Why We Love...Cate Blanchett

Who else could play Queen Elizabeth and Bob Dylan?

By Kate Torgovnick
Published: Dec 30, 2007
Photography by ©Globe Photos

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is for us what Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was for sci-fi geeks. Sure, we’re not about to line up 72 hours in advance and sleep in camping chairs to be the first to see it. But last week I saw the Golden Age preview at the movies — our Cate wearing the most elaborate dresses and wigs, shouting “England will not fall while I am Queen!” and riding about on a horse in full body armor. All this and a few shots of Clive Owen. As the picture faded and the titles rose, women throughout the theater began to clap. Hard.

We’ve been waiting for this movie since 1998 when we first fell in love with Cate’s strong, fiercely intense Elizabeth I. She’s such a natural fit for the role that it’s hard to picture her as anyone else. With her narrow Siamese cat eyes, Cate is, like her character, regal, austere and commanding — not the celebrity you’d take on a raucous night of drinking, but the one you’d want to channel when firing a boyfriend or asking your boss for a raise.

But The Golden Age is not the only Cate movie coming down the pipeline. In November, she pulls a Hilary Swank, binding up her chest and wearing a wig to play a young Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. Haynes is not known for making run-of-the-mill biopics. His movie, Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story—where Barbie dolls play the lead roles— was the main reason Cate wanted to work with him. In He’s Not There, six actors play Bob Dylan and some of them are heavy hitters—Christian Bale, Richard Gere and Heath Ledger. But, hands up, who knew they were even in the movie? Cate has received 95.6 percent of the buzz—she’s the one the paparazzi scrambled to photograph on set and the one who got the Best Actress award when the movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

Haynes’ reasoning for wanting to cast Cate as Bob Dylan is inspired. “The radical strangeness of how Dylan looked was something that we have all gotten used to, so the shock value had gone away,” he recently told W Magazine. “The best way to reinvigorate that was to do something extra.” But Cate’s explanation for why she took him up on it is endearing. She told the Chicago Sun Times that “the idea of me playing Bob Dylan was so utterly ludicrous that of course I had to say yes.”

That’s why we love Cate. Every now and again, through the strong and proper, we catch a glimpse of an absurdist. She is, after all, the woman who played Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings trilogy so, “I could have the ears.” (She’s had said ears bronzed.) She was also chauffeured to a recent photo shoot in the back of a Toyota Prius.

Cate’s career has been a 10-year whirlwind. After graduating from Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art, she landed a role in the play Oleanna, co-starring with Geoffrey Rush. Before rehearsals began, Rush called Cate. “I didn’t know there were sweat glands in my elbows, but I discovered them,” she once told the New York Times. “I thought, ‘I’m talking to Geoffrey Rush. It can only go downhill from here.’”

Not so much. She was soon tapped to play Queen Elizabeth I. The role was instantly iconic, and even though she lost the Best Actress Oscar race to Gwyneth Paltrow (um, can we request a recount?), she picked up the Golden Globe. Next thing she knew, Anthony Minghella was writing a part into The Talented Mr. Ripley specifically for her to play. Then came the famous ears—Cate says the Lord of the Rings experience was, “like stepping into a video game.”

Cate’s next high-profile part was in The Aviator, where she played another woman we love—Katherine Hepburn—and earned the moniker “Academy Award winner.” The following year, she was considered for the role of Jane in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Can’t you just imagine an alternate universe where Cate got it instead of Angelina—our tabloid culture would be oh-so-different.

Speaking of which, Cate has managed to keep her personal life so quiet that I’ve heard more than one person conjecture that she’s a lesbian. Not the case. Cate is married to Andrew Upton, a playwright she met a year before filming Elizabeth. “He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant,” she said of their initial meeting. The couple has two sons—Dash, 5, and Roman, 3—and they recently moved to Australia, where Cate is taking a three-year vacation from Hollywood to co-direct the Sydney Theater Company with her husband.

But since she’s recently wrapped two films, we won’t have to wait until Cate returns from sabbatical in 2010 for her next movie. This summer, she’ll star in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—the fourth in the series. While she was filming, Cate said, “I was completely in love with Harrison Ford and I still am. He's a hottie and he's stood the test of time.” But she’s not playing a love interest—she’ll be playing a villain. After that, Cate teams up with Brad Pitt, her Babel co-star, in the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a movie based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a man who ages in reverse.

So why shoot four movies in rapid succession while raising two small kids? Cate, of course, explains it best. She told W Magazine, “I used to constantly play that Truth, Dare, Kiss or Promise game as a child. I guess I’ve never outgrown it. If somebody challenges me to do something, I say ‘okay’. I say ‘okay’ very quickly.”

Kate Torgovnick is Dame's editor-at-large. Prior to that, she was a writer/editor at Jane Magazine and her articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek and Page Six Magazine. Her first book, Cheer!, will hit bookstore shelves in March 2008.

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