A golden touch

THERE are few more iconic figures in some circles than Queen Elizabeth I and Bob Dylan. One was England’s famous Virgin Queen, who vigorously guarded her country’s independence during the age of Shakespeare and the Spanish Armada; the other America’s rumbly voiced bard. Nothing connects them in the popular imagination, but a pair of concurrently released films shows these figures struggling with their phantom alter egos, the mythic selves that live free-form in the culture.

In “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” the monarch determinedly sheds her intimate personal identity to become the white-faced theatrical mother of the nation; in “I’m Not Here,” Dylan -- or at least one of the seven versions of Dylan in the film -- is seen in his new electric guitar phase, “an amphetamine dandy” as director Todd Haynes calls him, willfully refusing to submit to his admirers’ need to deify his folk-hero persona.

The less likely link between the two is that both parts are played by Cate Blanchett, the 38-year-old Australian actress who, in a mad period of months, transformed from a corset-laden monarch terrified of intimacy to an androgynous male singer-poseur.

The latter performance has already won her the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival, where “I’m Not Here” premiered. Still, Blanchett admits that when Haynes first approached her about the part, “I just burst out laughing. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” But she liked his audacious nuttiness. “How can you not take that meeting?”

Blanchett is in L.A. at the end of an 18-month working jag, which includes not only “Elizabeth” and “I’m Not There” but also “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a romance with Brad Pitt, and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” which she’s finishing. Blanchett can’t say much about that last role (though an indiscreet day player has said she plays an evil Russian), but she does reveal that “Steven [Spielberg] is very proud that I’ve had to butch up.” No bodices or fancy-pants accents. “He was joking the other day, saying he was going to cast me in a film where I was always in a harness flying through the air with guns in both hands.”

Blanchett was certainly looser and giddier than when we first met half a dozen years ago. On that occasion, she was polite but reserved, with her hair shorn to about an inch long all over her head, and a plum constructed suit that she wore as chic armor. She was an actress on the rise, having already stunned critics and audiences with her portrayal of the young Elizabeth in Shekhar Kapur’s first film about the famed monarch, but she remained distinctly wary of media limelight.

In the intervening years, she gave birth to two sons, picked up an Oscar for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in “The Aviator,” and moved assuredly into her reign as one of the great actresses of her generation. When she appeared for tea at the Beverly Wilshire hotel recently, she was evidently still an admirer of formal-feeling fashion (this time a stiff but feminine gray scoop-neck dress and red-bottomed stiletto heels), but she was relaxed after playing with her two boys upstairs and eager to laugh.

It used to be hard to remember what Cate Blanchett’s face looked like -- its elastic quality merged so completely with her early performances (“Charlotte Gray,” “The Shipping News”) that the essence of who she was remained elusive. Now, after 30-odd films, Blanchett seems supremely comfortable with her gift, and her intelligence shines through, anchoring her more securely in the audience psyche. Says Kapur, “Cate is so confident of her innate skill that she can put that into her subconscious, and explore herself through the part. . . . Every artist is only a great artist if [she] can reveal herself.”

Another man in her life

Bob DYLAN, says Blanchett, is the only man who ever made her husband, the writer-director Andrew Upton, “jealous.”

“I became unhealthily obsessed,” she says, describing how she’d sit in front of the TV and watch old Dylan press conferences over and over. . Upton “literally one day just kind of took the remote control out of my hand and went, ‘Hello!!’ ” Not that she ever met the superstar, nor did writer-director Haynes. But then again, “I’m Not There,” which opens Nov. 21, is a meditation on the singer, not a Dylan biopic, and his various personas are played by actors as diverse as Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere and a 10-year-old African American actor named Marcus Carl Franklin, who plays Dylan as a Woody Guthrie-like hobo. Haynes says he wants audiences to “experience the movie like a Dylan song. A discourse, not an answer.” The conceit apparently appealed to the puckish superstar, who gave his permission -- and OK’d the use of his songs -- for the enterprise.

Blanchett’s Dylan is the one who barnstormed England in 1965, right after he took his music electric, an aesthetic choice that enraged many folk fans. Haynes labeled that section of the script “Star Wreaks Havoc on His Electric Tour in the style of Fellini’s 8 1/2 ,” and wanted a woman to play the part because he wanted to “bring out something I thought had been lost in the way we look at Dylan in ‘66, his absolute unique strangeness . . . an incredible unique androgyny.”

This was Dylan in his rock-star-elusive phase. “The through line for me was just the way he escaped definition,” says Blanchett. “[Journalists] kept saying, ‘He’s so cryptic. He’s so cryptic.’ I just think he was so prescient. The way he dealt with the press is, he made complete and utter sense. It’s just that he was speaking in haiku.”

For Blanchett, switching genders wasn’t that daunting. “I was always playing men in high school. I was tall, and I was quite relieved as a professional actor when I got the chance to play women,” she says. That said, “It helps putting a sock down your pants,” she adds impishly. “It affects your walk.”

For Haynes, though, it wasn’t the clothes, the wig or the girdle that transformed Blanchett. “It’s remarkably how little she’s wearing in facial makeup. She has a translucent tooth guard over her teeth to muck them up a bit, eyebrows, sideburns and the wig. The remarkable thing about Cate is: when the sunglasses were off is when she resembled Dylan the most.”

Of course, the trigger that turns those eyes into ambivalent, elusive, faintly surly orbs is what Blanchett guards. She’s happy to talk about research -- she works diligently, carefully constructing her character -- but the pith, the total inhabiting of another life, that’s a different issue. “It’s that elusive moment when the light goes on,” she explains. “You live in fear that you’re going to press the switch and it’s not going to go on. I’m sure that’s why people get stage fright, because they’re panicking that it’s not going to happen this time or they become too conscious of their unconscious process. That’s why talking about it is a little unhealthy. It needs to remain a little bit mercurial and hidden from you.”

Transformed into a monarch

At least cramming to play Dylan was a healthy respite from her day job -- playing Elizabeth I in the sequel to the movie that made her famous.

“Elizabeth” launched her international career, but Blanchett was “terrified” about watching it again with director Kapur before they started shooting the new one. She remembered “being disappointed in what I had done and wished I had another chance. I always feel bad at the end of a role. You think, ‘Now I know how to do it. If only I could go back and do it again.’ ”

Although the movie held up better than she remembered, she was keenly aware that there had to be a reason for continuing the story beyond the fact that Elizabeth I is one of history’s most fascinating characters. That raison d’être became the duality in Elizabeth’s character between her larger-than-life political self and her private reality, in which she never knows who loves her for herself and who loves her for her kingdom. The new film, which opens Friday, is visually vibrant, theatrical -- like HBO, but on steroids. In a pivotal moment, Blanchett, in full armor, red hair streaming down her back, addresses her troops, a relatively small band of Englishmen who must soon face the heretofore indomitable Spanish Armada, come to turn Protestant England back into a Catholic country.

“I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all, to lay down my life for my God and for my kingdom and for my people, my honor, and my blood, even in the dust.”

The real Elizabeth said that. And when the weather turned dismal, leading to England’s victory, Elizabeth took it as a sign from God.

The film, says Kapur, “is an exploration of one woman who has to become almost divine and immortal, and go through the pain of leadership and the pain of desire, and the pain of the needs of human relationships, the need to be a mother and leave it behind and turn into a super-being, to counteract somebody [the king of Spain] who believed, ‘I am the servant of God.’ How do you explore divinity? How do you act toward divinity without feeling a sense of the divine?”

Blanchett says that the moment when Elizabeth rallies the troops “fascinated Shekhar from a mystical point of view. I think that was probably an entry point for him into the film, because he talked a lot about divinity and destiny. As he always does. You can guide your destiny, but fate is in the hand of the gods.”

Blanchett’s portal into Elizabeth appears to be not what makes the queen godlike but what makes her mortal, what she renounces to survive politically. Elizabeth is famously the Virgin Queen, who refused to marry, and hence bear children. At the point of “The Golden Age,” she was in her early 50s and probably menopausal (Blanchett repeatedly told the filmmakers to make the lighting harsher and harsher, though she remains beautiful despite the ghostly pallor and ornate Elizabethan wigs).

“I was fascinated to make a film in this day and age about the choice woman have, to have children or not to have children, and then the regret a lot of women experience when they reach a point beyond the point of no return. I haven’t had that,” says Blanchett. “How would Elizabeth assimilate the moment? How does she deal with the fact that she was aging? I think there’s a melancholy to the film, as there’s a realization that she is never going to know intimacy.”

Children are clearly important to Blanchett. Almost the first thing she says when she sits down is that she’d like to have another to join her boys, Roman, 3, and Dashiell, who’s 5. Ever since the making of the first “Elizabeth,” she and her husband have vowed never to be apart for any length of time and have traveled the world together as a brood, except for the last six weeks. Upton has returned to Australia to prepare for their next venture together, as co-heads of the Sydney Theatre Company, the country’s leading theater. That choice, which will lessen Blanchett’s availability for Hollywood, was not made for the children but coincides with her older son’s need to stay in one place for a while. “It’s time,” she says. “I need to settle. Too much time off, too much working, too much of anything -- too much asparagus -- it’s not good for you. So it’s just a matter of keeping things in balance, and now the scale has to tip the other way.”

Dash and Roman have assimilated their mother’s constantly changing identity the way children do -- naturally, without question. They’re obsessed with superheroes and own the Marvel Comics superhero dictionary. Their mother is usually dubbed the Black Canary, after a character with a high-pitched squeal, blond ponytail and black fishnets. (Blanchett admits only to the blond hair.)

The boys “are really interested in people’s alter egos.” With superheroes, “they always want to know what their secret identity is.”

That’s why their mom’s job -- in which she can skip from ruling England to singing in drag to torturing Indiana Jones -- makes total and complete sense to them, she says. “They see it as, these are my series of secret identities.”

--

rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com