SHAPE-SHIFTER

Interviewing an actor, WILL SELF thought, would be like discussing metaphysics with a parrot. in fact, his meeting with Cate Blanchett was more like a bizarre blind date which left him obsessed with one question: is she big or is she small?

I want to be like Bernard Shaw. By that I don't mean I want to be dead, or bearded, or celibate, or a wearer of purpose designed, Jaeger, all-wool suits. No, the Shaw I want to be is Shaw the dramatist, the salon frequenter, the chaste wooer of actresses.

On a fine evening such as this, if I were Shaw, I would've been cycling along the Embankment, my beard whipping over my shoulder like some hairy standard of rebellion, on my way to see a revival of one of my own plays, followed by a little dinner at Sheekey's with my glamorous actress protege. But, as it stands, I was dogging rather than whipping, the play was a revival of David Hare's "Plenty", and all I managed was a brief backstage chat with its star, Cate Blanchett, about "Abba: The Musical", rather than a Shavian tête-à-tête.

Not that Blanchett would've been averse to a Sheekey's supper of fish. When I cornered her for a longer chat, in the same dressing room a few days after seeing her perform, she told me that she knew "just about every dish on the menu". "you should try the organic salmon," Blanchett said in the afternoon glow of her dressing room of the Albery Theatre. "It's fantastic."

The actress is, herself, fantastic; and in the almost aquatic limpidity of the distempered room she might well have been some kind of organic salmon too. Slivery as she is, arching back as she was.

But what size of catch does Blanchett present? If I were an angler, how far apart would my hands need to be spaced in order to convey the right idea of her heft? In truth, it's this, the preoccupation with the actress's size, which really separates me and old Bernard. You can hardly imagine him pacing the streets of Theatre Land agonising over Mrs. Patrick Campbell's inside-leg measurement. Yet I'd spent most of my stroll from home to St. Martin's Lane entirely preoccupied by Blanchett's bulk.

I'd met Blanchett before, for another article, in the winter. It was just before the "Plenty" revival had opened, on the excruciatingly protracted run-up to her being beaten to the Best Actress Oscar by the androgyne Gwyneth Paltrow. On the occasion we'd spent several hours together. It was more like a bizarre blind date than an interview. We rendezvoused at the Groucho Club, had a drink and went to see an exhibition of portraits of Elizabeth I at the National Portrait Gallery. Later we had another drink at the Colony Room, back in Soho, before I dropped her off to meet her husband.

I suppose that one of the reasons I found the encounter peculiar is that, unlike my other interview subjects, there was nothing I had to talk to Blanchett about. Interviewing an actor is analogous to discussing metaphysics with a parrot; whereof can they speak without a script?

It's the kind of conundrum Wittgenstein would have relished. Some actors complain of being asked to do interviews in character, yet Lady Macbeth is in no position to dissect her own murderous motivations. Or, alternatively, we have the minutiae of their own, very ordinary, very bourgeois lies. As Blanchett put it to me: "Yeah - but in the end what they really want to know about is your sex life."

We don't want to know about that, do we? We're intelligent, grown-up people, and we have a good idea about what the sex lives of 29-year-old, happily married actresses are like, don't we? Blanchett did confide that she'd been finding the performing grind difficult recently because she was "hellishly pre-menstrual". And I'd imagine that just about sums it up - wouldn't you?

No - it's her actual size that matters. On her first meeting I found her presence tentative to the point of being experimental. It was if she'd taken it upon herself to fully epitomise the expression "to move lightly upon the surface of the Earth"; or perhaps that she was according ordinary life itself a provisional status, and waiting to see if she'd passed the audition.

She was wearing a full-length, tan leather overcoat, patterned so as to appear quasi-lizard skin. Beneath this there was an interestingly tufty black sweater, which might have been chenille, or possibly something more exotic. Her trousers were dark to the point of being opaque, although there was no hiding the fact that Blanchett is achingly svelte. Her blonde hair was tightly scraped back, exposing an absolutely flawless face.

I have an unusual, if not say disturbing, capacity for the minute examination of people; and the Blanchett face received the undivided, highly focused attention of my highly insidious porecam. There was not a wrinkle, not a single dermatological glitch. Even so, this is a face with real character and - for an actor - a lively intellect.

Later on, as we wandered around the plush rooms of the National Portrait Gallery, examining the stylised physiognomies of the past, she made a little moue and said that beauty was "all in the mouth".

Yes, it was all well and good, this actress-observing. And I could've got to like it just as much as any of the other strange things I've been compelled to stare in the face during my writing career. But it took me no closer to judging her size.

She had no side - an marvellous Australian expression - being direct affable and wholly uncoquettish. She drank unnecessary Diet Coke and dabbled an order of chips in tomato ketchup. In the gallery we wandered from a bright room of garish political cartoons, into a vestibule full of the current and recent British culturalati. Francis Bacon's mutant boiled-potato visage weighed down upon us - Blanchett was impressed: He'd be the same upside down y'know - he's that strange."

As we strolled into room after room, we examined the detail of the embroidery on the heliotropic extravaganzas which were the contemporary portraits of Elizabeth I. Had she read much biography in order to prepare for the film part? Only a couple - she doesn't find biography congenial. Did she require a lot of assistance from a voice coach to get the accent right? Not really.

At the far end of the gallery she bought 10 or so postcards and a few other masterful figurative paintings. We talked of children, of nest-making. She and her husband, the script editor and writer Andrew Upton, have a house in Sydney, but they've barely been there in the past year and a half, as their careers have propelled them around the globe. It didn't seem to rankle; the nearest Blanchett came to damning the road was to mention an occasion when she wore dirty clothes rather than repack her suitcase for the ninth time in a week.

Her American father died when she was 10 - a trauma she doesn't so much play down as volley into the net of inquiry. She says she is close to her two siblings, all still in Australia; and the only worry she evinces about how she is perceived by others is that she has a healthy anxiety about acting in front of old friends.

Although Blanchett is only 29 she's had a solid grounding on the stage in Australia; and perhaps more importantly, she is an actor who could have done other things. She told me that she "loathed economics" when she was doing it at university in Australia, but I gained the distinct impression that this was another example of a very genuine and unaffected modesty. In interviews I had read she continually stressed her feeling that luck played a big part in the breaks she'd had. A point which was underscored on that evening by our venue: she had "run into" Shekhar Kapur in the Groucho Club bar when he was casting "Elizabeth".

When I got home my wife asked me how it went : "Fine - she's a wee thing, y'know."
"Oh really," she purred sceptically. "She looked pretty big in that film to me."
"Well, I think I might have a better fix on that, having spent more than three hours with her."
"Really?"
"Really. I mean, I know that given my freakish height, I tend to view most ordinary people as all of a piece, but in this case I don't think I can have made a mistake."
"No?"
"No - after all, I saw her in a bar, in the street, at the gallery - there were plenty of things against which to judge her true scale. It's not like I was Bogart on a box and she was Bergman ina hole. This wasn't a screen impression - I saw the true Blanchett."

In May I had lunch at the Ivy with Marianne Faithfull to interview her. We got onto the subject of a projected film of Marianne's biography. The actress up to play her was none other than Cate Blanchett: "I went to see her the other night in 'Plenty'," Faithfull growled, and my dear, she's a big, strapping thing." "Are you sure, Marianne?" I demurred. "I spent some time with her and she seemed quite petite."
"Well, she looked big from where I was."

This exchange I duly reported to my wife as well, and the matter of Blanchett's size - petite? galumphing? - became something of a family issue. On the night we were scheduled to see 'Plenty', I stayed behind to put the kids to bed - not something which was incumbent on Shaw - while my wife took in the first act. At the theatre I wandered from circle bar to crush bar to stalls bar and back searching for her. I hadn't been in a theatre for a bout 20 years and now I remembered why - the people, my dear. Here they were, sweatily playing their part by making loud extempore comments on the act they'd just seen:

"Just the everyday story of a neurotic woman...." a man boomed at his wife; "She's mad!" boomed a second.

The "she" in question is Susan Traherne, the lead character in 'Plenty'. Traherne is a neurotic femme fatale, whose exciting time with the Special Operations Executive in wartime France leaves her unprepared for the disturbing lack of plenty in postwar Britain.

Naturally, with Hare now one of the Tony-ennobled, and the Red Dawn victorious in our unfortunately still sceptr'd isle, the play's revival has been of some moment. Does its critique of Britain still stand up? As far as Blanchett the actor was concerned, it was a field day for the critics who said that she "couldn't do the accent", and that, as an Australian - and a film star - she couldn't bring the requisite down-home know-how to this quintessentially English character.

I finally located the wife: "She's brilliant," she trilled. "And you know what? Although I can't stand David Hare, this play isn't too bad either."
"Never mind that," I snapped. "What about the size question?"
"The size?"
"How big is she?"
"Well, she's big - tallish at any rate."
"Steeply raked stage? Special lighting? All the other actors are short....? There are ways, you know....?"

She was brilliant. The voice boomed a bit - which made it seem affected, but she had 50s RP down pat. And she moved brilliantly, her whole body like a taut bow: an organic salmon of an actress. I'd been worried that I wouldn't be able to suspend disbelief in Blanchett's Traherne, having met the real woman, but the set was purpose-built to assist theatrophobes like me. The stage was lacking in depth and steeply raked. The proscenium was masked entirely with plain black sheets so as to resemble a film frame; and there were even rifles projected onto the curtain between scenes.

"It's really rather good," I whispered to my wife. "Far better staged than I remember the theatre being."
"That's because you haven't been in 20 years," she hissed. "There have been improvements."

Improvements,fair enough, but they couldn't possibly monkey around with her height. As soon as the curtain was down we were out back at the stage door. Admitted to the star's dressing room, I introduced her to the wife and I could only just forbear from urging them to stand back to back. Still, there was no need for fine comparisons; clearly I'd been wrong. Blanchett wasn't small. She was a svelte-yet-strapping 173 centimetres thereabouts.

There were a couple of friends in the dressing room with her and drinks were offered, while the chat turned to the perennial crisis of the West End. Blanchett was visibly still tingling from her performance. No surprises there - it can't ever be straightforward to move from two hours of impersonating a deranged ex-servicewoman to light badinage about the Abba musical. Still, as I observed her tense movements from leg to leg, her back archings and still-sudden lunges, it occured to me why I was still so hung up on the size issue.

In part I suppose it was simply an ironic take on the whole industry of stardom. Blanchett's modesty seemed entirely for real - but could it be? It was like the prisoner's dilemma: was she a good enough actress to pretend to be this modest? But the other aspect of the scale question was more pertinent: was she a good enough actress to alter her height? To which the answer was a resolute "yes". Blanchett really does use her whole body to act, and on the first occasion we met she wasn't acting at all. Hence the modesty; hence finding her "petite". She wasn't petite - she was just resting.

Still not content, I went back to see her a few days later. I surprised her sleeping - the fruit of a happy marriage: "We were up all night hanging these new etchings we're excited about." When I heard whom they were by - Paula Rego - I understood the excitement. Blanchett coiled herself up in the corner in her silk slip and puffed on Silk Cuts.

We talked about the ill-fated Oscars: "It wasn't too bad because I was doing this....so I wasn't sitting in LA for two weeks getting wound up by people's expectations." I asked her about some of the critical reactions to her performance in 'Plenty' and she told me she didn't read reviews. I believed her. I asked her if she felt the next film had to be big and Hollywood and she said "I'm in no rush." And I believed that too.

No, as Blanchett smoked and arched and chatted, it came home to me that she really was all of these things: a very good actress, a genuinely beautiful woman, a genuinely modest one, and...actual size. Then I went home and started work on my 'Pygmalion'. I feel it will be a perfect vehicle for her.

Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday, July 31st, 1999. (First published in The Independant UK).

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Aussie Cate Online © 1999 Lin, Dean, Lance
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