A Character Delicately Revealed
Despite her reputation as a world-class chameleon, Cate Blanchett is not without vanity. When she sat down to re-watch Elizabeth, the film that launched her career in 1998, she admits she was "incredibly uncomfortable" facing up to how much she’d changed in the intervening years.

"I was thinking, ‘Oh, God, it’s been ten years later. Have I aged that much?’ Being an actress in film is like aging in dog years," she says with a laugh. "It’s quite confronting."

When the time came for Blanchett to once again ascend the thrown in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, she found herself embracing the notion that the monarch might be in the throes of a very unglamorous mid-life crisis.

"In the first film, Elizabeth is a girl approaching womanhood," notes Blanchett, 38, born in Melbourne to an Aussie mom and a Texan father. "In this one, she’s approaching her middle years. She’s prone to self-medicating with herbs and she’s physically unstable. She’s quite menopausal. As I was playing her, I thought, ‘She might be going through the change.’

"I kept telling Remi Adefarasin, our cinematographer, to take off the 12 stockings that he was shooting me through so more of my wrinkles would show."

Since becoming a movie star nine years ago, Blanchett has proven her versatility time and again. She’s impersonated a backwoods soothsayer (The Gift), a British schoolteacher (Notes on a Scandal), an elf queen (the Lord of the Rings movies), a German prostitute (The Good German), and Katharine Hepburn (The Aviator).

"I’m not at all interested in playing myself or imposing my own value system onto a character," she notes. "That’s like having conversations continually with like-minded people. You get a very skewed perception of the way the world works. So I like having conversations with characters who think in very different ways to me — and have very different sets of experiences."

For someone who is committed to variety, it’s no surprise that Blanchett balked at wearing Elizabeth’s crown for a second time.

"I was nervous about returning to a character that allowed me to walk through the door and into this international film career," says the actress who earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance in Elizabeth. (She won six years later for The Aviator.)

"You don’t want to feel like you’re going backwards. But once I could see that I could actually progress forward through the film, then it became very exciting to me."

The first Elizabeth received quite a bit of criticism for playing fast and loose with the facts. This time around, even more liberties have been taken in the name of dramatic license.

"I think the great thing about Shekhar [Kapur, the director] and I working together is that I’m fascinated by history and he’s utterly disinterested in it," she says. "So I think that we tempered one another really well."

While Blanchett says she’d "never say never" to playing the Queen again, it’s not something she can even think about for the next several years.

Married to screenwriter Andrew Upton with whom she has two sons ages six and three, Blanchett recently signed up as artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company. Along with her husband, she’ll oversee a full schedule of productions.

"We officially take over on the first of January, but things have already begun. Andrew has been there all year and I’ve been coming and going. There are some projects that we’ve begun to set up already so it’s very exciting."

Blanchett will also appear on movie screens playing Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ unconventional biopic I’m Not There. Heath Ledger and Richard Gere also play the folk-rock icon.

"The idea of playing Bob Dylan was just so utterly ludicrous that, of course, I had to say yes," says Blanchett. "But it was very daunting and it was a little bit nerve-racking as well. I slipped into the suit and the wig but the odd thing was the tight rope I had to walk because none of the incarnations of Dylan in the film are called Dylan.

"My character is named Jude. When I got the script, it just said, ‘A rock star wreaks havoc on his first electric tour. Shot in the style of Fellini.’ So there you go."

In 2008, Blanchett will be seen in two big films — alongside her Babel co-star Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about a man aging backwards, and with Harrison Ford as a Russian interrogator in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

"It’s such a well-oiled, iconic franchise and one I grew up with. On the first day of shooting, it was extremely surreal. I was watching the monitor as Steven [Spielberg] set the frame up. I knew the iconography of the frame. I knew the trucks. I knew the layout. I knew the way that these things were lit but yet when I was meant to enter the frame, it was a really great moment. It’s been fantastic and so much fun. My boys have had an absolute ball."
— Amy Longsdorf, photo by MJ Kim/Getty Images Entertainment