ate
Blanchett is one busy actress. Since her Oscar-nominated and Golden
Globe-winning performance in 1998's Elizabeth,
she has become one of the world's most interesting movie stars, acclaimed
by both audiences and critics.She chooses parts that will not typecast her. "At the time I was offered nothing but Elizabeth-type roles, and I wasn't going to fall into that trap." Instead, Blanchett chose to play a Long Island housewife in Mike Newell's black comedy Pushing Tin. Then she played Lady Chiltern in An Ideal Husband. Next up she played WASP millionaire heiress Meredith Logue in The Talented Mr. Ripley - the list goes on.
Needless to say, she's passionate about her acting career, "I like a challenge, and I find it thrilling to leap into situations that are bigger than me."
was aloof and I thought he was arrogant," she said. "It just shows how wrong you can be. But once he kissed me that was that." And the two got married a year later, in June 1997.
Since the making of Elizabeth, which separated the couple for three
months, they've tried to be as inseparable as possible. "It was so
painful," she recalls, "we just couldn't do it again. So
Andrew's been flexible this year with his work (a screenplay). He's been
able to take it with him."And as the pace of Blanchett's career continues to be exhausting, her family life is as important to her as her acting - especially since she and her husband are expecting their first child, due in late 2001. "I would rather commit euthanasia on my career than let my life slip away from me," she muses.
For Blanchett fans and Lord of the Ring fans alike, a treat to
watch for is her upcoming role as Galadriel, the wise and beautiful Queen
of the Elves in the eagerly-anticipated Lord of the Rings trilogy.
This time she'll display her regal bearing while wearing a blond wig,
glam-disco platform boots and pointy silicone Elf ears. "Oh, the
queen of the elves is a very different queen (from) Elizabeth. You'll
see," she said during a press briefing.Blanchett readily admits that she was drawn to the character because of Galadriel's fascinating strength. "I loved playing Galadriel because she is so conic. She is the one in The Fellowship of The Ring who truly tests Frodo. I also think she has a profound message to give about taking responsibility for ourselves and our actions. And, yes," she laughs, "I have to admit I have always wanted to have pointy ears."
Blanchett was born in Melbourne, Australia on May 14th, 1969. Her father passed away when she was only 10 and Cate and her two siblings were raised by her mother, a schoolteacher. Blanchett considers her childhood as quite normal but she does remember herself as "part extrovert, part wallflower."
She attended Methodist Ladies College, a private high school in Melbourne where she was part of the "Cato" House drama group. In spite of Blanchett's involvement in several drama productions at high school, she wasn't yet bitten by the acting bug. Instead, she chose to study fine arts and economics at the University of Melbourne but left her studies before finishing her courses because she wanted to travel.
When Blanchett returned to Australia, she auditioned for and was accepted at the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art. Blanchett remembers it as a life-changing move: "It was only when I realized how actors have the power to move people that I decided to pursue acting as a career."
Her feature film debut came in 1997 with noted Australian director Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road, in which she plays a shy Australian nurse. From then on her road led straight to the top. The 1997 critically acclaimed Oscar and Lucinda was her breakthrough. It was Blanchett in her starring role as Lucinda Leplastrier opposite Ralph Fiennes that made Hollywood take notice. The director of Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur, was "blown away" by footage of Blanchett in Oscar and Lucinda. "Apart from her breathtaking beauty, here was an actress of indomitable strength who was perfect for this character," said Kapur. And for Blanchett, the part as Elizabeth was "a dream role."
What Blanchett tends to look for in a role are first of all good scripts
and then interesting directors. Shortly after Elizabeth's success, she
returned to the theater to star in David Hare's Plenty at London's
Abbey Road Theatre. She told the Telegraph Magazine: "There
were people in Australia who called my agent and said, 'What are you doing
putting her in a play for six months? This is absolute suicide,' and I
just thought, oh shut up."When asked why she agreed to take the part of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, she replies, "How could I not? It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences. It will never happen the way it happened again; you really felt that in the cast and crew."
The Lord of the Rings is one of the most colossal movie productions ever undertaken with a cost rumored to be around $300 million. J.R.R. Tolkien's immortal tale of the struggle between good and evil set in the fantasy world of Middle-Earth, was filmed in New Zealand as a Star Wars-style trilogy over a period of almost a year.
The story is set in a mythic realm completely out of ordinary time. Frodo Baggins, a young hobbit, together with his unusual fellowship of companions, sets out on a journey through Middle-Earth to destroy an ancient magic Ring that Frodo inherited from his elderly cousin Bilbo. Their quest to destroy the One Ring pits the fellowship against Sauron, Lord of the Dark Tower, who desperately wants the ring for himself because it will make Sauron ruler of Middle-Earth and will give him ultimate power over all.
The mastermind behind the new real-life movie version is Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners) who brings a deep love for the Tolkien books to his project. Jackson had long felt that the time had come to film a complete cinematic telling of The Lord of the Rings. Visual technology had finally reached the point where it could tackle the creatures and the landscapes of
Tolkien's fantastically magical imagination. In an unprecedented move, Jackson pushed to make the three films back to back and to shoot them in the most remote parts of New Zealand. "I felt that in order to do the tale's epic nature justice, we had to shoot it as one big story because that's what it is."