Her Career in Full Flower

Is there a busier major film actress than Cate Blanchett? There certainly hasn’t been in the last couple of years: She appears in three films that will open during this year-end period, which makes a total of six she has completed since the start of last year.

But her frenetic career has now slowed considerably. Blanchett, 32, is about to give birth to her first baby in mid-December, and although a long line of filmmakers who want to work with her is forming, they will simply have to wait for a while. “Ah, yes,” says Blanchett, patting her belly gently, “I’ve already been waking up at 2 a.m. and cleaning the kitchen. Life is about to change.”

It will need to, considering her list of commitments since January 2000. That was when she began filming “The Gift” for director Sam Raimi. “That seems like five years ago,” she says, sighing. She went on to New Zealand to play the minor role of Galadriel in “The Lord of the Rings.” Then she traveled to Italy and Germany for “Heaven,” director Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of a script by the legendary Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski, due out next year. After a mere five days off, Blanchett headed for the Pacific Northwest to film Barry Levinson’s recently released “Bandits.”

That took her to the beginning of this year. She spent four days in Scotland for some pre-shooting research on the film “Charlotte Gray” (opening Dec. 28), in which she plays the title role. Then, just in case anyone might think Blanchett was taking it easy, she flew to Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada (doubling for upstate New York) and spent a week filming with Lasse Hallstrom on his adaptation of “The Shipping News,” in theaters Dec. 25. Mention to her that this seems a formidable work rate, and she merely shrugs. “These were things you couldn’t say no to.”

Given the whirlwind that her life has been lately, Blanchett looks, well, serene. In a London hotel suite, she is understatedly elegant in a black velvet blouse, matching pants and simple diamond stud earrings. She can appear strikingly different from film to film--occasionally, even within the same film, as in her Oscar-nominated title turn in “Elizabeth.” Yet she has distinctive features: strawberry blond hair, pale complexion and a large expressive mouth. She is also one of her profession’s more thoughtful interviewees, answering questions in a serious, considered manner. Blanchett’s spurt of recent work has not exactly been atypical for her; she has completed 14 movies in the last five years. “Is that how many?” she asks, seemingly about to protest. “Well, OK, if you say so. But playing Meredith Logue [in Anthony Minghella’s ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ from 1999] or doing ‘The Shipping News’ didn’t take long. They’re not all huge commitments in terms of time.

“Last year was lunacy really, being in so many different places. I was laughing about it with my husband [Australian screenwriter and playwright Andrew Upton]. I said, ‘Where’s this year gone?’ And he said, ‘Well, love, you’ve already made five films this last year.’ We both knew it was going to be an exceptional time.”

In more ways than one. “I’ve been blessed,” Blanchett muses. “We conceived while I was shooting ‘Charlotte Gray’ in France. It was quite a physical film, quite apart from the emotional and psychological gymnastics. It was really fortunate that I wasn’t sick. I just felt incredibly energetic last year.” She laughs. “Obviously!”

In both “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Shipping News,” Blanchett makes relatively fleeting appearances. In the former film, she plays Galadriel, whom she describes as “a sort of touchstone” for the story’s hero, Frodo. Blanchett’s character also will appear in the two subsequent “Lord of the Rings” films, due in 2002 and 2003. Her week in Nova Scotia on “The Shipping News” was spent playing an unsympathetic minor character, Petal Bear. She enjoyed it hugely: “You don’t often get to play someone as unrelentingly obnoxious. Protagonists can rarely be as black and as dark. You can’t steam ahead in the same way as you can in a smaller part.”

That leaves “Charlotte Gray,” a film that, in contrast, Blanchett dominates in terms of screen time. It is based on a best-selling novel by English author Sebastian Faulks, and Blanchett plays Charlotte, a young Scottish woman who travels to London in World War II and is recruited by British intelligence forces.

After she falls in love with a Royal Air Force officer whose plane is shot down over France, she parachutes behind enemy lines to liaise with a French Resistance unit in a small town. She has to pretend she is a Frenchwoman from Paris. But only she knows she is using her mission in France, a country she loves, for another reason--to look for her lover.

However, Charlotte’s expectations are changed when she encounters Julien (Billy Crudup), the committed anti-Nazi who runs the French Resistance unit, and his father (Michael Gambon), with whom he has a combative relationship. The three conspire to hide two young Jewish brothers to prevent them being shipped to death camps by the Nazis.

“Charlotte moves through a lot in this story,” Blanchett reflects. “She almost assumes another identity and somehow becomes more herself when she is undercover. She undergoes a lot of difficult emotional shifts, but I relished the challenge of that. It says about Charlotte in the book that there’s a nervous intensity in her passion. There’s a life-saving quality to it. She has a nervousness, an aloofness.”

Blanchett first read “Charlotte Gray” when she was starring on the London stage in the David Hare play “Plenty” in the spring of 1999. She took the lead role, Susan Traherne, another British woman who served in World War II but felt bitter and disillusioned afterward. “It was the first of Sebastian’s books that I’d read,” she recalls. “When juxtaposed against Susan Traherne’s wartime experiences, Charlotte Gray broke my heart. There was something about her relentless optimism and her refusal to sink into the depths of depression. Whereas Susan experienced the death of honor and couldn’t find a way to move forward through it, Charlotte obviously experienced the ambiguities and complexities of war, but was galvanized by the shock and the grief that she experienced. So both characters complemented one another.”

In a curious coincidence, once Blanchett had finished reading “Charlotte Gray” in paperback, she received a hardback copy from Faulks. He had taken a close interest in who might be cast as Charlotte and hoped Blanchett would like his book. “I couldn’t quite believe it,” she says now. “It was like he had read my mind.” The small London production company Ecosse, which made “Mrs. Brown” (1997) with Judi Dench and Billy Connolly, secured the film rights to the novel. (Appropriately for this film, “Ecosse” is the French word for Scotland.) Screenwriter Jeremy Brock, who had written “Mrs. Brown,” adapted “Charlotte Gray,” and Ecosse hired Blanchett’s fellow Australian Gillian Armstrong, who had directed her in “Oscar and Lucinda” (1997).

“Gillian’s meticulous as a director, but she’s always incredibly emotional,” Blanchett says. “She invests every bit of herself in making a film.”

To prepare for playing Charlotte, Blanchett toured Scotland for a few days: “I find the more images I have floating around my head, the more voices and accents come through too. I flew up from London to the Edinburgh area, hired a car, got lost a lot and listened to a lot of Scottish radio. In the book, Charlotte comes from a village named Ancram. It’s so tiny I drove through it several times before I realized I’d missed it.”

Still, she feels her research paid off: “I’ve seen a rough assemblage of the film, and I found I could watch it, which is a really good sign,” she says, smiling wryly.

After their baby is born, she and Upton have major decisions to make, including where to live. “We’ve been here in London for the last little while, although my husband’s also been in Australia. He’s adapted a new version of ‘Don Juan’ down there. We’ll probably be back there next year because his new play, ‘Hanging Man,’ is on at the Sydney Theatre Company.”

And Blanchett? You’ve guessed it--her dance card for 2002 is already starting to fill up. “I’m going to work with Joel Schumacher on a film about Veronica Guerin [the crusading Irish journalist murdered by Dublin gang members]. And I’m going to be making a film with Darren Aronofsky [‘Requiem for a Dream’] in which I’ll be acting with Brad Pitt.”

Does this woman never want to rest up for a while? She wrinkles her nose in a faintly apologetic manner: “It’s sort of nice, because having a child is the most unpredictable thing you can do--apart from getting married, that is. It’s a sort of hopeful insanity. So it’s nice that I have a sense of what the arc of next year is.”