Cate Blanchett
Catherine Élise "Cate" Blanchett is an Australian actress and theatre director. She has won multiple acting awards, most notably two SAGs, two Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTAs, and an Academy Award, as well as the Volpi Cup at 64th Venice International Film Festival. Cate earned five Academy Award nominations between 1998 and 2010.
She came to international attention for her role as Elizabeth I of England in the 1998 film Elizabeth. She is also well-known for her portrayals of the elf queen Galadriel in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Colonel-Doctor Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, a role which brought her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She and her husband Andrew Upton are currently artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company.
Cate was born in Ivanhoe, a suburb of Melbourne, the daughter of June, an Australian property developer and teacher, and Robert "Bob" Blanchett, a Texas-born US Navy Petty Officer who later worked as an advertising executive. The two met while Cate’s father’s ship USS Arneb was in Melbourne. When Cate was 10, she lost her father to a heart attack. She has described herself during childhood as "part extrovert, part wallflower".
She studied Economics and Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne before leaving Australia to travel overseas. When she was 18, Cate went on a vacation to Egypt. A fellow guest at a hotel in Cairo asked if she wanted to be an extra in a movie, and the next day she found herself in a crowd scene cheering for an American boxer losing to an Egyptian in the film Kaboria, starring the Egyptian actor Ahmad Zaki. Cate returned to Australia and later moved to Sydney to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1992 and beginning her career in the theatre.
In 2007, Cate was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People In The World and also one of the most successful actresses by Forbes magazine.
Cate and her husband started three-year contracts as artistic co-directors of the Sydney Theatre Company in January 2008, with Giorgio Armani as its patron.
On 5 December 2008, Cate was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard in front of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre.
As of 2010, Cate has featured in eight films that were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture: Elizabeth (1998), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002 and 2003), The Aviator (2004), Babel (2006), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).
Cate’s husband is playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton, whom she met in 1996 while she was performing in a production of The Seagull. It was not love at first sight, however;
"He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant", Cate later remarked. "It just shows you how wrong you can be, but once he kissed me that was that."
They were married on 29 December 1997 and have three sons: Dashiell John (born 3 December 2001), Roman Robert (born 23 April 2004), and Ignatius Martin (born 13 April 2008).
After making Brighton, England, their main family home for much of the early 2000s, she and her husband returned to their native Australia. In November 2006, Cate stated that this was due to a desire to decide on a permanent home for her children, and to be closer to her family as well as a sense of belonging to the Australian (theatrical) community. She and her family live in "Bulwarra", an 1877 sandstone mansion in the harbourside Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill. It was purchased for $10.2 million Australian dollars in 2004 and underwent extensive renovations in 2007 in order to be made more "eco-friendly".
In early 2009, Cate appeared in a series of special edition postage stamps called "Australian Legends of the Screen", featuring Australian actors acknowledged for the "outstanding contribution they have made to Australian entertainment and culture". She, Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe, and Nicole Kidman each appear twice in the series: once as themselves and once in character; Cate is depicted in character from Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
