Beresford’s second-world-war film about a group of women in a Sumatra prisoner-of-war camp Blanchett was the courageous Australian nurse, Susan, who survives torture in the blistering sun, demi-wave intact, to become the most memorable heroine in a cast of female saints led by Glenn Close and Pauline Collins. She was unprepared, however, for the stardom attached to Elizabeth, where the perfect stillness of her face before the camera somehow conveyed her tumultuous journey from dreamy sensualist to born-again virgin It wasn’t fun.
“You don’t expect to have a good time making a film, and Elizabeth was really difficult,” she recalls of the picture she has only seen once. “Before you become one, you imagine that film actors have an easy time, that they can reshoot and reshoot for perfection, but when you’re doing it there’s never enough time - and it’s when things aren’t perfect that you think most creatively.” She had three hours of makeup every morning; shaved brows, bleached lashes, an inch shaved off her hairline; and if Gwyneth Paltrow snatched the Oscar, one naturally assumes that Blanchett could have walked her role in Shakespeare in Love, while Paltrow would not have made as convincing a sovereign with the “heart of a man”.
She is honest enough to admit that Oliver Parker’s film of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, in which she plays Lady Chiltern, prim wife of a flawed man, was more of a “curious exercise” to see “if that heightened dialogue wou1d work on screen. I found it… interesting. But I loved Oliver, and making it was like being on summer camp.” As for Pushing Tin, “It was like being tickled for two months.”
In truth there were tears as well. The physical transformation required for Elizabeth left her hair in a condition that Newell’s location hairdressers in Canada found hard to correct. “At one point it turned pink,” he says. “She was in tears. We had to send her to a top hairdresser in New York.” Equally traumatising, at one point Newell decided that Connie was becoming too inane and asked Blanchett to reshoot. “There were never any tantrums or bad behaviour from Cate - she is a very clear-cut actress,” says NewelI, who found her refreshingly serious. “But when I made that criticism she felt I’d taken away a little bit of sky and that the trust would not be there in quite the same way.”
If Blanchett makes playing American and English women look easy, she says she is always daunted by the prospect. She feared that Elizabeth would not be respectful of the history. As for Susan Traherne, in this year’s revival of Plenty for the Almeida, at one panicky moment in rehearsals she told director Jonathan Kent that she “couldn’t do” English. But she dazzled, controlling the hysteria, carving something intelligible and sympathetic out of a part that Kate Nelligan had customised in the 1970s, and Meryl Streep has failed to master in Fred Schepisi’s film. “There are people outside the norm of what it is to be British which makes it easier for me to play, and Susan was one of them,” she says modestly.
Blanchett’s achievement was to make a piece of expositional drama resonate on a human level, fulfilling the dramatist’s belief that theatre best demonstrates the distance between “what is said and what is seen to be done.”
“I love how jagged Plenty was,” she says. “I loved its shifts in time and space. People told me I shouldn’t be doing it. There was some strange idea after Elizabeth that I should take bigger projects, but I can’t think like that.” She was also uncomfortable with the idea that she was following in the footsteps of Nicole Kidman and Juliette Binoche, gracing the London stage with her glittery presence. “It was very odd to be treated like a famous actor visiting London I never felt more foreign than when I was doing that play, and it had nothing to do with the role. I thought, hang on, I trained at the National Institute, I primarily worked in theatre and my heart is still there.”
She loves the fact that Pushing Tin, like Plenty, took her into an unknown dimension, this time one of suburban women and shopping malls. “She was the only actress I talked to:" says Newell, “who didn’t want to legitimise Connie by having her do a part-time quantum physics degree. She understood that she was happy with her life.” Blanchett invests Connie’s world with as much mystique as the court of Elizabeth, quite determined to avoid a judgement on which was the better part - or, for that matter, woman. Such caution fits the careful way Blanchett distances herself from two aspects of actressy success. Firstly from the idea that a viable career demands that roles get progressively bigger and better paid. Her view is that the little people are as absorbing as the greatest monarch.
Really, Pushing Tin is about the stupidity of male competitiveness, and Blanchett’s role is minor. “I relished not being central to this,’ she sighs. “After Elizabeth and Plenty, there was an unhelpful and unhealthy focus on me and it’s nice to be just part of a team. People have said I should be optioning books, but I’m not interested in finding vehicles for my talent - the whole concept makes me cringe. I come out of a theatre background where everyone mucks in.”
Secondly, Blanchett plants herself firmly in the real world, as opposed to a stardust name-dropping one. “My best friend is a social worker,” she says. “That’s fantastic because you can get too caught up in this world, and it’s humbling to talk to people whose concerns have nothing to do with the arts, nothing to do with constructing a fantasy and everything to do with living in a reality.” Her husband Andrew’s role in this preference for normality is central: solid and dependable-looking, at first you think he must be the one who gets ignored in the stampede to meet darling Cate, who waits at home with a warm heart and a hot meal, but then you hear that she has appeared in his first short film, Bangers, exploring a woman’s intense relationship with her mother. And again, things seem less ordinary, more starry-couple-on-their-way, than she would perhaps want them to. The curious - and unfair - fact us that the more actors stress their roots in the real, the more Alan Rickman hones his Labour manifesto, or Juliet Stevenson speaks of Inuit dignity, the more they insist that their best friends are youth workers, the more tiresomely actorly they sound. With her view of the profession as a painful shedding of skin to reveal truth, her moral thespian persona, her richly tonal voice, it struck me that Blanchett is a sort of Aussie version of Stevenson. “I have a strong sense of justice,” says the republican concerned with territorial independence. “Being a republican is just about asking how we are going to embark on a programme of reconciliation and maturity as a nation. We just have to leave home. I mean as if we hadn’t already!”
Like Stevenson, she drops quietly killing judgements on the LA lifestyle, the prostitution for fame, the value system of Hollywood; it is a worthiness that can make you long for Elizabeth Taylor being gloriously impossible on a poolside lounger. “There is a kind of film-making which is really to do with selling chewing gum and toilet roll.” She looks mildly disgusted. “As for living there, which is what people advised me to do after Oscar and Lucinda, I can’t think of anything more depressing. Some people are good at networking and making the right friends, but if I tried to schmooze I’d be dribbling, I’m so bad at it. And if I really went for things, they’d turn out to be the wrong things. I’d rather just let them happen.”
Indeed, her career thus far has been full of people fighting on her behalf, extolling her brilliance, putting themselves on the line to give her a chance, whether it is Gillian Armstrong accepting a reduced budget from Fox Searchlight when the studio wanted a bigger name for Lucinda, or her co-star Fiennes calling the studio head to emphasise how happy he was to work with the unknown Australian. She is yet to disappoint any of her backers; however seriously they take their project, Blanchett can be relied upon to worry herself to death over getting it right for them. “She worries about everything,” laughs Jonathan Kent. “If you tell her she is utterly brilliant and fantastic, but you just thought she might wear her parting on the other side, the floodgates of self-doubt will be opened.”
Blanchett might have jumped up to pour my water - democrat, see - but with her cool detachment and refusal of all chumminess, she reminds me of a Henry James heroine, noble, brusque and adventurous, a modern woman and yet a throwback to a less pushy time, nursing a set of principles about privacy and self-containment that can make her rather rigid, all too ready to castigate a silly question or a slipshod observation. But she is also a great romantic. She has said - though not to me - of her husband that she is “blessed” to have him, that he is “perfection”. A friend of theirs adds that Andrew is “ballast and balance in her life, but at the same time nobody’s fool and a good source of advice”. With those she has reason to suspect, Blanchett is neither warm nor funny, but she is on some level true to herself. It was this quality that led director Anthony Minghella to expand her original cameo in his forthcoming adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s psychological thriller The Talented Mr Ripley. Blanchett plays Meredith Logue, a wealthy upstate New York girl reinventing herself on the grand European tour.
She herself did the European trip at 17, not a moment too soon for a girl longing to see if the magical landmass of Europe, source of all creativity and excitement, actually existed. Before then, her childhood of wallflower and extrovert had been disrupted by tragedy. Born in Melbourne, Cate was 10 when her American father died of a heart attack at the age of 40. Though she denies that she ever talks about her background, claiming rather absurdly that all the details in her press interviews “have been invented by journalists”, she has talked at length of how she developed a fascination for hauntings and horror movies after his death, and fantasised that he had been abducted by the CIA and that she might catch a glimpse of him in the street.
At the Methodist Ladies College in Melbourne she did drama to alleviate her self-consciousness. Watching her mother struggle made her determined to be financially independent, so she chose the odd mix of economics and fine art at Melbourne University. After her backpacking travels in Europe and England. where she was so broke she couldn’t afford to visit the Tower of London, she finished her degree and enrolled at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art. She played Rosalind in As You Like It, and her final-year production, Electra, was directed by the legendary Lindy Davis, who runs the Victoria College of the Arts. Davis’s great friend Geoffrey Rush - a respected Sydney actor with whom Blanchett would later star in Oleanna and later still in Elizabeth - recalled Electra as pinning him to his seat. Her acclaimed Ophelia four years ago was nominated for a Green Room award in Victoria, but she is not desperate to do Shakespeare on film. “Shakespeare is about sweat, it’s better to be in the space with the actors.”
Though her career is racing, and offers and compliments fall like rose petals at her feet, Blanchett is a little twitchy about the whole business. “This is a strange thing to do for a living,” she says tentatively. “I have a very ambivalent attitude towards acting, which is why I can continue to do it - I ask myself why with every job I am offered. Every time, I think, ‘Who needs another film? There are enough of them out there.’ Artistic endeavour has become so outcome-orientated, people don’t make films unless they have decided how to market them. The things I do are not like that, so it’s pretty certain I’ll fall flat on my face, but if you don’t risk, what do you gain?”
She may play other nationalities with aplomb, but Blanchett is not fighting her birthright. Her base with her husband is a house on the Sydney waterfront, and she talks with relish about the domestic joys of tinned tomatoes and sleeping in her own bed after months of rented flats and hotels. “As an Australian you grow up knowing that the land is the most important thing, and in a lot of ways you have a healthy sense of insignificance. You feel everything is happening on the other side of the world and it makes you very curious. We take the piss out of ourselves and make sure we don’t get too big for our boots - it’s a form of passive aggression, and we have to work really hard at taking anything seriously because we’re sort of bred not to.” In that ease, earnest Care is a national disgrace: she declares herself “incredibly worried” about the Australian film industry, the lack of good writing and brave ideas. “There is a homogeneity which has to explode. In 200 years’ time they will say that this was like the other fin de siècle, where people loved melodrama. We love musicals, action movies, whereas it’s small films like The Thin Red Line which will influence the film-makers of the future.”
Perhaps the source of Blanchett’s unease with self-revelation is that she does not yet quite recognise herself as an artist worthy of our honest or prurient curiosity, as another beautiful member of a make-believe world to be gawped at. She seems to fear the onset of celebrity as if it might strangle her opportunities for good, thoughtful work; at one point she vehemently contradicted my remark that a movie star and great actor could he the same thing. “Oh, I’m not so sure about that!” Perhaps she enjoys her fame more than she admits: surely nobody becomes an adored movie goddess unless they want to, surely this was the very essence of her Melbourne dreams? “I feel rather apart from the fame and success obsession that drives this business,” she reflects. “I never even thought I’d make films. I feel like one of those horses with a champ bag, so busy eating you don’t notice you’ve arrived somewhere.”
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