THE ARTS/CINEMA	JANUARY 26, 1998 NO. 4
	The World At Her Feet Bringing Peter Carey's heart-of-glass heroine alive on screen, Cate Blanchett is gorgeous, gifted and going places By MICHAEL FITZGERALD tepping out with blue bloomers and a gambler's heart, the sparky heroine of Oscar and Lucinda allows nothing to get in the way of her outlandish goal--having a glass church spirited across colonial New South Wales by a defrocked English clergyman (Ralph Fiennes). Lucinda stalks her dream like a fox terrier. So does Cate Blanchett, the Australian actress who plays her in Gillian Armstrong's lightly feminized version of Peter Carey's robust comic novel. "If she set her mind to go and land on the moon," British producer Alison Owen says of Blanchett, "I think she'd do it." Recently, however, the actress was stopped in her tracks on a visit to New York with her husband. "We were just talking and walking quite slowly," Blanchett recalls, "and this man cut in front of me and said, 'You stupid bitch, go back to Sweden!'" Blanchett and her cool, Nordic beauty won't be deterred. After all, it's the 28-year-old Sydneysider's otherworldly quality that has allowed her to be equally at home in a Japanese P.O.W. camp in World War II for Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road and on the 16th century English throne for the upcoming Elizabeth; as Mudgee nurse or monarch. In Thank God He Met Lizzie, which won her best supporting actress at last year's Australian Film Institute Awards, she is a Hitchcock blonde, comic but real. Her acting melds precision with heart. "I really do think the camera often sees into people's souls," says director Gillian Armstrong. "And she has such a goodness. She has a good heart and that really comes through." When Peter Carey wrote of Lucinda, "She wore an odd smile, a neatly tied bow which only just kept the trembling parcel of the face together," he could have been describing Blanchett. Even so, Fox Searchlight Pictures was cautious about casting an unknown Australian opposite English star Ralph Fiennes in its $A20 million movie. "Our initial impulse was to look for a name actress, and that kept drawing us towards Americans," says president Lindsay Law. Then Blanchett's gutsy turn in Paradise Road, another Fox film, convinced them otherwise. So far the gamble has paid off. Last month Oscar and Lucinda opened to respectable box office--and Oscar buzz--in the U.S. "What's beautiful about Cate," says Law, who has cast the Australian opposite John Cusack in the Mike Newell drama about air traffic controllers, Pushing Pin, "is that she's distinctively different, in the way that Katharine Hepburn was very beautiful but she wasn't Hedy Lamarr." Blanchett was anything but when she first auditioned for Armstrong in 1995. "I didn't have any eyebrows, my hair was bleached, I had a cold and I was jet-lagged," recalls the actress, who, after graduating from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1992, initially divided her time between TV and the stage, winning best actress and newcomer at the Sydney Theatre Critics' Circle Awards in 1994. It was her ability to dig deep under pressure that saw her through Oscar and Lucinda's difficult 14-week shoot and hold her own with the twice Oscar-nominated Fiennes. "She matched him beat for beat," says Armstrong. In the film's best scene, when Oscar hears Lucinda's confession aboard the ship Leviathan, the two closet gamblers' faces flare with desire over a card table. Recalls the director: "The crew all applauded at the end of the first take." Blanchett's unflappable cool also proved useful when she was tossed into the media frying pan for the film's U.S. release in December, an experience she likens to "being in a rock tour. Hotel room after hotel room." She was mobbed by photographers at the New York premiere. "She handled herself with enormous grace," says Law, "as if she were born to it." But Blanchett will always be an actress first, star second. In Oscar and Lucinda, she brings Carey's "proud square peg" artfully to life. For the Sydney orphan and glassworks owner, Blanchett looked no further than Carey's picaresque pages. "He described the way Lucinda moved, walked, ate, smiled, laughed, looked, raised her eyebrows," she says. "So it wasn't like putting on a mask, because the mask was so deep and so layered." Yet the beauty of her performance, both as frail and as strong as glass, is the spiritual quality she brings to Lucinda. "She was someone who was searching and yearning for fellowship and communion without having to compromise herself," says Blanchett, "which is such a timeless sentiment." Blanchett's own timeless aura and modern spirit helped secure her the coveted lead role in Elizabeth, Shekhar (Bandit Queen) Kapur's $A70 million postcolonial take on the early years of the fierce monarch's reign, which finished shooting late last year. "Oh God, she's terrifying," Alison Owen,who produced the film, says of Blanchett's portrayal. "Formidable is the word." Yet on a searing Sydney afternoon, the day after Oscar and Lucinda's Australian premiere, formidable isn't a word that springs to mind. Pointing to her shaved forehead, the legacy of her Elizabeth shoot, Blanchett guffaws: "Oh hair, hair, hair! My career is wig after wig after wig." The middle of three children raised in a leafy middle-class Melbourne suburb, Blanchett harbored acting dreams after watching a magician perform at a friend's birthday party when she was 6. That sense of play is still alive within her. "She has a highly tuned inner life that she's obviously comfortable with and is able to play with," noted Geoffrey Rush, with whom she has shared the stage in productions of Hamlet and David Mamet's Oleanna. Just don't scrutinize her craft. "I hate seeing acting as a business," she says. "And I feel at times that the way people talk to me about work, I should be carrying a briefcase and have a laptop. It actually kills the intangible, inexplicable reasons why you do something." Her own are closely guarded. "She's not terribly interested in her private world being opened up," says Fox Searchlight's Law. "She doesn't want to talk about her family and where she came from because that's hers." In Joan Sauers' recently published Brothers and Sisters: Intimate Portraits of Sibling Relationships (William Heinemann), Blanchett speaks eloquently of her American-born father's death from a heart attack when she was 10. At the hospital, she recounts, "we were left in the room with one of the managers from work, and he sat us down and he said, 'This is gonna be a very, very hard time for your mother. You have to be very, very good.' And it kind of framed my whole relationship with the family." That pressure to be good still fuels her life and work. "She's a perfectionist," says director Armstrong. Since marrying script supervisor Andrew Upton last June, perfecting the role of working wife is another work in progress. "People assume it's hubris if you say, 'Well, actually I would like to go home and cook dinner for my husband and read a book,' " she says. In the meantime, there's the filming of Pushing Pin, and later this year, English Patient director Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley--"my first film cameo!" she exclaims--with Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon. "I think she will be huge," says producer Owen, "if she wants to be." Lucinda Leplastrier knows all about the emotional cost of pursuing your dream. What Cate wants is still a beguiling mystery. "For ten seconds they offer you the world," says Blanchett, "and in that ten seconds you think, 'Well, do I want to do it?'" As the clock ticks, Cate Blanchett shows both goodness and grace under pressure.
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