Cate Blanchett
Catherine Élise Blanchett is an Australian actor and producer. Regarded as one of the best performers of her generation, she is recognised for her versatile work across stage and screen. Blanchett has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, four British Academy Film Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and three Screen Actors Guild Awards, in addition to nominations for three Primetime Emmy Awards and a Tony Award.
A graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Art, she began her career on the Australian stage in 1992 and made her feature film debut in 1997. She came to international prominence for her performance as Queen Elizabeth I in the period drama Elizabeth, for which she received her first Academy Award nomination. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in the biopic The Aviator, and Best Actress for playing a neurotic former socialite in the comedy-drama Blue Jasmine. Her other Oscar-nominated roles were in Notes on a Scandal, I'm Not There, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Carol, and Tár, making her the most-nominated Australian. Her biggest commercial successes include The Lord of the Rings trilogy, its prequel The Hobbit trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Cinderella, Thor: Ragnarok, Ocean's 8, and Don't Look Up.
Blanchett has performed in over twenty stage productions. She and her husband, Andrew Upton, were the artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company from 2008 to 2013. Some of her stage roles during this period were in revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire, Uncle Vanya, Big and Little and The Maids. She made her Broadway debut in 2017 in The Present, for which she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She portrayed Phyllis Schlafly in the FX on Hulu miniseries Mrs. America and a journalist in Apple TV+ miniseries Disclaimer, both of which earned her nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.
Blanchett is the recipient of several honorary awards. The Australian government awarded her the Centenary Medal in 2001, and she was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2017. In 2012, she was appointed Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. Blanchett was honoured by the Museum of Modern Art and received the British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015. Time named her one of its 100 most influential people in the world in 2007. In 2018, she was ranked among the world's highest-paid actresses. She also received honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from the University of New South Wales, University of Sydney and Macquarie University.
Early life and education
Catherine Élise Blanchett was born on 14 May 1969 in the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe. Her Australian mother, June, was a property developer and teacher; and her American father, Robert DeWitt Blanchett Jr., a Texan native, was a United States Navy chief petty officer who became an advertising executive. They met when Robert's ship broke down in Melbourne. When Blanchett was ten, her father died of a heart attack, leaving her mother to raise the family. Blanchett is the second of three children, with an older brother and younger sister. Her ancestry includes English, some Scottish, and remote French roots.Blanchett has described herself as a "part extrovert, part wallflower" child. During her teenage years she had a penchant for dressing in traditionally masculine clothing, and went through goth and punk phases, at one point shaving her head. She attended primary school in Melbourne at Ivanhoe East Primary School; for her secondary education, she attended Ivanhoe Girls' Grammar School and then Methodist Ladies' College, where she explored her passion for the performing arts. In her late teens and early twenties, she worked at a nursing home in Victoria. After high school, she began a Bachelor of business administration at the University of Melbourne. While in Egypt, Blanchett was asked to be an extra as an American cheerleader in the Egyptian boxing film Kaboria ; in need of money, she accepted the job. On returning to Australia, she moved to Sydney and enrolled at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1992 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Career
1992–2000: Early work and international breakthrough
Blanchett's first stage role was opposite Geoffrey Rush in the 1992 David Mamet play Oleanna for the Sydney Theatre Company. That year, she was also cast as Clytemnestra in a production of Sophocles' Electra. A couple of weeks after rehearsals, the actress playing the title role pulled out, and director Lindy Davies cast Blanchett in the role. Her performance as Electra became one of her most acclaimed at NIDA. In 1993, Blanchett was awarded the Sydney Theatre Critics' Best Newcomer Award for her performance in Timothy Daly's Kafka Dances and won Best Actress for her performance in Mamet's Oleanna, making her the first actor to win both categories in the same year. Blanchett played the role of Ophelia in a 1994–1995 Company B production of Hamlet directed by Neil Armfield, starring Rush and Richard Roxburgh, and was nominated for a Green Room Award.Blanchett's first screen appearance was in the 1994 TV miniseries Heartland opposite Ernie Dingo, and she went on to appear in the miniseries Bordertown with Hugo Weaving, and in an episode of Police Rescue entitled "The Loaded Boy". She also appeared in the 50-minute drama short film Parklands, which received an Australian Film Institute nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
Blanchett made her feature film debut with a supporting role as an Australian nurse captured by the Japanese Army during World War II, in Bruce Beresford's film Paradise Road, which co-starred Glenn Close and Frances McDormand. The film made just over $2 million at the box office on a budget of $19 million and received mixed reviews from critics. Her first leading role came later that year as eccentric heiress Lucinda Leplastrier in Gillian Armstrong's romantic drama Oscar and Lucinda, opposite Ralph Fiennes. Blanchett received wide acclaim for her performance, with Emanuel Levy of Variety declaring, "luminous newcomer Blanchett, in a role originally intended for Judy Davis, is bound to become a major star". She earned her first AFI Award nomination as Best Leading Actress for Oscar and Lucinda. She won the AFI Best Actress Award in the same year for her starring role as Lizzie in the romantic comedy Thank God He Met Lizzie, co-starring Richard Roxburgh and Frances O'Connor.
File:Shekhar kapur 02.jpg|thumb|upright|Shekhar Kapur, director of Elizabeth
Blanchett played a young Elizabeth I in the historical drama Elizabeth, directed by Shekhar Kapur. The film catapulted her to international prominence, winning her the Golden Globe Award and British Academy Award, and her first Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award nominations. In his review for Variety, critic David Rooney wrote of her performance, "Blanchett conveys with grace, poise and intelligence that Elizabeth was a wily, decisive, advanced thinker, far too aware of her own exceptional nature to bow to any man. builds the juicy character almost imperceptibly from a smart but wary young woman who may be in over her head into a powerful creature of her own invention." Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Blanchett's performance "brings spirit, beauty and substance to what otherwise might have been turned into a vacuous role", and Alicia Potter writing for the Boston Phoenix stated that, "In the end, Kapur's crown jewel is a tale of twin transformations, that of Elizabeth into one of history's most enigmatic and powerful women, and that of Blanchett into, well, a bona fide screen queen."
The following year, Blanchett appeared in Bangers, an Australian short film and part of Stories of Lost Souls, a compilation of thematically related short stories. The short was written and directed by her husband, Andrew Upton, and produced by Blanchett and Upton. She also appeared in the Mike Newell comedy Pushing Tin, with her performance singled out by critics, and the critically acclaimed and financially successful film The Talented Mr. Ripley, alongside Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. She received her second BAFTA nomination for her performance as socialite Meredith Logue in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
2001–2007: ''The Lord of the Rings'' and established actor
Blanchett appeared in Peter Jackson's blockbuster trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, playing the role of elf leader Galadriel in all three films. The trilogy was a major critical and financial success, earning $2.981 billion at the box office worldwide, and all three films were later ranked within the top 10 greatest fantasy movies of all time in a poll conducted by American magazine Wired in 2012. In addition to The Lord of the Rings, 2001 also saw Blanchett diversify her portfolio with a range of roles in the dramas Charlotte Gray and The Shipping News and the American crime-comedy Bandits, for which she earned a second Golden Globe and second SAG Award nomination. Bandits marked Blanchett's first notable foray into the comedy genre, with Ben Falk of the BBC declaring her and co-star Billy Bob Thornton "a real find as comedians" and calling her performance as an unsatisfied housewife caught between two escaped convicts "unhinged, though undeniably sexy".In 2002, Blanchett starred opposite Giovanni Ribisi in Tom Tykwer-directed Heaven, the first film in an unfinished trilogy by writer-director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Her performance in the film as a grieving woman who commits a desperate act of terrorism was highly praised, with Stephen Holden of The New York Times calling it, "the most compelling screen performance of her career" and going on to state, "Although Ms. Blanchett face has always registered emotion with a mercurial fluidity, the immediacy of feeling she conveys in "Heaven" is astonishing." 2003 saw Blanchett again playing a wide range of roles: Galadriel in the third and final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy ; the Ron Howard-directed western thriller The Missing; Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, playing two roles, for which she received an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female nomination; and the biographical Veronica Guerin, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination. In 2004, Blanchett portrayed a pregnant journalist chronicling an underwater voyage by an eccentric oceanographer in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Blanchett won her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2005 for her highly acclaimed portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. This made Blanchett the first actor in history to win an Academy Award for portraying another Academy Award-winning actor. She lent her Oscar statuette to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote that Blanchett portrayed Hepburn with "lip-smacking vivacity", and Roger Ebert lauded the performance, describing it as "delightful and yet touching; mannered and tomboyish". During her preparation for the role, and at the request of Scorsese, Blanchett reviewed 35-millimeter prints of all of Hepburn's first fifteen screen performances to study and memorize her poise, mannerisms and speech pattern. Blanchett spoke of the responsibility of portraying such an iconic star, stating, "Representing Kate in the same medium, film, in which she existed was very daunting. But because she was so private and few people really knew her, we basically know Hepburn through her films. So of course you have to give a nod to her screen persona when playing her." That year, Blanchett also won the Australian Film Institute Best Actress Award for her performance as Tracy Heart, a former heroin addict, in the Australian film Little Fish, co-produced by her and her husband's production company, Dirty Films. Though lesser known globally than some of her other films, the sober and sensitive Little Fish received great critical acclaim in Blanchett's native Australia and was nominated for 13 Australian Film Institute awards.
File:Flickr - Siebbi - Cate Blanchett .jpg|thumb|upright|Blanchett attending an event for The Good German at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival
In 2006, Blanchett portrayed Hedda Gabler at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the Sydney Theatre Company production of Hedda Gabler, directed by Robyn Nevin. She then starred opposite Brad Pitt in Alejandro González Iñárritu's multi-lingual, multi-narrative drama Babel, as one half of a grieving couple who get caught up in an international incident in Morocco. Babel received seven Academy Award nominations. She also co-starred in Steven Soderbergh's World War II-era drama The Good German with George Clooney, and the psychological thriller Notes on a Scandal opposite Dame Judi Dench. Blanchett received a third Academy Award nomination for her performance in the latter film, where she portrays a lonely teacher who embarks on an affair with a 15-year-old student and becomes the object of obsession for an older woman played by Dench. Both Blanchett's and Dench's performances were highly acclaimed, with Peter Bradshaw writing in The Guardian, "Director Richard Eyre, with unshowy authority, gets the best out of Dench and Blanchett and, with great shrewdness, elicits from these two actors all the little tensions and exasperations - as well as the genuine tenderness - in their tragically fraught relationship."
In 2007, Blanchett was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World, and appeared on Forbes Celebrity 100 list. She made a cameo as Janine, forensic scientist and ex-girlfriend of Simon Pegg's character, in Edgar Wright's action comedy film Hot Fuzz. The cameo was uncredited and she gave her fee to charity. She reprised her role as Queen Elizabeth I in the 2007 sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age directed by Shekhar Kapur, and also portrayed Jude Quinn, one of six incarnations of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' experimental film I'm Not There. She won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Award, and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Jude Quinn. At the 80th Academy Awards, Blanchett received two nominations – Best Actress for Elizabeth: the Golden Age and Best Supporting Actress for I'm Not There – becoming the first actress to receive a second nomination with the reprisal of a role. Of her achievement that year, Roger Ebert said, "That Blanchett could appear in the same Toronto International Film Festival playing Elizabeth and Bob Dylan, both splendidly, is a wonder of acting."