Unpredictable pays off

A suburban American mother struck by random gunfire in a remote Moroccan village. A North London art teacher swept into an affair with a 15-year-old boy. A married German woman in 1945 Berlin who’s romantically entangled with an American war correspondent. In a string of films that open before the end of the year, Cate Blanchett inhabits a collection of characters offering a strong sampling of her range.

“She’s clearly interested in trying a lot of different things, and she isn’t concerned about the size of the part,” says Steven Soderbergh, who directed her in “The Good German,” opening Dec. 15 in Los Angeles and New York. “She’s very director-driven and content-driven, so she gives herself more options than a lot of people might have ordinarily.”

With “Babel” now in theaters, and “The Good German” followed Dec. 22 by “Notes on a Scandal,” audiences (and Oscar voters) will have a chance to size up her choices, projects that seem more the mark of an artist than a movie star.

And while she’ll be highly visible on-screen, she’s relatively absent from the blaring forums of celebrity mania. The Australian-born actress has been married to fellow Aussie and theater director Andrew Upton for almost nine years. And days spent making and promoting her films are punctuated by real-life concerns such as picking up her sons Dashiell, almost 5, and Roman, 2, from school.

All of which makes Blanchett a rare breed of star: She is, to her public, tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which a filmmaker’s dreams can be projected and believed.

The performer who leaves no footprints on her audience’s preconceptions greets a visitor on a recent afternoon in bare feet at the top of a driveway in Los Feliz. She apologizes profusely for the steep walk up to the classic Mediterranean home she has been renting for a couple of weeks, and leads the way to a couch in the cavernous living room.

A devotee of fashion who wears it well, Blanchett has appeared on numerous fashion magazine covers, but today she’s simply dressed in jeans and a loose-fitting, striped Comme des Garcons top. She’s wearing no makeup over her luminous complexion and her hair is tied back, more an afterthought than a ponytail. At a Screen Actors Guild screening the night before of “Notes on a Scandal,” she’d shown herself to be funny, self-deprecating and thoughtful. And she still talks about the best supporting actress Oscar she won last year for playing Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator” with all the gee-whizness of the Sydney drama school student she once was.

“I thought I was going to demurely place it in the loo,” she says with a laugh. “But when I got it, it was so beautiful.... I polished up the grand piano and plunked it in the middle, right where people could see it when they walked in the front door. Your family, your friends want to see the thing. It’s fantastic.”

Soderbergh says Blanchett was the first actress who came to mind when he discussed casting “The Good German” with George Clooney, his frequent collaborator. “She’s a real thoroughbred,” he says. “All of us on the movie walked away feeling, ‘Well, that’s about as good as it gets.’ ”

Blanchett wanted to play Lena Brandt because she was impressed by the complexity of Soderbergh’s vision. The film is a homage to Hollywood’s Golden Age shot in black and white on Warner Bros.’ back lot. While contemporary films set in Eastern Europe go for the authenticity supplied by a location shoot, Soderbergh was going after a different kind of authenticity -- one that persuasively resurrected vintage movies. At the outset of production, he handed the actors a one-page manifesto as well as DVDs of film classics such as “Casablanca” and “Humoresque” so they could study the presentational performance style of the ‘40s. But the film is actually a hybrid of old and new because the actors’ faces as well as the swearing and sex scenes are the stuff of present-day moviemaking.

For Blanchett, a chance like that, to tread on new territory, is professional catnip. “The things I end up taking are things where I think, ‘Wow, I never thought of that. That’s a crazy idea. I have no idea how to do that.’ Because I think the journey of trying to find out how to do it keeps you on your toes.”

PATH TO DISCOVERY

BLANCHETT says there’s no single road map for her to find the truth of a character. “Sometimes the process is quite messy, and sometimes it’s very simple,” she says, fiddling with her coiled wedding ring. “It depends on the role and also the director and the way the other actors like to work. And it’s that dynamic that I find interesting, because it’s an exchange. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to be exchanging ideas with people of remarkable intellect and talent. And so their points of reference have continually been expansive on a selfish level.”

Blanchett was attracted to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s intensity when she agreed to appear with Brad Pitt in the elegiac Paramount Vantage film “Babel” after the three had dinner in Los Angeles. It wasn’t long before Blanchett and Pitt found themselves in Morocco for a grueling three-week shoot.

With several stories on different continents threaded together by a single bullet, there was little screen time for Blanchett and Pitt to establish themselves as partners in a fraying marriage. The actors turned to Inarritu for a back story to set the stage for their trip to Morocco in an attempt to salvage their relationship. “We talked a lot with Alejandro about what had gone on, what the silences were,” she says. “Alejandro wanted them to be equally as eloquent, more eloquent perhaps, than the dialogue was between them. So that required trying to make each moment as deep as possible, as layered as possible.”

In Fox Searchlight’s “Notes on a Scandal,” Blanchett’s character, Sheba Hart, becomes embroiled in a relationship with a minor that was so foreign, the actress was completely perplexed by it.

“What would drive someone to do something like that? I think that’s an interesting question to ask yourself as a human being. But as an actor, it’s not always important to answer the questions, it’s just important to ask them.”

While that destructive relationship is the scandal of the title, the main plot concerns another troubled relationship: An aging lesbian teacher, played by Judi Dench, discovers their liaison and tries to use the secret to her advantage. Blanchett had been intrigued by the 2003 bestseller by Zoe Heller on which the movie is based. After Blanchett’s friend playwright Patrick Marber (“Closer”) mentioned that he was writing the screenplay, she signed on to the project.

But once she plunged into the role, Blanchett surprised herself with her harsh judgment of Sheba. “I think normally when I approach a character, I don’t really ever like or dislike them,” she says. “To fall in love with a character means you shy away from showing their unpalatable side. You always want to show something as three-dimensional as possible.”

LAUNCHING A COURSE

BLANCHETT cast the template for her career as both leading lady and character actress with her breakthrough title role in Shekhar Kapur’s “Elizabeth,” which led to a best actress Oscar nomination in 1999. She went on to a string of eclectic performances that included another queen, the elf Galadriel of “The Lord of the Rings.” The broad swath she cut freed Blanchett to return to the subject of royalty for the recent shoot of the “Elizabeth” sequel: “The Golden Age,” which costars Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh and picks up 15 years later to explore the political and personal concerns of the aging queen.

This month, Blanchett will direct Harold Pinter’s “A Kind of Alaska” and her husband will direct David Mamet’s “Reunion” in a production of one-act plays for the Sydney Theatre Company. Then she continues her avenue in innovative filmmaking: a reunion with Pitt in David Fincher’s “The Adventures of Benjamin Button,” about a 50-year-old man who ages in reverse. And she’s signed on to star in the adaptation of the unlikely commercial blockbuster “Cancer Vixen: A True Story,” cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s memoir.

But the project that makes her eyes shimmer is Todd Haynes’ (“Far From Heaven”) upcoming biopic about Bob Dylan, “I’m Not There.” In it, she is one of half a dozen actors playing a version of the songwriter -- and, not surprisingly, the only one who’s a woman.

“That’s out there,” she says with a broad smile. “When Todd and I spoke about it a couple of years ago, the idea was so insane that I just kept running away from it. But the Bob Dylan thing is not a regular biopic. It’s splitting a mystique as much as a persona into five or six different components and casting actors to play all those different characters. Then in the juxtaposition of those different personas, you maybe can approximate the spirit of Bob Dylan. I would say it’s a pastiche, but that sounds a bit cut and paste. It’s a Todd Haynes movie.”