ONWARd ANd UpWARd WiTH THE ARTs disAppEARiNG ACT

Cate Blanchett branches out. BY jOHN lAHR

n Sydney, , on the bright, most of her fans have come to know her. blustery morning of November 10th, Blanchett’s list of twenty-seven movies towardI the end of Pier 4, a “finger wharf” is notable for both its range and its am- that reaches out two hundred yards into bition. In her most recent collection of the harbor and houses the Sydney The- character studies, she plays a predatory atre Company, a little bit of show-biz Nazi collaborator (Steven Soderbergh’s history took place. There, inside a cav- “The Good German”), an American ernous former wool storehouse—now a tourist who is shot in Morocco (Ale- dusty gray rehearsal room—amid a clus- jandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel”), a ter of cameras, lights, and local journalists, British schoolteacher who has an affair the actress and her hus- with a fifteen-year-old student (Rich- band, the playwright Andrew Upton, an- ard Eyre’s “Notes on a Scandal,” a per- nounced their appointment as co-artistic formance for which she was just nom- directors of the S.T.C., Australia’s most inated for an Academy Award), and a prestigious theatre, which operates three version of Bob Dylan, complete with big stages. Theatre history is studded with hair and sideburns (Todd Haynes’s “I’m examples of renowned actor-managers— Not There”). “I wanted to be him,” Blan- Molière, Shakespeare, and Sir Laurence chett said of the singer. “It’s the first time Olivier come to mind—but never before I ever had that feeling. I actually wanted had a movie actress of Blanchett’s cali- to be Dylan. Ultimately, he just really bre, at the height of her powers and pop- didn’t care. He’s on his own path.” ularity, made this kind of commitment to At the S.T.C., Blanchett, who calls the theatre community that launched her. herself a “theatre geek,” was following Blanchett and Upton will officially begin her own path. Her appointment was their three-year appointment in 2008, also a strategic coup for the company: after a year of shadowing the current ar- with Blanchett and Upton as artistic di- tistic director, Robyn Nevin. They also rectors, its productions will attract inter- happened to be in the process of staging national press and talent. (Philip Sey- a double bill at the theatre: Harold Pin- mour Hoffman, for instance, will direct ter’s “A Kind of Alaska,” directed by Upton’s play “Riflemind,” later this year.) Blanchett, and David Mamet’s “Re- And for a theatre company that, in 2005, union,” directed by Upton, both of which found itself in the red for the first time opened to strong reviews at the end of in twenty-seven years, Blanchett’s star- November. “Andrew and I are galvanized dom will draw lucrative sponsorship. by a challenge,” Blanchett said. “Frankly, None of this sense of promise and pur- this is the most exciting thing that has pose, however, seemed to catch the happened to us, apart from marriage and imagination of the local press back in having children.” November. When it was time for ques- “I feel the need to move forward,” tions, the journalists seemed nonplussed. Blanchett, who is thirty-seven, told me What if Blanchett got a movie role? they later. “I know it’s going to broaden me asked. Would she have time, in her busy as a human being. I hope it broadens film schedule, to undertake such a job? me as an actor.” She added, “Movie- Did this mean that she and her sons— making becomes a little pointless after a five-year-old Dashiell and two-year-old time. You think, Well, yes, that’s an in- Roman—were going to live perma- credible role, and, yes, it would probably nently in Sydney? How would her celeb- stretch me as an actor. But performance rity affect the running of the theatre? is not, and never has been, really, all of “Celebrity is a by-product,” Blanchett who I am.” Still, it is through film that replied firmly. “If that by-product can be

38 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12, 2007

TNY—2007_02_12—PAGE 38—133SC.—#2 PAGE—TiTlE ChANGE AT ToP of PAGE harnessed to the company’s name, fan- chett once described the experience of which, she has admitted, is “very mean- tastic.” After the final question of the acting. A similar metaphor came up over dering—nothing is linear.” proceedings—which, like many before, lunch, when Upton described his view of When I asked Blanchett if she agreed was directed only at Blanchett—she put their family life. “There’s someone on top with Upton about their family dynamic, her hand on Upton’s shoulder. “We’re a riding a bike with a bar and a ball balanc- she said carefully, “There’s something team,” she said. ing the thing,” Upton said. “I think we’re about being an actor that is shaman-like. in there.” It can produce a great amount of super- pton, like his wife, seems to know “In the ball?” Blanchett said. stition in terms of how you connect to it. himself without insisting on himself; “Me and the boys are in there.” To talk about that is very private. Before heU exudes a sort of ironic equanimity. In 1997, the newly married couple spent three months apart while Blanchett was shooting Shekhar Kapur’s “Elizabeth,” and vowed, Blanchett said, to “never ever do that again.” In the decade since then, they have travelled together whenever possible. The S.T.C. offer coincided, ser- endipitously, with their sense that they needed, for their children’s sake, to settle somewhere. Over lunch, at the theatre’s restaurant later that day, Blanchett turned to Upton and said, “If it wasn’t for you, I think I probably would have imploded. Acting takes its toll on people. There’s a kind of madness in it that’s thrilling and wonderful but also can be incredibly de- structive.” She turned to me. “Andrew is an incredibly strong person,” she said. Strength—or the outward appearance of it—is not the first thing that comes to mind when you meet the impish Upton, who is forty-one. His sinew lies in his good-humored stability and in his alle- giance to his wife’s talent. Upton studied playwriting and directing at the Victorian College of the Arts School of Drama, in , and has already done a series of successful stage adaptations for the S.T.C., including a tempestuous version of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” (2004), star- ring his wife. He and Blanchett got to know each other in 1996, while working on one of her lesser-known Australian movies, “Thank God He Met Lizzie.” “We were both taken by surprise,” Upton said. “I mean, it could have been a one- night stand. We just kept going. Three weeks into our relationship, Cate says she thought, Oh, God, he’s gonna ask me to “Performance is not all of who I am,” Blanchett says. Photograph by Ruven Afanador. marry him. I’m gonna have to say yes. I asked her three weeks later.” Their de- A flicker of distress showed in her Andrew, in previous partnerships, even cisions to marry and to run the S.T.C. eyes. “That’s not true,” she said. friendships, I couldn’t go there. I didn’t seemed to share an adventurous sense of “In a balancing way.” want to break some spell.” She turned to optimism. “Our spirit is jump in, then “You’re not in the ball with the boys.” Upton. “I met you and I finally could talk just keep going until you can make the “I mean, there’s balancing in it,” Upton to somebody else about that stuff. I feel thing work or not,” Blanchett said. “If it’s said. like every time I make a film or go into a not making sense, you pull it apart and The exchange, in its matter-of-fact- rehearsal room I’ve already collaborated try to put it back together again.” ness, seemed evidence of the clarity that with you on it. The hardest thing is to get “Walking a tightrope” is how Blan- Upton brings to Blanchett’s thinking, up there and voice what it is that you’re

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12, 2007 39

TNY—2007_02_12—PAGE 39—133SC.—livE ArT r15887—CriTiCAl CuT To bE wATChEd ThrouGhouT ENTirE PrESS ruN! performance,” he said. “I think the hid- den chaos of Cate is so interesting.” Scott Rudin, a co-producer of “Notes on a Scandal,” told me, “She’s very shrewd about what capital she gives up and when. When she gives you the tiniest bit of in- sight into why the character’s behaving the way she is, you gobble it up. I think it’s a combination of alluring and elu- sive.” He added, “It is the elusiveness that is the key.” Blanchett herself made the same point. She was describing her char- acter Lena, a Nazi collaborator in Berlin in 1945, in Soderbergh’s “The Good Ger- man,” which she began shooting, with- out any rehearsal, the Monday after she’d completed “Notes on a Scandal.” The scene Blanchett filmed that day had Lena “Tell your liege it’ll be in the shop for at least three days.” sitting on a bench with an American mil- itary attorney from whom she’s hoping to get the papers she needs to leave Berlin. •• “I thought, The biggest thing I’m gonna do is cross my legs,” she told me. “I’m not feeling, for fear of being misunderstood cast her as Elizabeth I, in “Elizabeth,” one gonna give anything away to this man. I or locked down too early or just plain ri- of the films that made Blanchett an inter- knew everything that Lena was conceal- diculous. I think that to be able to sort of national star. “I was looking for somebody ing. But it was, like, I’m not going to let air that stuff with you . . . allows it to who could portray not only a reality but an Steven Soderbergh know. I’m going to be grow,” she said. ethereal quality,” he said. “This ability to completely, utterly ambiguous.” She con- be both of the earth and of the spirit was tinued, “Ambiguity is not absence. It’s rom the outset of her acting career— very attractive to me—the ability to be a wildly contradicting series of actions, she studied at the National Institute both vulnerable and totally ruthless. Cate’s emotions, and intentions. There was a ofF Dramatic Art (NIDA), in Sydney, from absolute ruthlessness is with herself, an line where Lena said, ‘No one is all good 1990 to 1992—Blanchett exhibited an obsessive ruthlessness about her craft.” or all bad.’ And I thought that she was re- uncanny ability to enter the kind of ego- “There’s something tightly wound ferring to herself. So I let a tiny little bit of less state that her former teacher the di- inside her, something hidden,” the Brit- her own self-hatred come through.” (So- rector Lindy Davies calls “transforma- ish director Jonathan Kent, who worked derbergh got his shot on the first take.) tional.” In work and in life, Blanchett, with Blanchett on the Almeida The- What Blanchett hides from her direc- whose favorite word is “fluidity,” has a atre Company’s 1999 revival of David tors and her audience she also hides from kind of inconclusiveness that lets her re- Hare’s “Plenty,” said. “An uncontrolled herself. “I do like to preserve the mystique main receptive. “I don’t like everything to core that she’s not entirely in charge of, of the thing, for myself as much as anyone be tied neatly in bows,” she told me. “If which, when it’s harnessed, makes her else,” she has said. Over the years, she has it’s flowing, you don’t arrest it.” Keeping riveting.” In “Plenty,” Blanchett played repeatedly dodged autobiographical ques- things open when you’re acting, she ex- Susan Traherne, a woman whose life tions by claiming, “I’ve sort of forgotten plained, reinforces the mystery and the after the Second World War is a slow my childhood.” These ellipses in conver- intensity of the moment. “I think it’s im- diminuendo into despair. The produc- sation help Blanchett to trick herself out portant to pin questions down,” she said. tion was controversial, and some of the of self-consciousness. “I’m not interested “Sometimes you can answer things de- reviews were catty—the Independent in the character I am in myself,” she told finitively within a character, within a mo- suggested that only Dame Edna could James Lipton on the television series “In- ment. And sometimes it’s important that have done more to expose the weak- side the Actors Studio.” “Any connection you don’t.” nesses of the play. Blanchett was dis- that I have to my characters will be sub- “Cate is willing to throw herself into a traught. “She didn’t weep like a prima liminal and subconscious.” The first time chaotic state out of which something will donna,” Upton said. “She wept like Blanchett realized that she might have arise,” the director Shekhar Kapur told a betrayed woman.” Since that inci- talent is associated in her mind with this me. “The fluidity you get in Cate is also dent, Blanchett has never read a review; ability to make herself disappear. She was because of the contradictions inside her.” Kent, for his part, has never quite be- in her second year at Melbourne Univer- Blanchett is both candid and private, gre- lieved in her apparent confidence. “That sity, appearing in a play by Kris Hemens- garious and solitary, self-doubting and grounded self that you and I perceive— ley called “European Features,” at Mel- daring, witty and melancholy. It was these the directness, the straightness, the lack bourne’s La Mama. “My sister, Genevieve, contradictions that prompted Kapur to of nonsense—in a way I think that’s a came to see the play,” Blanchett said. “My

40 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12, 2007

TNY—2007_02_12—PAGE 40—133SC.—livE ArT A12165 sister’s a harsh critic. She said, ‘That’s the The ritual continues, according to Upton. chett told Lipton. “He said, ‘Oh, you can first time I couldn’t see you.’ I understood “She will never forget to say goodbye,” he never trust these Japanese,’ or some joke. what she meant.” said. “When you’re going off to work, if I remember that moment—seeing the you’re going overseas, that point of depar- actor handling a real moment in a com- lanchett grew up in Ivanhoe, a leafy ture is really important to her.” pletely surreal and unreal production. I suburb of Melbourne, beside the When asked about her father now, thought, I wish I could be up there with YarraB River. She was the middle child, be- Blanchett generally brushes the questions him.” Throughout her childhood, on tween an older brother, Bob, who had a aside. “I don’t necessarily need to con- Saturday afternoons, Blanchett attended mild case of cerebral palsy, and Gene- sciously understand my past,” she said. a drama class in a musty warehouse, with vieve. (Bob works as a computer pro- She went on, “Drama school was a place a costume box full of “things that were grammer; Genevieve is studying architec- where a lot of these things came up, but slightly frayed around the edges.” “I ture, after a successful career as a stage in a way that one could deal with them in would often spend the whole class by designer.) Of the siblings, Blanchett was, a visceral sense. You move them through myself, or with another girl, trying on by her own admission, the most adventur- your body and out your fingertips. Then this stuff and making little things up,” ous. “I felt very free as a child,” she said. you keep the bits that are useful and she told me. She was, she added, “the Together, she and Genevieve invented throw away the junk.” Still, the loss was child of whom everyone said, ‘Oh, she’s characters, which Blanchett would play, clearly a transforming one, for her and for gonna be an actress.’ ” for days at a time, around the house. “My her work. She has called bereavement “a Still, Blanchett started out at the Uni- sister and I would dress me up in some- strange gift.” In many essential ways, she versity of Melbourne as an art-history thing,” she said. “I’d pull a face or a stance; told me, her father’s death was the shadow and economics major. After two years, she’d give them names and an identity.” that informed her brightness. “It’s chiar- she auditioned, on a whim, for the three- When Blanchett was around nine, her en- oscuro,” she said. year acting course at NIDA. Her most cel- thusiasm for performance took the form After Robert died, Blanchett devel- ebrated performance at NIDA was one for of knocking on strangers’ doors to see if oped a passion for horror movies. “I loved which she wasn’t originally cast. She was she could talk her way inside their homes being terrified,” she said. “It used to be a playing Clytemnestra in a production of with a tall tale about a lost dog. “It was the badge of honor if you could sit through Sophocles’ “Electra”; two weeks into re- adrenaline rush, really,” she said. “My ‘Halloween II.’ ” Some of the appeal of hearsals, the woman playing Electra friend hid in the bushes. I remember the horror movies lies in the thrill of surviv- withdrew. The director, Lindy Davies, woman at the door saying, ‘I haven’t seen ing them, of, in a sense, cheating death. asked, “Who can work over Easter?,” and a dog. Come in. I’ll ask my husband.’ I It’s a thrill that carries over, as Upton Blanchett raised her hand. “One of the looked at the bushes thinking, Oh, my pointed out, to acting. “You go onstage things that she can do,” Davies told me, “is God, what am I doing? I remember the and you’re alive,” he said. “You walk move into the realm of metaphor, but look in this woman’s eyes when she started offstage, then the character’s gone. You without being histrionic.” Davies recalled to think, You haven’t lost a dog, have you? survive the experience. It’s scintillating.” Blanchett weeping during rehearsals. “She It suddenly had become a real thing.” He added, “I think that’s why Cate’s not sobbed on the floor in the sunlight. She Blanchett continued, “My whole child- one of those Method people who carry was talking about Menelaus. The sense of hood was like that. If someone dared me, the role offstage with them.” Over the grief was like a waterfall cascading. The I’d do it.” years, Blanchett has turned her appetite thing is that she understands loss.” Blanchett’s mother, June, was a jazz- for this form of transcendence into a kind “When I came out of drama school, I loving schoolteacher. Her Texas-born fa- of life style. “You can’t say no to things wasn’t that hot young thing,” Blanchett ther, Robert, who met June when his because you’re frightened,” she told a told me. But she gathered heat soon Navy ship broke down in Melbourne, group of students in 2005. enough. In 1993, at the Sydney equivalent had, according to Blanchett, “a very dry of the Tony Awards, she was voted Best sense of humor.” He had quit school at he idea of performance first cap- Newcomer, for her performance in Tim- fourteen—“I went to the school for bums,” tured Blanchett’s imagination when othy Daly’s “Kafka Dances”; the same he told his daughter. Robert put himself sheT was about five and saw a production year, for her appearance opposite Geoffrey through night school, worked at a televi- of “The Mikado” in which an actor’s long Rush in a memorable production of sion station, returned to Australia to mustache fell off onstage. “You could feel Mamet’s “Oleanna,” she was named Best marry June, and got into advertising. the whole audience go, ‘Oh, my God, Actress. (She was the first person ever to Then, when Blanchett was ten, he died. something real just happened,’ ” Blan- win both categories at once.) Three years “I was playing the piano,” she has recalled. later, Blanchett auditioned to play the role “He walked past the window. I waved of the mercurial title character in Gillian goodbye. He was going off to work. He Armstrong’s “Oscar and Lucinda” (1997). had a heart attack that day. He was only The movie, which was based on the novel forty.” The fact that she hadn’t embraced by Peter Carey about two obsessive gam- him before he left haunted Blanchett. “I blers, brought Blanchett’s “chalky phos- developed this ritual where I couldn’t phorescence,” as the director Anthony leave the house until I could actually phys- Minghella called it, out of the Southern ically say goodbye to everyone,” she said. Hemisphere and into the international

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12, 2007 41

TNY—2007_02_12—PAGE 41—133SC.—livE SPoT ArT r15924_b, PlS iNSPECT ANd rEPorT oN quAliTY—#2 PAGE—fixEd SPoT bECAuSE iT wASN’T A Tiff filE arena. After her next movie, “Elizabeth,” as Dashiell’s complaints escalated. She an act of rough justice, Philippa plants a the world, and every film director in it, leaned down to speak to him. “Hang on,” bomb in the drug lord’s office. We watch knew her name. she said. “You’re giving conflicting mes- Blanchett place the device in his wastepa- sages. You’re saying you don’t want fish per basket before escaping from the build- t NIDA, one of Blanchett’s teachers fingers, but all of a sudden you do want ing; we also watch a cleaning lady empty gave her some advice that she took fish fingers.” Dashiell mumbled some- the contents of the basket into her cart, toA heart. “When you’re performing, al- thing about wanting a sandwich and not which she wheels onto an elevator car- ways keep your lights on,” he told her. soup. “If you start to eat your meal, dar- rying a man and two girls. The scene in “When you’re home, turn them off.” ling, then we can make you a sandwich,” which Philippa is confronted with the Blanchett and Upton have settled down Blanchett said. news that she has killed four people, in- in the sleepy heart of Sydney normality, Dashiell said, “I’ll eat the bread but not cluding two children, is perhaps Blan- the sedate suburb of Hunter’s Hill, about the soup.” chett’s greatest emotional moment on fifteen minutes northwest of town, where “This is the new Dash,” Blanchett said, film. Her expression goes from blank- the noisiest thing in the street is an explo- smiling. “He thinks he’s living in a hotel ness, to shock, to sorrow, to disbelief, to sion of purple jacarandas. Ten minutes and wants to order room service all the moral horror, to a grief so overwhelming from their rented sandstone house, they time.” that she finally faints in anguish. are renovating a house on three acres of “I don’t want to,” Dashiell said, and In her career, Blanchett has played land seeded with Norfolk pine and euca- slapped at Blanchett’s hands. She calmly Australian, American, Scottish, Russian, lyptus trees, which hide the neighbors and scooped him up and took him to his bed- English, Irish, French, Italian, and Ger- muffle the sound of cars. To Blanchett, room at the back of the house. A few man characters. “She can do a voice in so- the place, which she calls her “oasis,” has minutes later, the sound of his griev- prano, a baritone voice, a nasal voice, an “a feeling of being completely in the bush.” ance ceased, and Blanchett returned. adenoidal voice, a three-octave voice, or Even in her current cramped residence, “There’s a whole thing with my gen- she can do something quite tinny and Blanchett has established a sense of calm eration about having the children like twangy,” the dialect coach Tim Monich order. The living room is dominated by a you,” she said. “Most parents want to be told me. “People use the phrase ‘I’m television, photographs of a windswept friends.” Her role at home, she made it gonna make it my own.’ With Cate, it’s Upton and Blanchett on the New Zea- clear, was mother, not pal. quite the opposite; it’s about adapting land coast, and, in the corner, a small chil- herself.” The key to Blanchett’s character- dren’s table, where, on the day I visited, t home and at work, Blanchett has a izations is not so much the imitation of Roman was proudly learning how to ma- talent for listening. When she stud- sound as the penetration of syntax. “An neuver his knife and fork over some fish iesA a script, she often writes down every- actor’s job is partly anthropological,” she sticks. Nowhere was there any sign of thing that her character says about herself told me, and the character’s idiom is Blanchett’s line of work. (A converted and about other characters, as well as ev- where she does much of her excavation. closet off the dining room serves as her erything that other people in the script say “The way people speak reveals how they office; a bevy of her awards—Academy, about her character. “You get an objec- think,” she said. “The rhythm reveals Golden Globe, and BAFTA among tive sense, within the story, of how they’re emotion, it reveals intention.” When she them—is pushed to the far corner of her perceived and how they perceive them- was at Melbourne University, working desk by a morass of papers, books, and selves,” she said. “You get a sort of three- part time as a waitress at the Old Home- photographs of the children.) dimensional sense of what they are doing.” stead Inn to pay her way, Blanchett would When he was finished with his lunch, She went on, “Each project you encounter jot down overheard conversations on her Roman came over to discuss the possi- reveals to you the way to work on it. It’s pad; those “found moments” went into a ble modes of transportation to the play- all about the text. Some pieces need to be play that she wrote with another student, ground, where his nanny was about to invented, or reimagined, or teased out. about life in the city and how people’s take him. He was leaning toward tak- Some just need to be unlocked.” conversations are often “a way of avoiding ing the stroller. Blanchett listened closely She has the capacity to see herself as rather than communicating.” to his argument, then said, “Maybe you part of a larger landscape. Her form of Over the decades, her methods have should walk. What do you think? Walk storytelling, therefore, lies not just in the become more cunning and more de- on your little feet?” Roman considered dialogue but in the dance of the character. tailed. When preparing to play the title for a moment, then agreed to leg it. Later, “She has a constantly amorphous phys- role in Joel Schumacher’s “Veronica Blanchett negotiated with the inquisitive icality,” Geoffrey Rush told me. “That’s Guerin” (2003), a portrait of the Irish Dashiell, whom she’d just picked up from why she seems to transform from role to journalist who was murdered for her in- the local Montessori school and who had role.” She also has the acuity to sit inside vestigations into the drug trade, Blan- gone from voluble curiosity in her gray an emotion and parse it. In Tom Tyk- chett listened to every interview that BMW (“What are guts? What are the wer’s “Heaven” (2002), for instance, she Guerin had ever given. “You could hear guts of the house?”) to visible fury over played Philippa, an English teacher in the way she was thinking,” Blanchett his lunch menu of soup and fish sticks: “I Italy, frustrated by the failure of the cor- said. “You could hear the missteps; you don’t want it; they’re disgusting!” rupt carabinieri to stop the drug lord could hear when she wasn’t telling the “That’s his favorite word of the mo- who is selling to children at her school truth; you could hear when she was un- ment—‘disgusting,’ ” Blanchett said, and whose drugs killed her husband. In sure of something. I thought, Ah, she’s

42 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12, 2007

TNY—2007_02_12—PAGE 42—133SC. not sure about her own intelligence.” Eyre says he got off to “a slightly sticky a woman whom she was not going to ex- “Every seemingly little trivial piece of start with Cate.” He told me, “She’d had plain or apologize for—she was just going information is something that can feed one session with a dialect coach, and was to play it. She never asked me to write her,” said Monich, who worked with she going to have another? I was worried something that would make her more Blanchett on her version of Katharine about whether she’d be class-specific. Her sympathetic or her predicament more un- Hepburn’s imperious, vowel-strangled character is kind of upper-middle bohe- derstandable.” On the other hand, Blan- Yankee barrage of words in Martin Scor- mian. I wanted the distinction between chett was willing to disagree with lines sese’s “The Aviator” (2004). It was her and Judi Dench’s character, who is that she felt didn’t match the character she Monich who first told Blanchett about petit bourgeois, to be clear.” Eyre contin- had in mind. In one scene, after Sheba’s Hope Williams, a socialite and actress for ued, “I think she thought I was overcon- affair with her fifteen-year-old student is whom Hepburn was an understudy in cerned with the externals instead of the made public and she has taken refuge “Holiday,” on Broadway, in 1928. “She psychology.” “He was really worried about with her teaching cohort and confidante, was a genuine rich girl whom Philip Barry the issue of class,” Blanchett explained. Barbara, she discovers Barbara’s toxic di- wrote a couple of plays for,” Monich said. “ ‘Richard,’ I said, ‘I need to work on it be- aries, full of twisted sexual obsession with “I had this theory that Hope Williams cause I’m not a mimic. I need to sit down her, and taped-in mementos of the infat- was a role model for Hepburn as a person, and work on it.’ So the accent became an uation. Sheba melts down. Marber recalls, as a character, as an actress. They called issue, when I didn’t want to focus on the “I put this line in it, ‘Where did you get her the Park Avenue Stride Girl. Later, it accent but on the meat of things.” No my hair? Did you pluck it from the bath became clear she was a lesbian. She had sooner were Eyre’s words out of his mouth with some special fucking tweezers?’ She very short hair. . . . Cate was completely than he realized that he’d made a mistake. said, ‘I don’t want to say that line. It’s too intrigued with my theory. We both be- “I was sitting in my kitchen and talking. funny. It will corrupt the tone of where came obsessed with Hope Williams.” She said, ‘Don’t you think I can do this?’ ” Sheba’s at.’ We hammer-and-tonged it Monich and Blanchett told Scorsese, who Eyre said. “She was upset. I must have for about ten minutes. Eventually, I said, screened for them Ben Hecht and Charles been eroding her self-confidence. I felt as ‘Oh, please, just please.’ I think she felt MacArthur’s “The Scoundrel,” in which bad as I’ve ever felt. I apologized. She compelled to concede to the writer, even Williams makes an entrance in a stylish didn’t extract revenge.” if he was a bloody idiot. I think that’s be- hat with a breezy “Hello, hello.” In “The In fact, Blanchett turned in one of her cause she’s come from the theatre.” Aviator,” Blanchett pays homage to that most thrilling performances, as the art scene, when Hepburn arrives at her fam- teacher Sheba Hart. “She was quite ruth- n the day that Blanchett and Upton ily’s New England summer lunch party. less in the way she approached that role,” announced their artistic leadership “Cate is imitating Katharine Hepburn the British playwright Patrick Marber, ofO the , she as- imitating Hope Williams,” Monich said. who wrote the screenplay, said. “This was sured the wary journalists, “We’ve got At her first meeting with Scorsese for the film, Blanchett brought a coffee- table book containing studio stills of Hepburn. “She said, ‘Look, I looked at some stills of Katharine Hepburn,’ ” Scorsese told me. “And she got in a cer- tain position, sort of crouching down. Cate said, ‘I think she was like this.’ Sure enough, she just had it. She had the ges- ture, she had the body lines, the look of Katharine Hepburn.” In her research, “the most fantastic resource,” Blan- chett said, was Dick Cavett’s 1973 two- part interview with Hepburn, then in her mid-sixties. “She was older and her voice had calcified and her whole per- sonality had become a burlesque of itself, but it was fascinating to see how she be- haved, and how uncomfortable she was,” Blanchett told the Times. Her portrayal of Hepburn, for which she won an Acad- emy Award, managed to suggest a de- fensiveness behind the brusque bravado, especially in the vocal restrictions of her machine-gun laugh. In a preproduction discussion for last year’s “Notes on a Scandal,” Richard

TNY—2007_02_12—PAGE 43—133SC.—livE ArT A12028 “asleep” for thirty years, awakens, strug- gles to get her bearings in this strange new world, then sinks back into dark- ness. “I’ve always been interested in the emergent consciousness—that point be- tween wakefulness and slumber, that place where the sense of one’s self is ex- tremely malleable,” Blanchett said. “She’s a broken person who’s trying to reassem- ble herself.” Toward the end of the play, Deborah starts to feel her mind receding. “Oh, dear,” she says. “Yes, I think they’re closing in. They’re closing the walls in. Yes.” On the play’s last beat, Blanchett and Upton planned to have the water seep upward. “It somehow formally completes the evening,” she said. Later that day, I met up with Blan- chett again to accompany her to the open- ing night of “Keating!,” a musical revue about the trials and tribulations of Aus- “Yes, he has deep pockets. But I never realized how short his arms are.” tralia’s flamboyant former Prime Minister Paul Keating, directed by Neil Armfield. Before we left, she insisted on playing for •• me the soundscape she was devising for “A Kind of Alaska.” “Chris Abrahams good instincts and a good eye.” Her visual make them not quite those characters, so is an amazing pianist and plays in a jazz sophistication is apparent in her art col- it’s an invented language.” She went on, trio called the Necks. Abrahams did this lection, which includes works by Paula “It’s about the way we tell ourselves sto- music—sort of a hybrid form,” she said. Rego, Howard Hodgkin, and Tim Ma- ries: how we handle failure, how we han- With her elbows planted on the desk and guire. After tea, she suggested that we dle success, how we place ourselves against her face in her hands, she leaned forward, visit a gallery that featured artists in whom the rest of the world. All these things are concentrating on the insistent pounding she had an interest. There was a provoc- at the core of who I am, who we all are. that was both funereal and celebratory, ative show by the Chinese conceptual art- It’s somewhere bound up with this jour- like a heartbeat getting stronger. Voices ist Zhang Huan, that included disturbing ney inward.” and archival sounds were layered into it: images of the artist buried beneath a a piano played a snippet of “If You Were mound of books and appearing to sod- wo days later, Blanchett, Upton, and the Only Girl in the World”; a voice omize a donkey. At the same gallery, I met at the S.T.C.’s three-hundred- growled “piss in your face.” The cursing Blanchett studied the Chinese-born Syd- seatT main stage, to look at the set for “Re- voice was authentic—taken from a video ney artist Guan Wei’s “Echo,” a series of union” and “A Kind of Alaska,” which of Sacks’s patients, which Blanchett had forty-two panels painted as mythological had just been constructed. Blanchett re- tracked down, she said, after noticing a maps of Australia, which appropriated garded the moody, brackish gray-green footnote in “Awakenings.” She listened figures from European colonial explora- backdrop and the walkway that led to an awhile longer, then hit “Pause.” “The tion, as well as Chinese landscape paint- angled square in the center; she and theme is good,” she said, “but it’s just too ing. On the periphery of another Guan Upton intended to flood the space so that present. You don’t want to give it all away painting, a wild seascape in black, were the performing area would appear to be a in the soundscape. There are all these iconic emblems of Australia’s past and floating island. “One thing I do under- memories, inventions, planes of supposed present: galleons, soldiers, Aborigines, stand is space,” she’d told me earlier, and reality. If you describe them literally, then and kangaroos. At the center were roiling so it seemed. The design was playful and it depletes them. The audience has to waves and clouds, in which pink figures daring, poetic and timeless. “It really lib- listen with their reaching ears.” Blan- fell from boats and bobbed in the surf. At erates preconceptions,” she said. She said chett shoved the CD into her bag. “We’re the edge was the desert. that she had seen a similar effect used at gonna have to fuck with it,” she said. Blanchett scrutinized Guan’s works. the Saatchi Gallery, in London. “I asked When we arrived at the Belvoir Street “He’s very witty,” she said. “Towns called the curator how deep the water was. He Theatre, a converted tomato-sauce fac- Dread and Bathe. It seduces you with one said, ‘It’s as deep as you want it to be.’ ” tory, the lobby was a scrum of people, feeling, then it undercuts it. He’s got ac- In “Alaska,” which is inspired by with blinking red lights strung around the tual creatures, then mythological crea- “Awakenings,” Oliver Sacks’s study of low ceilings and the exuberant buzz of a tures. He’s got Chinese characters, to several survivors of “sleeping sickness,” beer cellar. Blanchett pushed her way which he’s added little brushstrokes that the heroine, Deborah, after having been through the well-wishers and news-

44 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12, 2007

TNY—2007_02_12—PAGE 44—133SC.—livE ArT A12031 hounds until she ran into Gillian Arm- be photographed. When I turned around, strong. In the hubbub, it was impossible she had vanished, swallowed up by the to hear what she was saying. Instead, as milling crowd. For a moment, I thought the cameras flashed, I watched her easy I’d lost her; then it occurred to me to fol- smile and thought about a story that low the popping flashbulbs, which, like Armstrong had told me on the phone the the landing lights of an airstrip, led inevi- night before. “I ran the first answer print tably to Blanchett. About forty-five min- of ‘Oscar and Lucinda’ at the lab for the utes later, we made our way back through color grader, Arthur Cambridge, whom I the theatre, through the dressing rooms, worked with for many years,” she said. past the laundry room, the wardrobe, and “You sit in the dark. You watch the film out into the rain-cooled air. at mute, with no sound at all. No one had Blanchett had made a reservation at ever heard of or seen Cate before.” She an Italian restaurant she liked. From the went on, “We’re halfway through the film table, she phoned home to check on the when Arthur said, ‘Is she a nice person? It boys, which led to a discussion of par- just comes through that she is.’ I thought, enthood. “I find it’s made me more eco- Isn’t that great? He’s the first audience.” nomical, more focussed, more generous, After we took our seats, a tall, hand- less self-centered,” she said. “I’m grate- some older man in a blue sports coat ful for it.” She went on, “I remember em- stopped beside us. “Hello, Cate,” he barking on ‘Veronica Guerin’ after Dash said. It was Keating himself. The lights was born, thinking I have nothing to give dimmed. “I love it when it goes dark,” this project because I’m so filled up with she said. “It’s like a slumber party.” She this creature we’ve created. But I’ve be- settled back to be, for once, a member come a better actor because of it. I think of the audience. The show had a fine set parenthood is knowing what cards you’ve of impudent lyrics and an inventive stag- got and then throwing them up in the air. ing; it seemed to release Blanchett’s ro- You need to let go. It’s like when you ex- bust sense of humor. The sultry face of perience intense grief—you often have the glamour pages gave up its famous the deepest insights because the dead composure; the poised lips dissolved into wood’s been cleared out. When you’re ab- guffaws. Blanchett rocked in her seat. At solutely exhausted, somehow the work one point, in “Freaky,” a song about Al- you’ve been consciously trying to do gets exander Downer, the current Australian done on a different, deeper level.” Earlier, Minister for Foreign Affairs, who be- Upton had told me that Blanchett was “in came a figure of fun after he was photo- a constant battle between optimism and graphed in fishnet stockings and wom- pessimism—the futility of all the effort.” en’s shoes for a charity event, Blanchett As Blanchett tucked into her fagottini di was surprised to find herself part of the carne, I asked her about this. “We sort of joke. Downer was played by the show’s liberate one another from melancholy,” lyricist and composer, Casey Bennetto, a she said of her husband. “At least, he cer- large man with a hairy back who swanned tainly does with me. The only thing that onstage in the tight-fitting garter-belted gets in the way is lack of time.” Nonethe- mufti of a dominatrix. He looked, more less, they have considered having another or less, like a bratwurst in heels. Bennetto child. Just that day, Blanchett said, Upton worked the room with gusto: had taken a Pilates class at home with a fe- I’m a greasy-cheek freak male instructor who had a newborn baby. A leader of tomorrow, But I won’t be ’round next week Blanchett held the baby while Upton ran ’Cause I’m too freaky. through his stretching regime. “I was in my pajamas,” she said. “I held this seven- As he marched up the aisle loudly la- week-old baby. He came out looking at menting his volatile career, he came upon me like ‘Don’t.’ And I did.” Blanchett Blanchett. He looked at her for a split looked away for a moment. “The reality second, then flopped into her lap and, in- of what three children would be like?” she voking the singer Barry White, ad-libbed, said. She turned back to her pasta. “We “It’s S.T.C. / When you’re next to me.” 1like a bit of chaos,” she said. ♦ The audience, and Blanchett, howled. When the show was over, she made Headline in the Narragansett (R.I.) Times. her way toward the exit. Just before we LIterArCy GrAnt BenefIts LoCAL students got there, Blanchett was asked to return to But not the local press.

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12, 2007 45

TNY—2007_02_12—PAGE 45—133SC.