Cate Blanchett reveals head injury after 'chainsaw accident' at home

Cate Blanchett casually revealed she took a 'nick' out of her head while using the power tool, narrowly avoiding a serious injury.

Cate Blanchett has had a nasty run-in with a chainsaw while getting stuck into some isolation DIY at her home in England.

Speaking to former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard on her podcast, the 51-year-old Oscar winner casually revealed she took a "nick" out of her head while using the power tool, narrowly avoiding a serious injury.

Brushing the incident off, she told Gillard it wasn't very "exciting".

"I'm fine. I had a bit of a chainsaw accident yesterday, which sounds very, very exciting, but it wasn't. Apart from the little nick to the head, I'm fine," she said on A Podcast of One's Own.

Gillard replied: "Be very careful with that chainsaw. You've got a very famous head, I don't think people would like to see any nicks taken out of it."

Ocean's 8 star Blanchett, who was born and raised in Melbourne, lives on a sprawling $6.25 million British property, in a manor called Highwell House near Crowborough, south of London.

She and her husband, playwright Andrew Upton, live with their four children, Dashiell 18, Roman, 16, Ignatius, 12 and Edith, five.

Apart from near-death experiences in the garden, Blanchett's pandemic isolation has been as quiet as the rest of us, having taken a year off work to help her eldest son, Dashiell, through his final year of school.

"I took the year off ostensibly to be with him and support him through exam period," Blanchett told Gillard elsewhere in the conversation.

"And then all of this exam stuff evaporated (because of school closures) and I'm left with an 18-year-old who doesn't really want to have anything to do with me!

"So it's a little bit discombobulating but, it's a high-class problem, we're all well," she said, adding that isolating with her children has strengthened her long-held respect for the teaching profession.