Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett
Blanchett at the Berlin Film Festival, February 2007
Born	Catherine Élise Blanchett 14 May 1969 (1969-05-14) (age 40) Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Spouse(s)	Andrew Upton (1997-)
Awards won Academy Awards Best Supporting Actress 2004 The Aviator Australian Film Institute Awards Best Actress in a Supporting Role 1997 Thank God He Met Lizzie Best Actress in a Leading Role 2005 Little Fish News Limited Readers' Choice Award 2005 BAFTA Awards Best Actress in a Leading Role 1998 Elizabeth Best Actress in a Supporting Role 2004 The Aviator Golden Globe Awards Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama 1998 Elizabeth Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture 2007 I'm Not There Screen Actors Guild Awards Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture 2003 SAG award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast Other awards Critics Choice Award for Best Actress 1998 Elizabeth Critics Choice Award for Best Cast 2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King CFCA Award for Best Actress 1998 Elizabeth CFCA Award for Best Supporting Actress 2007 I'm Not There DFWFCA Award for Best Supporting Actress 2006 Notes on a Scandal Empire Award for Best Actress 1998 Elizabeth FFCC Award for Best Supporting Actress 2001 The Man Who Cried ; Bandits ; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring ; The Shipping News 2006 Notes on a Scandal Robert Altman Award 2007 I'm Not There Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress 2007 I'm Not There KCFCC Award for Best Supporting Actress 2004 The Aviator Sierra Award for Best Supporting Actress 2004 The Aviator ; The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou 2007 I'm Not There NBR Award for Best Supporting Actress 2001 The Man Who Cried ; The Shipping News ; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring NSFC Award for Best Supporting Actress 2007 I'm Not There OFCS Award for Best Actress 1998 Elizabeth OFCS Award for Best Ensemble 2002 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers OFCS Award for Best Supporting Actress 2004 The Aviator PFCS Award for Best Cast 2001 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 2002 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers PFCS Award for Best Supporting Actress 2006 Notes on a Scandal Volpi Cup for Best Actress 2007 I'm Not There

Catherine Élise "Cate" Blanchett (born 14 May 1969) is an Academy Award-winning Australian actress and stage director. She has won various other acting awards, most notably two SAGs, two Golden Globe Awards and two BAFTAs, as well as the Volpi Cup at 64th Venice International Film Festival.

Blanchett came to international attention in the 1998 film Elizabeth, directed by Shekhar Kapur, in which she played Elizabeth I of England. She is also well known for her portrayals of the elf queen Galadriel in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Colonel-Doctor Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, a role which brought her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.^[1][2][3] She and her husband Andrew Upton are currently artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company.

Biography

Early life and education

Blanchett was born in Ivanhoe, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the daughter of June, an Australian property developer and teacher, and Robert "Bob" Blanchett, a Texas-born U.S. Navy Petty Officer who later worked as an advertising executive.^[4][5] The two met while Blanchett's father's ship USS Arneb was in Melbourne. When Blanchett was 10, she lost her father to a heart attack. She has described herself during childhood as "part extrovert, part wallflower".^[6] She has two siblings; her older brother, Bob, is a computer systems engineer, and her younger sister, Genevieve, worked as a theatrical designer and received her Bachelor of Design in Architecture in April 2008.^[6]

Blanchett attended primary school in Melbourne at Ivanhoe East Primary School before completing secondary education at Methodist Ladies' College, where she explored her passion for acting. She studied Economics and Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne before leaving Australia to travel overseas. When she was 18, Blanchett went on a vacation to Egypt. A fellow guest at a cheap hotel in Cairo asked if she wanted to be an extra in a movie, and the next day she found herself in a crowd scene cheering for an American boxer losing to an Egyptian in the film Kaboria, starring the late Egyptian actor Ahmed Zaki. Blanchett returned to Australia and later moved to Sydney to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Art; graduating in 1992 and beginning her career in the theatre.

Career

Her first major stage role was opposite Geoffrey Rush in the 1993 David Mamet play Oleanna, for which she won the Sydney Theatre Critics' Best Newcomer Award.^[7] She also appeared as Ophelia in an acclaimed 1994–95 Company B production of Hamlet, directed by Neil Armfield, starring Rush and Richard Roxburgh. Blanchett appeared in the TV mini-series Heartland opposite Ernie Dingo, the mini-series Bordertown, with Hugo Weaving, and in an episode of Police Rescue entitled "The Loaded Boy". She also appeared in the 1994 telemovie of Police Rescue as a teacher taken hostage by armed bandits and in the 50 minute drama Parklands (1996), which received a limited release in Australian cinemas.

Blanchett made her international film debut with a supporting role as an Australian nurse captured by the Japanese Army during WW2 in Bruce Beresford's 1997 film Paradise Road, which co-starred Glenn Close and Frances McDormand. Her first leading role, also in 1997, was as Lucinda Leplastrier in Gillian Armstrong's production of Oscar and Lucinda opposite Ralph Fiennes. Coincidentally, Peter Carey, the Booker Prize-winning Australian author of Oscar and Lucinda, had known Blanchett's father, Bob, when both worked in the advertising industry in Melbourne. Blanchett was nominated for her first Australian Film Institute Award as Best Leading Actress for this role but lost out to Pamela Rabe in The Well. She did, however, win an AFI Award as Supporting Actress in the same year for her role as Lizzie in the romantic-comedy Thank God He Met Lizzie, co-starring Richard Roxburgh and Frances O'Connor.

Her first high-profile international role was as Elizabeth I of England in the 1998 movie Elizabeth, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Blanchett lost out to Gwyneth Paltrow for her role in Shakespeare in Love but won a British Academy (BAFTA) Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama. The following year, Blanchett was nominated for another BAFTA Award for her supporting role in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Already an acclaimed actress, Blanchett received a host of new fans when she appeared in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. She played the role of the High Elf Queen Galadriel in all three films, which hold the record as the highest grossing film trilogy of all time.^[8]

In 2005, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. This made Blanchett the first person ever to garner an Academy Award for playing a previous Oscar-winning actor/actress.

In 2006, she starred in both Babel opposite Brad Pitt, and Notes on a Scandal playing Sheba Hart opposite Dame Judi Dench. Coincidentally, Dench won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for playing Elizabeth I, the same year Blanchett lost for playing the same historical figure, albeit in a different category. Blanchett received her third Academy Award nomination for her performance in the film (Dench was also Oscar nominated).

In 2007, she won the Volpi Cup Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival and the Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe Award for portraying one of six incarnations of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' feature film I'm Not There and reprised her role as Elizabeth I in the sequel to Elizabeth entitled Elizabeth: the Golden Age.^[9] At the 80th Annual Academy Awards Blanchett received two Academy Award nominations including Best Actress for Elizabeth: the Golden Age and Best Supporting Actress for I'm Not There, becoming only the eleventh actor to ever receive two acting nominations in the same year and the first female actor to receive another nomination for the reprisal of a role.^[10]

In 2007, Blanchett was named as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People In The World and also one of the most successful actresses by Forbes magazine. She next starred in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as the psychic KGB agent Col. Dr. Irina Spalko.

Blanchett and her husband commenced three-year contracts as artistic co-directors of the Sydney Theatre Company in January 2008. Their contracts include a clause that will allow either of them to take three months out of each year to pursue other activities.

Blanchett will next be seen on screen alongside Brad Pitt in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, at the end of the year. Blanchett will provide a voice for the upcoming film Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, slated for an April 9, 2009 release, although the specific role is as yet unknown.^[11]

Personal life

Blanchett's husband is playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton, whom she met in 1996 while she was performing in a production of The Seagull. It was not love at first sight, however; "He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant", Blanchett later remarked. "It just shows you how wrong you can be, but once he kissed me that was that." The two were married on 29 December 1997. Their first child, Dashiell John, was born on 3 December 2001; their second child, Roman Robert, was born on 23 April 2004 and on 13 April 2008, they welcomed their third son, Ignatius Martin Upton, in Sydney.

After making Brighton, England their main family home for much of the early 2000s, she and her husband returned to their native Australia. In November 2006, Blanchett stated that this was due to a desire to decide on a permanent home for her children, and to be closer to her family as well as a sense of belonging to the Australian (theatrical) community.^[12] She and her family live in "Bulwarra", an 1877 sandstone mansion in the harbourside Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill. It was purchased for $10.2 million Australian dollars in 2004 and underwent extensive renovations in 2007 in order to be made more "eco-friendly".^[13][14]

In 2006, a portrait of Cate Blanchett and family painted by McLean Edwards was a finalist in the Archibald Prize, which is awarded the "best portrait painting preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics".^[15]

Blanchett is a Patron of the Sydney Film Festival. She works as the face of SK-II, the luxury skin care brand owned by Procter & Gamble. In 2007, Blanchett became the ambassador for the Australian Conservation Foundation's online campaign www.whoonearthcares.com — trying to persuade Australians to express their concerns about climate change. She is also the Patron of the development charity SolarAid. Opening the 2008 9th World Congress of Metropolis in Sydney, Blanchett was insightful: "The one thing that all great cities have in common is that they are all different." ^[16]

Filmography

Theatre credits and awards

References

External links

• Cate Blanchett at the Internet Movie Database
• Sydney Theatre Company - The Sydney Theatre Company
• Cate Blanchett - Australian Film Commission
• Cate Blanchett: A Life in Pictures, BAFTA webcast
• Interview: Recent article about Cate's environmental renovation to her Australian home
• Cate Blanchett online theatrical performance "The Crossing"