Before she became one of the greatest actors of her generation, Cate Blanchett rubbed a genie’s lamp and wished for a never-ending packet of Tim Tams.
Yes, that’s Blanchett, in her early 20s, in an ad that is etched into the Australian imagination.
Fast forward to 2023 and Blanchett, now 53, has just come off a magical awards season run, winning a Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice and BAFTA award for her titular turn in the psychological drama Tár, as a conductor coming undone.
She was also nominated for best actress at this week’s Oscars — but was pipped at the post by Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s Michelle Yeoh.
Still, with two Oscar wins already under her belt, Blanchett is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated Australians in Hollywood.
While many make the pilgrimage to the States to further their careers, few get a foothold in the industry.
But not only has Blanchett found a foothold, she’s climbed the highest peaks. So what sets her apart?
From a quiet Melbourne suburb to the stage
Born in 1969, Catherine Elise Blanchett spent her childhood exploring the hidden parks of Ivanhoe, a leafy suburb in Melbourne’s north-east, and learning piano and German.
Blanchett is the middle child of three, and her father, a US naval officer, met her mother, a teacher, when his ship broke down in Melbourne.
She was seven when her mother first took her to the theatre, to see a production of The Mikado starring famous character actor Frank Thring.
She told ABC Classic earlier this year: “Watching him on stage I just wanted to be up there amongst it all; it seemed to be such a playful and alive place to be.”
By nine, Blanchett’s piano teacher had picked up on her real ambitions and called an end to their lessons, as the actor recounted to The Guardian this year: “[The teacher] would have these concerts and she instinctively picked up on how I would just come along and act the part of a musician.”
Sitting at the piano one morning, Blanchett waved goodbye to her father as he set off for his job as an advertising executive. Later that day, he died of a heart attack, aged 40. She was 10 years old.
She gave up the piano after that.
After finding her voice in her school’s choir (she has a three-octave vocal range), Blanchett became a drama captain at Methodist Ladies’ College and later won a place at Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Arts.
Fresh out of drama school and unemployed, she took a job for a casting agent, reading lines in other actors’ auditions.
Then she was offered an understudy role in a Sydney Theatre Company (STC) production of Top Girls in 1993.
She told ABC RN’s The Screen Show in January: “I was advised not to take on [that role] … because I should wait to go to the company in a lead role.
“[But] I said: ‘I’m not working, I need to work, I’m going to be at the Sydney Theatre Company with Kerry Walker and Linda Cropper, and I get to perform for three weeks, I’m taking the job.”
Her next STC gig was as the lead in David Mamet’s Oleanna, opposite Geoffrey Rush, for which she won the Sydney Theatre Critics best actress award.
A successful experiment
Blanchett has said that she entered the entertainment industry as an “experiment”.
By 1997, that experiment paid off when she landed her first leading role in a film, as wealthy heiress Lucinda in Australian director Gillian Armstrong’s romantic drama Oscar and Lucinda.
She then burst onto the world’s screens in 1998 with historical drama Elizabeth, winning a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and her first Oscar nomination.
The Screen Show’s Jason Di Rosso says: “Elizabeth is a great example of Blanchett at her best, showing how, along with her incredible technique, she is capable of moments of spontaneous nuance.”
Blanchett carries the entire film on her shoulders as her Queen Elizabeth I goes from vulnerable youth to commanding monarch.
Elizabeth director Shekhar Kapur told The Screen Show in January that Blanchett is the hardest-working actor that he’s ever directed.
“She tries and then tries to get it better, and she’s a very instinctual actor,” says Kapur.
Kapur says what sets Blanchett apart is combining that intuition with intelligence as well as the skills she developed from years studying and working in theatre.
“I have an acute sense of audience [on stage] … I miss it when I’m not on stage,” Blanchett told The Screen Show.
Some of her notable theatre roles include the titular Hedda Gabler (2004), a gender-switched King Richard II in The War of the Roses and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (both in 2009), all at STC.
The latter two productions were conceived by Blanchett and her husband, playwright and director Andrew Upton, during their tenure as co-artistic directors of STC from 2008 to 2012.
During that time — as Blanchett’s star in Hollywood continued to rise — the couple lured big-name international talent, including Steven Soderbergh, to their home base in Sydney.
Cate, the chameleon
Following Blanchett’s breakout in Elizabeth, Upton had warned her about Hollywood’s obsession with youth: “Sweetheart, you’ve probably got about five years.”
She defied her husband’s prediction and went on to star in both critically acclaimed and blockbuster movies.
Those movies include The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003), playing ethereal elven queen Galadriel, as well as quieter, devastating films including Australian drama Little Fish (2005), British psychological thriller Notes on a Scandal (2006) and the queer romantic drama Carol (2015).
She had previously worked with Carol director Todd Haynes as one of six actors playing Bob Dylan in 2007’s I’m Not There, stuffing a sock down her pants in order to better embody the legendary male rocker.
But it was her studied, flawless embodiment of Hollywood legend Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator that won Blanchett her first Oscar in 2005.
Almost a decade later, she won her second for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, in which she played a Manhattan socialite newly down on her luck. (She says she was unaware of the abuse allegations against Allen when she worked with him.)
Thanks to her sensual turns in Carol, 2018’s disappointing crime caper Ocean’s 8 and Tár, she’s also become somewhat of a lesbian icon in the last decade.
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Di Rosso says: “She is one of the great actors of her time, especially those working in and around Hollywood.
“It’s an old cliche that a great actor is a chameleon but some aren’t — some play the same person. But Cate is capable of such great transformation on screen.”
Tár and beyond
Blanchett’s long career has also seen her transform into prickly and unlikeable characters; including campy, memorable villains in both the Indiana Jones and Marvel universes.
She also played the perfectly coiffed anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly in TV series Mrs. America and was almost unrecognisable as an obnoxious conservative news anchor in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up.
“She’s always been intelligent about what she does and having been trained so well, knowing theatre and clearly being a cinephile, she’s not the kind of person that would have ridiculous hang-ups about who she wanted to play based on likeability,” says Di Rosso.
Her latest complex antihero is Lydia Tár, a world-famous orchestra conductor whose life begins to unravel after her abusive behaviour comes to light.
Director Todd Field wrote the part specifically for Blanchett, telling The Guardian: “I think she is one of the greatest practitioners of the art that has ever lived.”
She is on screen for almost all of the film’s two-hour, 39-minute run time, and is utterly compelling, whether she’s masterfully dispensing with her daughter’s schoolyard bully or totally losing the plot.
For the role, Blanchett applied her usual dedication, deeply researching conducting, picking up German again, and finally returning to the piano.
When asked about how she approached conducting the Dresden Philharmonic, which stands in for the fictional orchestra in Tár, she told The Screen Show: “I’m acutely aware of … that liminal space between you as an actor standing as yourself in the wings and the moment before you step on stage into character.
“And I’ve learned over the years to trick myself that the profound and deep anxiety [in that moment] is, in fact, excitement. So I tried that trick and it worked.”
To this day, Blanchett is on the front foot about the kinds of characters she wants to play — and how they are realised on screen and on stage.
“She has managed to deliver these really interesting and layered performances of middle-aged women who are powerful and multidimensional. She has found those roles and those roles have found her,” says Di Rosso.
As Blanchett told The Screen Show: “I think it’s a furphy that actors are simply pawns to be moved around. You’re there to interpret the script and to take direction, but also to offer something … You have a big responsibility.”