Omega
Post by beth on May 16, 2010 17:42:01 GMT -5
It's Canne season and a number of movies are being released or previewed for later release, so it's a good time to catch up with some of our favorite entertainers.
Cate Blanchett on juggling blockbusters and babies
Cate Blanchett is about to swap the Sydney summer for a still chilly Berlin spring and is swamped by piles of cold-weather clothing, the travelling wardrobe for her writer-director husband, Andrew Upton, and their three young sons. “Suitcases, packing, check lists…” she frets. “We leave tomorrow and there’s still so much to do.”
With her biggest successes as our ice-cool monarch in 1998’s Elizabeth and as a dry and clipped Katharine Hepburn in Scorsese’s The Aviator (for which she took home 2005’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar), you might expect her to be imperious and haughty in real life, an actress of the old school. Instead, she is friendly and direct, a time-pressed wife and mother rather than an on-duty star.
“Anyone with children will tell you the same thing. Starting out as single women, our first questions about any job are, ‘What kind of role is it?’ and ‘Who will I be working with?’” says Blanchett, 40. “But as soon as we have kids, we find ourselves asking, ‘How long’s the shoot?’ and ‘Can it be done in the school holidays?’ Suddenly, your attitude becomes very pragmatic. It has to, because shifting your household to another hemisphere is a major upheaval and there has to be a pretty compelling reason for you to do it.”
Blanchett’s motivation for hauling the family off to Germany is Hanna, in which she will star alongside fellow Australian Eric Bana playing – surprise, surprise – an ice-cool CIA agent. But in our cinemas very soon is a much more unexpected role as a brave and decidedly unfrosty Marion in Ridley Scott’s much delayed, oft rewritten take on Robin Hood, played by fellow Aussie Russell Crowe. Not, you might think, the most natural choice for a star who’s about to turn 41 and enjoying a settled family life in a beautiful Sydney suburb.
“To get the chance to work not just with Ridley, but also with Russell?” she exclaims.
“I mean, c’mon, the dynamic duo! It seemed like a great way for us all to spend the summer back in the UK – and it was. In fact, it was thrilling. Our boys [Dashiell, 8, Roman, 6, and Ignatius, 2] had a ball. I went up in their estimation from the first night on set, when I was called on to shoot a flaming arrow, missed my mark and hit a light, which duly exploded. I mean, how many mums do stuff like that?”
It shouldn’t seem strange to hear Blanchett talk about herself in such cosily domestic terms, yet somehow it does. But despite it’s-all-about-the-art roles such as playing a young Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, for which she received another Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, she’s done rather more mainstream films than you might think. A generation of children too young to have seen her in Babel opposite Brad Pitt, The Good German alongside George Clooney or Notes on a Scandal with Dame Judi Dench know and love her as royal elf Galadriel in all three Lord of the Rings films. She also vamped it up in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. “I found her to be terrifically comedic,” says Ridley Scott. “She has a great sense of humour that she brings to the part and is lovely to work with, a real pro.”
So here she is in an all-action blockbuster that some critics have already christened Gladiator 2, although she topped and tailed it with appearances as Richard II and Blanche DuBois in the Sydney Theatre Company’s productions of Shakespeare’s War of the Roses [all eight of his war plays, in this case condensed into seven hours] and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire respectively.
It’s no surprise, either, that Blanchett’s Marion is no damsel in distress. “Rather than Robin simply coming to her rescue, Ridley was interested in depicting a woman who was completely unsentimental, who hardly knew her husband because he’d been away at war for ten years and who’d had to find her own means of survival. Then into her life walks this fellow and they form a bond.”
It was Russell Crowe who thought of her for the role, while they were at the launch of an “Australian Legends of the Screen” postage stamp issue in which they both featured, along with Nicole Kidman and Geoffrey Rush. (“I’m going to be licked by millions of Australians and I can’t wait,” Blanchett joked.)
While speaking that evening, Crowe asked the assembled crowd if they thought he and Blanchett should make a film together. “A thousand people loudly supported the idea,” he says. “And her eyes were shining, so she obviously thought it was a great idea, too.
Cate is a magnificent actress. She has complete control over her emotional responses, so she can make the smallest gesture a gigantic statement.”
As has been the case with so many of her films, Robin Hood was shot outside America.
Is it a deliberate policy for her – Melbourne-raised, now Sydney-based – to live and work as far from the established centre of the film industry as is possible? She says no. “I quite like Los Angeles. The underbelly of the city is really interesting to me. But a lot of my early film stuff ended up being shot around Europe and we headed for England instead. And now we’re back here and quite settled.”
She and Upton lived in Britain for almost ten years, first in North London then later on the South Coast, and two of their three children were born here. Asked what, if anything, she misses about it, Blanchett doesn’t hesitate: “The seasons, definitely. I miss the cold. We were filming Robin Hood in Windsor Great Park, which I’d never visited before… That place is just divine. It could turn you into a tree-hugger. Friends, too, of course. And I miss Brighton a lot, which is where we were before leaving.” Ultimately it was the pull of home and wider family that brought the couple back to Australia, specifically to the waterfront suburb of Hunters Hill, on a peninsula six miles northwest of Sydney.
“The boys go to the local state primary school and they love it there, love – like all kids – the routine of it.” What is it like for her, I wonder, this living in an otherwise all-male household? “It’s loud. Really loud. So very loud.”
It is a priority, she says, for her and Upton to instil normality in their sons’ lives, despite their professions and her star status. She knows only too well the importance of such constancy. When she was ten, her father died of a heart attack, leaving her teacher mother, June, to raise three children alone (Blanchett has an older brother and a younger sister). Bob Blanchett, a Texan-born petty officer in the US Navy, had met his wife-to-be when his ship visited Melbourne. He stayed on in the city and worked as an advertising executive. “One day he was just gone,” Blanchett has said. “Children adjust very quickly to circumstances, but I’m sure I’m still working out his absence in my head.”
Do she and Upton observe familial traits in their boys? “There is that moment when you’re identifying something within your kids that reminds you of yourself and they catch you and say, ‘Stop looking at me funny!’ They don’t want that level of attention or sentimentality. But it is very touching when you see echoes of your parents, your brothers and sisters or your partner in them. Touching and strangely comforting, in fact. It completes some kind of circle, somehow.”
Life informs art, of course, so has motherhood changed her as an actress?
“It toughens you up and makes you more pragmatic, yet at the same time it turns you into a bowl of mush. You see a child in distress or a puppy waiting to cross the street and you just want to weep. Maybe that mix is good for an actor. I guess the great thing is that it increases your ability to switch on and off. The work is no longer the only thing in your life. Other things count – and count more.”
Blanchett and Upton met in 1996 when they were both involved in a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull at Sydney’s Company B. They married a year later. “At first, he thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant. It just shows how wrong you can be. Once he kissed me, that was that,” she has said.
Their relationship is now professional as well as private, after they accepted an invitation in 2008 to become artistic co-directors of the Sydney Theatre Company (a post comparable to Kevin Spacey’s at the London Old Vic, say, but one with a much higher national profile).
“It was a really surprising but galvanising proposition,” says Blanchett. “When a place is not your particular cultural wellspring, you don’t feel the same passion, rage or anxiety about things as you would in your homeland. But coming back here and finding ourselves asked to run the company [the two have just signed for a second three-year term], we’ve been forced to enter a level of national debate that’s been really stimulating. And both my husband’s and my first jobs were there, so it feels like an absolute honour to have returned there in this new capacity.”
She reflects on some of the great older women she has worked with – Judi Dench, Rosemary Harris and the Norwegian Liv Ullmann, who directed the STC’s revival of Streetcar, which they took to New York to great acclaim – and what she might have learnt from them. “They had perspective and irony and were able to laugh at themselves,” she says. “They weren’t afraid to fail, as you often will. But the climate we live and work in now values fame over content. Of course, it depends what you want, and if that is to be famous then all hail to you. If you set out on a different road, though, well – it’s always going to be slightly rockier, isn’t it?”
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article7115564.ece
Cate Blanchett on juggling blockbusters and babies
Cate Blanchett is about to swap the Sydney summer for a still chilly Berlin spring and is swamped by piles of cold-weather clothing, the travelling wardrobe for her writer-director husband, Andrew Upton, and their three young sons. “Suitcases, packing, check lists…” she frets. “We leave tomorrow and there’s still so much to do.”
With her biggest successes as our ice-cool monarch in 1998’s Elizabeth and as a dry and clipped Katharine Hepburn in Scorsese’s The Aviator (for which she took home 2005’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar), you might expect her to be imperious and haughty in real life, an actress of the old school. Instead, she is friendly and direct, a time-pressed wife and mother rather than an on-duty star.
“Anyone with children will tell you the same thing. Starting out as single women, our first questions about any job are, ‘What kind of role is it?’ and ‘Who will I be working with?’” says Blanchett, 40. “But as soon as we have kids, we find ourselves asking, ‘How long’s the shoot?’ and ‘Can it be done in the school holidays?’ Suddenly, your attitude becomes very pragmatic. It has to, because shifting your household to another hemisphere is a major upheaval and there has to be a pretty compelling reason for you to do it.”
Blanchett’s motivation for hauling the family off to Germany is Hanna, in which she will star alongside fellow Australian Eric Bana playing – surprise, surprise – an ice-cool CIA agent. But in our cinemas very soon is a much more unexpected role as a brave and decidedly unfrosty Marion in Ridley Scott’s much delayed, oft rewritten take on Robin Hood, played by fellow Aussie Russell Crowe. Not, you might think, the most natural choice for a star who’s about to turn 41 and enjoying a settled family life in a beautiful Sydney suburb.
“To get the chance to work not just with Ridley, but also with Russell?” she exclaims.
“I mean, c’mon, the dynamic duo! It seemed like a great way for us all to spend the summer back in the UK – and it was. In fact, it was thrilling. Our boys [Dashiell, 8, Roman, 6, and Ignatius, 2] had a ball. I went up in their estimation from the first night on set, when I was called on to shoot a flaming arrow, missed my mark and hit a light, which duly exploded. I mean, how many mums do stuff like that?”
It shouldn’t seem strange to hear Blanchett talk about herself in such cosily domestic terms, yet somehow it does. But despite it’s-all-about-the-art roles such as playing a young Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, for which she received another Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, she’s done rather more mainstream films than you might think. A generation of children too young to have seen her in Babel opposite Brad Pitt, The Good German alongside George Clooney or Notes on a Scandal with Dame Judi Dench know and love her as royal elf Galadriel in all three Lord of the Rings films. She also vamped it up in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. “I found her to be terrifically comedic,” says Ridley Scott. “She has a great sense of humour that she brings to the part and is lovely to work with, a real pro.”
So here she is in an all-action blockbuster that some critics have already christened Gladiator 2, although she topped and tailed it with appearances as Richard II and Blanche DuBois in the Sydney Theatre Company’s productions of Shakespeare’s War of the Roses [all eight of his war plays, in this case condensed into seven hours] and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire respectively.
It’s no surprise, either, that Blanchett’s Marion is no damsel in distress. “Rather than Robin simply coming to her rescue, Ridley was interested in depicting a woman who was completely unsentimental, who hardly knew her husband because he’d been away at war for ten years and who’d had to find her own means of survival. Then into her life walks this fellow and they form a bond.”
It was Russell Crowe who thought of her for the role, while they were at the launch of an “Australian Legends of the Screen” postage stamp issue in which they both featured, along with Nicole Kidman and Geoffrey Rush. (“I’m going to be licked by millions of Australians and I can’t wait,” Blanchett joked.)
While speaking that evening, Crowe asked the assembled crowd if they thought he and Blanchett should make a film together. “A thousand people loudly supported the idea,” he says. “And her eyes were shining, so she obviously thought it was a great idea, too.
Cate is a magnificent actress. She has complete control over her emotional responses, so she can make the smallest gesture a gigantic statement.”
As has been the case with so many of her films, Robin Hood was shot outside America.
Is it a deliberate policy for her – Melbourne-raised, now Sydney-based – to live and work as far from the established centre of the film industry as is possible? She says no. “I quite like Los Angeles. The underbelly of the city is really interesting to me. But a lot of my early film stuff ended up being shot around Europe and we headed for England instead. And now we’re back here and quite settled.”
She and Upton lived in Britain for almost ten years, first in North London then later on the South Coast, and two of their three children were born here. Asked what, if anything, she misses about it, Blanchett doesn’t hesitate: “The seasons, definitely. I miss the cold. We were filming Robin Hood in Windsor Great Park, which I’d never visited before… That place is just divine. It could turn you into a tree-hugger. Friends, too, of course. And I miss Brighton a lot, which is where we were before leaving.” Ultimately it was the pull of home and wider family that brought the couple back to Australia, specifically to the waterfront suburb of Hunters Hill, on a peninsula six miles northwest of Sydney.
“The boys go to the local state primary school and they love it there, love – like all kids – the routine of it.” What is it like for her, I wonder, this living in an otherwise all-male household? “It’s loud. Really loud. So very loud.”
It is a priority, she says, for her and Upton to instil normality in their sons’ lives, despite their professions and her star status. She knows only too well the importance of such constancy. When she was ten, her father died of a heart attack, leaving her teacher mother, June, to raise three children alone (Blanchett has an older brother and a younger sister). Bob Blanchett, a Texan-born petty officer in the US Navy, had met his wife-to-be when his ship visited Melbourne. He stayed on in the city and worked as an advertising executive. “One day he was just gone,” Blanchett has said. “Children adjust very quickly to circumstances, but I’m sure I’m still working out his absence in my head.”
Do she and Upton observe familial traits in their boys? “There is that moment when you’re identifying something within your kids that reminds you of yourself and they catch you and say, ‘Stop looking at me funny!’ They don’t want that level of attention or sentimentality. But it is very touching when you see echoes of your parents, your brothers and sisters or your partner in them. Touching and strangely comforting, in fact. It completes some kind of circle, somehow.”
Life informs art, of course, so has motherhood changed her as an actress?
“It toughens you up and makes you more pragmatic, yet at the same time it turns you into a bowl of mush. You see a child in distress or a puppy waiting to cross the street and you just want to weep. Maybe that mix is good for an actor. I guess the great thing is that it increases your ability to switch on and off. The work is no longer the only thing in your life. Other things count – and count more.”
Blanchett and Upton met in 1996 when they were both involved in a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull at Sydney’s Company B. They married a year later. “At first, he thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant. It just shows how wrong you can be. Once he kissed me, that was that,” she has said.
Their relationship is now professional as well as private, after they accepted an invitation in 2008 to become artistic co-directors of the Sydney Theatre Company (a post comparable to Kevin Spacey’s at the London Old Vic, say, but one with a much higher national profile).
“It was a really surprising but galvanising proposition,” says Blanchett. “When a place is not your particular cultural wellspring, you don’t feel the same passion, rage or anxiety about things as you would in your homeland. But coming back here and finding ourselves asked to run the company [the two have just signed for a second three-year term], we’ve been forced to enter a level of national debate that’s been really stimulating. And both my husband’s and my first jobs were there, so it feels like an absolute honour to have returned there in this new capacity.”
She reflects on some of the great older women she has worked with – Judi Dench, Rosemary Harris and the Norwegian Liv Ullmann, who directed the STC’s revival of Streetcar, which they took to New York to great acclaim – and what she might have learnt from them. “They had perspective and irony and were able to laugh at themselves,” she says. “They weren’t afraid to fail, as you often will. But the climate we live and work in now values fame over content. Of course, it depends what you want, and if that is to be famous then all hail to you. If you set out on a different road, though, well – it’s always going to be slightly rockier, isn’t it?”
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article7115564.ece
