Cate Blanchett may be headed towards another Oscar for her performance in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine. She talks to Peter Calder.
It's hard to think of Cate Blanchett as anything other than a star. The Melbourne-born, Sydney-based actress was Oscar-nominated in her second substantial big-screen role, as the title character in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth. Since then she has had four nominations (she won in 2005 for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator) and is one of only 11 actors to have been nominated for both a supporting and lead acting Academy Award in the same year.
She is also, not incidentally, luminously beautiful. She has been named in People magazine's list of the 50 most beautiful people in the world (but also in Entertainment Weekly's 50 smartest people in Hollywood).
Yet as a striking 44-year-old mother of three she wears her beauty lightly. In her close-up cover shot for the highbrow British arts and culture magazine Intelligent Life, she broke with magazine tradition by spurning a Photoshop makeover. Lightly made up and with lines visible around her mouth, she fixed the camera with a steel-grey gaze that was all business. The cover line - "This is not a film star" - emphasised the point.
Certainly the voice that greets me down the phone line from Sydney is quite devoid of a star's self-regard. She's concerned about whether I have been kept waiting; apologetic that her wranglers have imposed a time limit; and, most important, keen to talk intensely about work.
It's not too much to say that Blanchett is an actor's actor. None of the other successful Australian exports to Hollywood is more devoted to the craft, and in particular to the theatre. This year she finished a three-year spell sharing the roles of chief executive and artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company with her husband, playwright and director Andrew Upton (he remains in the job). Her latest theatrical venture, as one of the two homicidal title characters in a production of Jean Genet's The Maids (the other was the famous French actor Isabelle Huppert), burnishes an already glowing stage CV.
But we're talking about a movie. In the new Woody Allen film, Blue Jasmine, the director's 44th feature in 47 years, Blanchett plays the Jasmine of the title, a woman struggling to deal with a precipitous fall from grace after her multimillionaire financier husband is exposed as a Bernie Madoff-scale crook.
This is Woody Allen in sombre, even tragic, mood by comparison with recent effervescent comedies set in Barcelona, Paris and Rome; indeed, this is his darkest film since Crimes and Misdemeanours almost a quarter of a century ago.
Jasmine Francis is also by some margin the meatiest female character Allen has created - complicated, contrary, and self-deceiving, she switches between hauteur and pathetic neediness in an instant. And Blanchett is mesmerising in a performance that must have her on very short odds for another Oscar.
The Australian joins a long list of big names who have appeared (invariably in alphabetical order) on the opening credits of a Woody Allen film. Despite the fact that the pay is famously (and non-negotiably) dreadful, they queue up as if an Allen film is an indispensable addition to the resume.
"I don't think it's quite as cold as that," says Blanchett, "but certainly when you make a list of the directors that you would love to work with, he's on everybody's list.
"I grew up watching his films. My parents watched his films. They're timeless. Even though they always seem to describe something very particular, they are universal and they are touching as well as hilarious. He keeps inventing such strange and weird and wonderful characters and situations."
Her impressive track record would argue against her being surprised to be offered the role, but she insists that's how it was.
"He called me out of the blue and asked if I would read a script he had written. Of course I read it the minute it arrived and she just leaped off the page. I was terribly excited but also terribly terrified. I kept thinking, 'Don't screw this up'.
"I was thrilled that he had thrown the part to me because it is such a wonderful one: a complicated, conflicted character who found herself in such a bizarre situation. She is so broken but she has such a romanticised view of herself."
Jasmine has roots in a long tradition in the American drama of women who have "walked that terrifying and tragic border between sanity and reality with a cocktail of pills and alcohol", Blanchett says: Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's masterwork Long Day's Journey Into Night and Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire spring to mind. The latter is a role that Blanchett played in a Sydney Theatre Company production, directed by Liv Ullmann, which became a modern theatrical legend.
Blanchett accepts that Jasmine owes something to Blanche: both are women running from catastrophe who seek refuge with a sister they look down on and come into conflict with the sister's boyfriend.
"We actually took [the STC production of] Streetcar to New York and I thought maybe Woody had seen it but he never mentioned it and I don't think he'd seen it. "The architecture of the piece is definitely reminiscent, but the way it pays off is not at all similar. There's a steely survivor instinct in Jasmine that isn't in Blanche. Blanche is trying to exist, but there is a poetic fragility in Tennessee Williams' writing that is antithetical to that urban neurosis that Woody creates. You can't overlay one across another.
"But when you play those great roles they do stay with you, the detritus of those characters stays with you so without even thinking about it the echoes of those characters exist, somehow."
Jasmine is a theatrical character: she seems to fill the screen, and it is a credit to the Blue Jasmine ensemble that they do not drown in the torrent of her aching rage.
"She has constructed herself," Blanchett says. "The way she speaks, the way she walks, the way she dresses, the way she thinks, the circles in which she moves, they are all constructed.
"She wasn't born into that world, but she has become the princess of it. that's her crowning achievement and the bigger fiction. Even if her husband hadn't done what he did and she hadn't suffered such a socially humiliating fall from grace, it would have all unravelled at some point in some other ways. She's been a time bomb waiting to explode."
Blanchett seems pretty busy: she is in the remaining parts of the Hobbit trilogy, plays a member of the French resistance in a George Clooney-directed wartime drama and has shot scenes in two new films by Terrence Malick. Films with Kenneth Branagh and David Mamet are also in the works.
But the way she talks, she's in the midst of a sabbatical. Leaving the STC job was "a matter of time", she says. "We've got three young children - 11, 9 and 5 - and it was time for me to pull back and accept the pull of family before work."
The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) and The Hobbit (2012-2014): On with the pointy ears and the headband as Galadriel, telepathic royal elf and the tallest gal in Middle-earth.
I'm Not There (2007): In this artful biography of Bob Dylan, Blanchett was one of six actors to play the troubadour- and the best of the lot.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008): Blanchett played Daisy Fuller, the love of the titular character's backwards-aging life.
Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn in the Aviator.
Blue Jasmine (2013): In Woody Allen's serious-mode latest, Blanchett plays Jasmine, a New York socialite on the verge of a breakdown after the betrayal of her financier husband (Alec Baldwin).
Who: Cate Blanchett What: Woody Allen's latest film, Blue Jasmine When: Opens at cinemas on September 5
