Consistent Cate Blanchett
Australian Actress Cate Blanchett Rarely Disappoints
Since first appearing as the Virgin Queen in 1998's Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett has wowed audiences and won coveted awards with her varied and poignant performances.
Hardly a year goes by without Cate Blanchett receiving a nomination for a Golden Globe, Oscar, or other such accolade. With the exceptions of 2000 and 2005, Blanchett has released at least two films a year since 1997. In 2007 alone, Blanchett is appearing in the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, reprising her breakout role as Elizabeth I in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and is featured in the documentary In The Company of Actors, a film that follows the staging of Andrew Upton’s play Hedda Gabler—starring Blanchett and Hugo Weaving—in Brooklyn, New York after a successful run in Australia.
Queen, and Then Some
Though the actress remains consistent with the amount of work she does and the amount of praise she receives, her film choices are anything but. With only a handful of films behind her, Cate Blanchett turned out an Oscar-nominated performance as Queen Elizabeth I in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth. From there, she has traversed time periods, continents, and genres. Always comfortable in costume, in 1999, she followed Elizabeth with The Talented Mr. Ripley and an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. From Italy-bound American, circa 1950s, to a duped Victorian wife—she also starred in the contemporary comedy Pushing Tin that year—Blanchett has revealed a timeless, borderless acting ability. Though a role has yet to take her into the future, she has seen into it (The Gift), and her role as elf queen Galadriel (The Lord of the Rings) took Blanchett out of earthly time altogether.
Independent Woman
Cate Blanchett is no stranger to the blockbuster. The Lord of the Rings trilogy took several years and several hundred million to make, and more than made it back. Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, in which she gave her Academy Award-winning performance as Katherine Hepburn, was a box office hit. Having found success in such big-budget films—she is currently filming action-adventure Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with Harrison Ford—Blanchett still chooses many independent and smaller-scale projects destined for limited release. Among them, Tom Tykwer’s Heaven and 2006’s Babel by director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. Blanchett takes supporting roles, as in Babel and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and plays them with the same dedication she would with any leading role. In fact, she has already been awarded the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival for her performance as one of six incarnations of folk singer Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There.
Cate Blanchett’s success comes down to smart choices and undeniable talent. One wonders if it will be her second turn as Elizabeth—or the role after that, or the role after that—that wins her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Whether she has her eye on the prize or not, there is little doubt that it will be given to her sooner or later.
