From aging to mothering to embracing her sexuality. This talented actress and producer is best known for her multi-dimensional characters, wide range of roles, and so much more.
By MARIANA MEJIA
Catherine Elise Blanchett was born on May 14, 1969, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, to June (Gamble), an Australian teacher and property developer, and Robert DeWitt Blanchett, Jr., an American advertising executive, originally from Texas. She has an older brother, Bob Blanchett, who works in the computer field, and a younger sister, Genevieve Blanchett, who is a theater designer. When Cate was ten years old, her 40-year-old father died of a sudden heart attack. “I was playing the piano. He walked past the window. I waved goodbye [but didn’t hug or kiss him]. He was going off to work. He had a heart attack that day. He was only forty. I developed this ritual where I couldn’t leave the house until I could actually physically say goodbye to everyone,” said Cate, on the reaction to her father’s death. Since then, her mother never remarried, and her grandmother moved in to help her mother. At the age of 14, with her father passing away at such a young age, her mother had to support three children by herself. Due to the financial struggles, she saw her mother dealing with, Blanchett had lied about her age to get a job at a nursing home to help her mother financially. Yet, her mother worked to give her children the best education. Because of her mother, Blanchett is known to be a bit of a workhorse, and she credits her mother with making her self-reliant and giving her a strong work ethic.
Amazingly enough, acting wasn’t Blanchett’s original course of study in school. Blanchett had originally gone to the University of Melbourne to study art history, and acting was merely a hobby. After seeing her in a play, Blanchett’s sister told her that she wasn’t seeing Blanchett anymore on stage— just her character. This led her to drop out of university and move to Sydney to attend drama school instead at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art, where she graduated in 1992. On graduating from NIDA, she joined the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, then played Felice Bauer, the bride, in Tim Daly’s Kafka Dances, winning the 1993 Newcomer Award from the Sydney Theatre Critics Circle for her performance. From there, Blanchett moved to the role of Carol in David Mamet’s searing polemic Oleanna, also for the Sydney Theatre Company, and won the Rosemont Best Actress Award, her second award that year. She then co-starred in ABC Television’s prime time drama Heartland (1994), again winning critical acclaim. In 1995, she was nominated for Best Female Performance for her role as Ophelia in the Belvoir Street Theatre Company’s production of Hamlet (1997).
“I DON’T KNOW IF I EVER REALLY WANTED TO BE AN ACTOR. I’M AN ACTIVE PERSON; THE THOUGHT OF WAITING FOR THE PHONE TO RING WASN’T SOMETHING THAT SAT HAPPILY WITH ME. BUT I KEPT DOING IT, TRYING NOT TO DO IT, AND THEN DOING IT. THERE’S SUCH A BLESSED UNREST THAT YOU FEEL ALL THE TIME, BUT MAYBE THAT’S WHAT KEEPS YOU GOING,” SAID BLANCHETT.
In that same year, Cate married Andrew Upton, an Australian playwright, screenwriter, and director, and has been married to him for 20 years. She is still married to the same man. At first, they didn’t like each other; Andrew thought that Cate was aloof and Cate thought Andrew was arrogant, but then they connected over a poker game, and she went home with him that night. The wedding took place in the National Park “Blue Mountains” in New South Wales. She claimed that they didn’t take any photographs because they couldn’t afford a photographer, even though she was already a working actress, and in fact, shortly after the wedding, she started filming the title role in Elizabeth (1998). Her first Oscar nomination was for playing Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth (1998), the same year that Judi Dench won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing that same role in Shakespeare in Love (1998). Blanchett was then praised for capturing the emotional complexity of the queen’s development from a love-struck adolescent to an indomitable political force who represses her emotional vulnerability. In 1999, Cate was chosen as one of People Magazine’s 50 most beautiful people in the world.
In 2001, she portrayed a kidnapped housewife who falls in love with her captors in Bandits (2001). She next appeared as the elf queen Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, and 2003), the film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy. Blanchett subsequently appeared in films that covered numerous genres and character types, securing her reputation as a versatile actress. In 2004, she was set to play “Portia” in Michael Radford’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (2004), thus reuniting with actor Joseph Fiennes, her co-star from the blockbuster Elizabeth (1998), but had to drop out after discovering her pregnancy in an interview with Fox Television Network, she blushingly admitted that she accepted the role of Galadriel, the elf queen, in The Lord of the Rings trilogy because she had always wanted to appear in a film wearing pointed ears. After recognizing Cate’s pregnancy, she later gave birth to her first child at age 32, a son named Dashiell John Upton, on December 3, 2001. He was named after her husband’s favorite author, Dashiell Hammett. “I had never done anything with blue screen before, or prosthetics, or anything like that. Lord of the Rings felt to me like stepping into a video game. It was another world completely. But, to be honest, I basically did it so that I could have the ears. I thought they would really work with my bare head,” said Cate Blanchett, of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.”
Cate later returned to work 7 months after giving birth to her son, Dashiell, in order to begin filming Veronica Guerin (2003). Cate then later said in a Daily Mail interview that her son Dashiell now refers to himself as “The Experiment,” because as the first-born, parenting was something of a learning process for Blanchett and her husband. Also in 2004, she played actress Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s film Aviator (2004), for which she received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in that same year. Cate was originally going to play the role of Anna in Mike Nichols’s latest film, Closer (2004), but due to her second pregnancy, she had to drop out, so it was recast for Julia Roberts instead. She then gave birth to her second child at age 34, a son named Roman Robert Upton, on April 23, 2004. Two years later, she received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for playing a teacher having an affair with an underage student in Notes on a Scandal (2006). Then, in 2008, she gave birth to her third child, a son, Ignatius Upton. She and her husband became artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company, choosing to spend more time in Australia raising their three sons. “I’ve done a lot of talking over the past six years. My husband and I have been running the Sydney Theatre Company, and it’s been magic; my kids have been able to see so many of those transient moments between acting and real life behind the scenes. But now that I’ve given it up, I’m looking forward to being a bit quieter. I’m very conscious of that. There have been times when I’ve heard myself in the past and thought: ‘Aw, just shut up,’” said Cate Blanchett. In 2015, she adopted her fourth child, a daughter named Edith Vivian Patricia Upton, with her husband, Andrew Upton. That same year, Blanchett then sank her teeth into the role of the wicked stepmother of the title character in Cinderella (2015).
Although many other productions with Cate Blanchett are to come out this year. On October 7, 2022, catch Blanchett in the drama/ music film, Tár (2022). Set in the international world of classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer/conductors and the first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra. It is definitely a diverse film like many of Blanchett’s works! Rumor has it that Blanchett will be starring in a drama/science-fiction film. Megalopolis, an architect wants to rebuild New York City as a utopian city following a devastating disaster. There is no exact date for its release, but they will announce it later this year.