Notes on a Scandal – Peter Murmann

Don’t! Stop! Don’t! Stop! Don’t… Don’t stop! I thought that Notes on a Scandal was a film about one of these notorious conservative British politicians caught up in a sex scandal. Wrong! The scandal involves people from a very different social group. Not knowing anything about the plot made the film all the more suspenseful. Notes on a Scandal manages to pull off what Little Children failed to do: drive you to the edge of your seat. Call it, “Adults Playing With Fire.” I was lured into the theatre by a recent profile of Cate Blanchett in the New Yorker (see below). The article celebrated her as one of the great actresses of our time. This was not on display in Babel or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. According to the article, her acting in Notes on a Scandal is excellent. Indeed, the film is very good, but not because of Blanchett. She is responsible for its only two flaws:

First, she portrays her character as having a sense of stability and self-assuredness that flies in the face of the actions that emanate from her character. Second, Blanchett is much too beautiful for the role. She reminds one of the perfect symmetry found in the faces of carefully chiseled Greek or Roman statues rather than a living human being. This makes her character even more psychologically unbelievable. Still, the film is well worth seeing. It provides a much better movie experience than Little Children. “Go see Elizabeth” an actor told me at a recent party, “if you really see what Blanchett is capable of.” That’s what I will do.

DISAPPEARING ACT by JOHN LAHR. The New Yorker. New York:Feb 12, 2007. Vol. 82, Iss. 49, p. 38

In Sydney, Australia, on the

bright, blustery morning of November 10th, toward the end of Pier 4, a “finger

wharf” that reaches out two hundred yards into the harbor and houses the Sydney

Theatre Company, a little bit of show-biz history took place. There, inside a

cavernous former wool storehouse—now a dusty gray rehearsal room—amid a

cluster of cameras, lights, and local journalists, the actress Cate Blanchett

and her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, announced their appointment as

co-artistic directors of the S.T.C., Australia’s most prestigious theatre,

which operates three stages. Theatre history is studded with examples of

renowned actor-managers—Moliere, Shakespeare, and Sir Laurence Olivier come to

mind—but never before had a movie actress of Blanchett’s calibre, at the

height of her powers and popularity, made this kind of commitment to the

theatre community that launched her. Blanchett and Upton will officially begin

their three-year appointment in 2008, after a year of shadowing the current

artistic director, Robyn Nevin. They also happened to be in the process of

staging a double bill at the theatre: Harold Pinter’s “A Kind of Alaska,”

directed by Blanchett, and David Mamet’s “Reunion,” directed by Upton, both of

which opened to strong reviews at the end of November. “Andrew and I are

galvanized by a challenge,” Blanchett said. “Frankly, this is the most exciting

thing that has happened to us, apart from marriage and having children.”

“I feel the need to move forward,” Blanchett, who is thirty-seven, told me

later. “I know it’s going to broaden me as a human being. I hope it broadens me

as an actor.” She added, “Moviemaking becomes a little pointless after a time.

You think, Well, yes, that’s an incredible role, and, yes, it would probably

stretch me as an actor. But performance is not, and never has been, really, all

of who I am.” Still, it is through film that most of her fans have come to know

her. Blanchett’s list of twenty-seven movies is notable for both its range and

its ambition. In her most recent collection of character studies, she plays a

predatory Nazi collaborator (Steven Soderbergh’s “The Good German”), an

American tourist who is shot in Morocco (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s

“Babel”), a British schoolteacher who has an affair with a fifteen-year-old

student (Richard Eyre’s “Notes on a Scandal,” a performance for which she was

just nominated for an Academy Award), and a version of Bob Dylan, complete with

big hair and sideburns (Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There”). “I wanted to be him,”

Blanchett said of the singer. “It’s the first time I ever had that feeling. I

actually wanted to be Dylan. Ultimately, he just really didn’t care. He’s on

his own path.”

At the S.T.C., Blanchett, who calls herself a “theatre geek,” was following her

own path. Her appointment was also a strategic coup for the company: with

Blanchett and Upton as artistic directors, its productions will attract

international press and talent. (Philip Seymour Hoffman, for instance, will

direct Upton’s play “Riflemind,” later this year.) And for a theatre company

that, in 2005, found itself in the red for the first time in twenty-seven

years, Blanchett’s stardom will draw lucrative sponsorship. None of this sense

of promise and purpose, however, seemed to catch the imagination of the local

press back in November. When it was time for questions, the journalists seemed

nonplussed.What if Blanchett got a movie role? they asked. Would she have time,

in her busy film schedule, to undertake such a job? Did this mean that she and

her sons—five-year-old Dashiell and two-year-old Roman—were going to live

permanently in Sydney? How would her celebrity affect the running of the

theatre? “Celebrity is a by-product,” Blanchett replied firmly. “If that by-

product can be harnessed to the company’s name, fantastic.” After the final

question of the proceedings—which, like many before, was directed only at

Blanchett—she put her hand on Upton’s shoulder. “We’re a team,” she said.

Upton, like his wife, seems to know himself without insisting on himself; he

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, serendipitously, 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 destructive.” 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 allegiance to his wife’s talent. Upton

studied playwriting and directing at the Victorian College of the Arts School

of Drama, in Melbourne, 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), starring 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 marry him.

I’m gonna have to say yes. I asked her three weeks later.” Their decisions to

marry and to run the S.T.C. seemed to share an adventurous sense of optimism.

“Our spirit is jump in, then just keep going until you can make the thing work

or not,” Blanchett said. “If it’s not making sense, you pull it apart and try

to put it back together again.”

“Walking a tightrope” is how Blanchett once described the experience of acting.

A similar metaphor came up over lunch, when Upton described his view of their

family life. “There’s someone on top riding a bike with a bar and a ball

balancing the thing,” Upton said. “I think we’re in there.”

“In the ball?” Blanchett said.

“Me and the boys are in there.”

A flicker of distress showed in her eyes. “That’s not true,” she said.

“In a balancing way.”

“You’re not in the ball with the boys.”

“I mean, there’s balancing in it,” Upton said.

The exchange, in its matter-of-factness, seemed evidence of the clarity that

Upton brings to Blanchett’s thinking, which, she has admitted, is “very

meandering—nothing is linear.”

When I asked Blanchett if she agreed with Upton about their family dynamic, she

said carefully, “There’s something about being an actor that is shaman-like. It

can produce a great amount of superstition in terms of how you connect to it.

To talk about that is very private. Before Andrew, in previous partnerships,

even friendships, I couldn’t go there. I didn’t want to break some spell.” She

turned to Upton. “I met you and I finally could talk to somebody else about

that stuff. I feel like every time I make a film or go into a rehearsal room

I’ve already collaborated with you on it. The hardest thing is to get up there

and voice what it is that you’re feeling, for fear of being misunderstood or

locked down too early or just plain ridiculous. I think that to be able to sort

of air that stuff with you . . . allows it to grow,” she said.

>From the outset of her acting career—she studied at the National Institute of

Dramatic Art (NIDA), in Sydney, from 1990 to 1992—Blanchett exhibited an

uncanny ability to enter the kind of egoless state that her former teacher the

director Lindy Davies calls “transformational.” In work and in life, Blanchett,

whose favorite word is “fluidity,” has a kind of inconclusiveness that lets her

remain receptive. “I don’t like everything to be tied neatly in bows,” she told

me. “If it’s flowing, you don’t arrest it.” Keeping things open when you’re

acting, she explained, reinforces the mystery and the intensity of the moment.

“I think it’s important to pin questions down,” she said. “Sometimes you can

answer things definitively within a character, within a moment. And sometimes

it’s important that you don’t.”

“Cate is willing to throw herself into a chaotic state out of which something

will arise,” the director Shekhar Kapur told me. “The fluidity you get in Cate

is also because of the contradictions inside her.” Blanchett is both candid and

private, gregarious and solitary, self-doubting and daring, witty and

melancholy. It was these contradictions that prompted Kapur to cast her as

Elizabeth I, in “Elizabeth,” one of the films that made Blanchett an

international star. “I was looking for somebody who could portray not only a

reality but an ethereal quality,” he said. “This ability to be both of the

earth and of the spirit was very attractive to me—the ability to be both

vulnerable and totally ruthless. Cate’s absolute ruthlessness is with herself,

an obsessive ruthlessness about her craft.”

“There’s something tightly wound inside her, something hidden,” the British

director Jonathan Kent, who worked with Blanchett on the Almeida Theatre

Company’s 1999 revival of David Hare’s “Plenty,” said. “An uncontrolled core

that she’s not entirely in charge of, which, when it’s harnessed, makes her

riveting.” In “Plenty,” Blanchett played Susan Traherne, a woman whose life

after the Second World War is a slow diminuendo into despair. The production

was controversial, and some of the reviews were catty—the Independent

suggested that only Dame Edna could have done more to expose the weaknesses of

the play. Blanchett was distraught. “She didn’t weep like a prima donna,” Upton

said. “She wept like a betrayed woman.” Since that incident, Blanchett has

never read a review; Kent, for his part, has never quite believed in her

apparent confidence. “That grounded self that you and I perceive—the

directness, the straightness, the lack of nonsense—in a way I think that’s a

performance,” he said. “I think the hidden 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

insight into why the character’s behaving the way she is, you gobble it up. I

think it’s a combination of alluring and elusive.” He added, “It is the

elusiveness that is the key.” Blanchett herself made the same point. She was

describing her character Lena, a Nazi collaborator in Berlin in 1945, in

Soderbergh’s “The Good German,” which she began shooting, without any

rehearsal, the Monday after she’d completed “Notes on a Scandal.” The scene

Blanchett filmed that day had Lena sitting on a bench with an American military

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 gonna give anything away to this man. I knew everything that Lena was

concealing. But it was, like, I’m not going to let Steven Soderbergh know. I’m

going to be completely, utterly ambiguous.” She continued, “Ambiguity is not

absence. It’s a wildly contradicting series of actions, emotions, and

intentions. There was a line where Lena said, ‘No one is all good or all bad.’

And I thought that she was referring to herself. So I let a tiny little bit of

her own self-hatred come through.” (Soderbergh got his shot on the first take.)

What Blanchett hides from her directors and her audience she also hides from

herself. “I do like to preserve the mystique of the thing, for myself as much

as anyone else,” she has said. Over the years, she has repeatedly dodged

autobiographical questions by claiming, “I’ve sort of forgotten my childhood.”

These ellipses in conversation help Blanchett to trick herself out of self-

consciousness. “I’m not interested in the character I am in myself,” she told

James Lipton on the television series “Inside the Actors Studio.” “Any

connection that I have to my characters will be subliminal and subconscious.”

The first time Blanchett realized that she might have talent is associated in

her mind with this ability to make herself disappear. She was in her second

year at Melbourne University, appearing in a play by Kris Hemensley called

“European Features,” at Melbourne’s La Mama. “My sister, Genevieve, came to see

the play,” Blanchett said. “My sister’s a harsh critic. She said, ‘That’s the

first time I couldn’t see you.’ I understood what she meant.”

Blanchett grew up in Ivanhoe, a leafy suburb of Melbourne, beside the Yarra

River. She was the middle child, between an older brother, Bob, who had a mild

case of cerebral palsy, and Genevieve. (Bob works as a computer programmer;

Genevieve is studying architecture, after a successful career as a stage

designer.) Of the siblings, Blanchett was, by her own admission, the most

adventurous. “I felt very free as a child,” she said. Together, she and

Genevieve invented characters, which Blanchett would play, for days at a time,

around the house. “My sister and I would dress me up in something,” she said.

“I’d pull a face or a stance; she’d give them names and an identity.” When

Blanchett was around nine, her enthusiasm for performance took the form of

knocking on strangers’ doors to see if she could talk her way inside their

homes with a tall tale about a lost dog. “It was the adrenaline rush, really,”

she said. “My friend hid in the bushes. I remember the woman at the door

saying, ‘I haven’t seen a dog. Come in. I’ll ask my husband.’ I looked at the

bushes thinking, Oh, my God, what am I doing? I remember the look in this

woman’s eyes when she started to think, You haven’t lost a dog, have you? It

suddenly had become a real thing.” Blanchett continued, “My whole childhood was

like that. If someone dared me, I’d do it.”

Blanchett’s mother, June, was a jazz-loving schoolteacher. Her Texas-born

father, Robert, who met June when his Navy ship broke down in Melbourne, had,

according to Blanchett, “a very dry sense of humor.” He had quit school at

fourteen—“I went to the school for bums,” he told his daughter. Robert put

himself through night school, worked at a television station, returned to

Australia to marry June, and got into advertising. Then, when Blanchett was

ten, he died. “I was playing the piano,” she has recalled. “He walked past the

window. I waved goodbye. He was going off to work. He had a heart attack that

day. He was only forty.” The fact that she hadn’t embraced him before he left

haunted Blanchett. “I developed this ritual where I couldn’t leave the house

until I could actually physically say goodbye to everyone,” she said. The

ritual continues, according to Upton. “She will never forget to say goodbye,”

he said. “When you’re going off to work, if you’re going overseas, that point

of departure is really important to her.”

When asked about her father now, Blanchett generally brushes the questions

aside. “I don’t necessarily need to consciously understand my past,” she said.

She went on, “Drama school was a place where a lot of these things came up, but

in a way that one could deal with them in a visceral sense. You move them

through your body and out your fingertips. Then you keep the bits that are

useful and throw away the junk.” Still, the loss was clearly a transforming

one, for her and for her work. She has called bereavement “a strange gift.” In

many essential ways, she told me, her father’s death was the shadow that

informed her brightness. “It’s chiaroscuro,” she said.

After Robert died, Blanchett developed a passion for horror movies. “I loved

being terrified,” she said. “It used to be a badge of honor if you could sit

through ‘Halloween II.’ ” Some of the appeal of horror movies lies in the

thrill of surviving them, of, in a sense, cheating death. It’s a thrill that

carries over, as Upton pointed out, to acting. “You go onstage and you’re

alive,” he said. “You walk offstage, then the character’s gone. You survive the

experience. It’s scintillating.” He added, “I think that’s why Cate’s not one

of those Method people who carry the role offstage with them.” Over the years,

Blanchett has turned her appetite for this form of transcendence into a kind of

life style. “You can’t say no to things because you’re frightened,” she told a

group of students in 2005.

The idea of performance first captured Blanchett’s imagination when she was

about five and saw a production of “The Mikado” in which an actor’s long

mustache fell off onstage. “You could feel the whole audience go, ‘Oh, my God,

something real just happened,’ ” Blanchett told Lipton. “He said, ‘Oh, you can

never trust these Japanese,’ or some joke. I remember that moment—seeing the

actor handling a real moment in a completely surreal and unreal production. I

thought, I wish I could be up there with him.” Throughout her childhood, on

Saturday afternoons, Blanchett attended a drama class in a musty warehouse,

with a costume box full of “things that were slightly frayed around the edges.”

“I would often spend the whole class by myself, or with another girl, trying on

this stuff and making little things up,” she told me. She was, she added, “the

child of whom everyone said, ‘Oh, she’s gonna be an actress.’ “

Still, Blanchett started out at the University of Melbourne as an art-history

and economics major. After two years, she auditioned, on a whim, for the three-

year acting course at NIDA. Her most celebrated performance at NIDA was one for

which she wasn’t originally cast. She was playing Clytemnestra in a production

of Sophocles’ “Electra”; two weeks into rehearsals, the woman playing Electra

withdrew. The director, Lindy Davies, asked, “Who can work over Easter?,” and

Blanchett raised her hand. “One of the things that she can do,” Davies told me,

“is move into the realm of metaphor, but without being histrionic.” Davies

recalled Blanchett weeping during rehearsals. “She sobbed on the floor in the

sunlight. She was talking about Menelaus. The sense of grief was like a

waterfall cascading. The thing is that she understands loss.”

“When I came out of drama school, I wasn’t that hot young thing,” Blanchett

told me. But she gathered heat soon enough. In 1993, at the Sydney equivalent

of the Tony Awards, she was voted Best Newcomer, for her performance in Timothy

Daly’s “Kafka Dances”; the same year, for her appearance opposite Geoffrey Rush

in a memorable production of Mamet’s “Oleanna,” she was named Best Actress.

(She was the first person ever to win both categories at once.) Three years

later, Blanchett auditioned to play the role of the mercurial title character

in Gillian Armstrong’s “Oscar and Lucinda” (1997). The movie, which was based

on the novel by Peter Carey about two obsessive gamblers, brought Blanchett’s

“chalky phosphorescence,” as the director Anthony Minghella called it, out of

the Southern Hemisphere and into the international arena. After her next movie,

“Elizabeth,” the world, and every film director in it, knew her name.

At NIDA, one of Blanchett’s teachers gave her some advice that she took to

heart. “When you’re performing, always keep your lights on,” he told her. “When

you’re home, turn them off.” Blanchett and Upton have settled down in the

sleepy heart of Sydney normality, the sedate suburb of Hunter’s Hill, about

fifteen minutes northwest of town, where the noisiest thing in the street is an

explosion of purple jacarandas. Ten minutes from their rented sandstone house,

they are renovating a house on three acres of land seeded with Norfolk pine and

eucalyptus trees, which hide the neighbors and muffle the sound of cars. To

Blanchett, the place, which she calls her “oasis,” has “a feeling of being

completely in the bush.” Even in her current cramped residence, Blanchett has

established a sense of calm order. The living room is dominated by a

television, photographs of a windswept Upton and Blanchett on the New Zealand

coast, and, in the corner, a small children’s table, where, on the day I

visited, Roman was proudly learning how to maneuver his knife and fork over

some fish sticks. Nowhere was there any sign of Blanchett’s line of work. (A

converted closet off the dining room serves as her office; a bevy of her

awards—Academy, Golden Globe, and BAFTA among them—is pushed to the far

corner of her desk by a morass of papers, books, and photographs of the

children.)

When he was finished with his lunch, Roman came over to discuss the possible

modes of transportation to the playground, where his nanny was about to take

him. He was leaning toward taking the stroller. Blanchett listened closely to

his argument, then said, “Maybe you should walk. What do you think? Walk on

your little feet?” Roman considered for a moment, then agreed to leg it. Later,

Blanchett negotiated with the inquisitive Dashiell, whom she’d just picked up

from the local Montessori school and who had gone from voluble curiosity in her

gray BMW (“What are guts? What are the guts of the house?”) to visible fury

over his lunch menu of soup and fish sticks: “I don’t want it; they’re

disgusting!”

“That’s his favorite word of the moment—‘disgusting,’ ” Blanchett said, as

Dashiell’s complaints escalated. She leaned down to speak to him. “Hang on,”

she said. “You’re giving conflicting messages. You’re saying you don’t want

fish fingers, but all of a sudden you do want fish fingers.” Dashiell mumbled

something about wanting a sandwich and not soup. “If you start to eat your

meal, darling, then we can make you a sandwich,” Blanchett said.

Dashiell said, “I’ll eat the bread but not the soup.”

“This is the new Dash,” Blanchett said, smiling. “He thinks he’s living in a

hotel and wants to order room service all the time.”

“I don’t want to,” Dashiell said, and slapped at Blanchett’s hands. She calmly

scooped him up and took him to his bedroom at the back of the house. A few

minutes later, the sound of his grievance ceased, and Blanchett returned.

“There’s a whole thing with my generation about having the children like you,”

she said. “Most parents want to be friends.” Her role at home, she made it

clear, was mother, not pal.

At home and at work, Blanchett has a talent for listening. When she studies a

script, she often writes down everything that her character says about herself

and about other characters, as well as everything that other people in the

script say about her character. “You get an objective sense, within the story,

of how they’re perceived and how they perceive themselves,” she said. “You get

a sort of threedimensional sense of what they are doing.” She went on, “Each

project you encounter reveals to you the way to work on it. It’s all about the

text. Some pieces need to be invented, or reimagined, or teased out. Some just

need to be unlocked.”

She has the capacity to see herself as part of a larger landscape. Her form of

storytelling, therefore, lies not just in the dialogue but in the dance of the

character. “She has a constantly amorphous physicality,” Geoffrey Rush told me.

“That’s why she seems to transform from role to role.” She also has the acuity

to sit inside an emotion and parse it. In Tom Tykwer’s “Heaven” (2002), for

instance, she played Philippa, an English teacher in Italy, frustrated by the

failure of the corrupt carabinieri to stop the drug lord who is selling to

children at her school and whose drugs killed her husband. In an act of rough

justice, Philippa plants a bomb in the drug lord’s office. We watch Blanchett

place the device in his wastepaper basket before escaping from the building; we

also watch a cleaning lady empty the contents of the basket into her cart,

which she wheels onto an elevator carrying a man and two girls. The scene in

which Philippa is confronted with the news that she has killed four people,

including two children, is perhaps Blanchett’s greatest emotional moment on

film. Her expression goes from blankness, to shock, to sorrow, to disbelief, to

moral horror, to a grief so overwhelming that she finally faints in anguish.

In her career, Blanchett has played Australian, American, Scottish, Russian,

English, Irish, French, Italian, and German characters. “She can do a voice in

soprano, a baritone voice, a nasal voice, an adenoidal voice, a three-octave

voice, or she can do something quite tinny and twangy,” the dialect coach Tim

Monich told me. “People use the phrase ‘I’m gonna make it my own.’ With Cate,

it’s quite the opposite; it’s about adapting herself.” The key to Blanchett’s

characterizations is not so much the imitation of sound as the penetration of

syntax. “An actor’s job is partly anthropological,” she told me, and the

character’s idiom is where she does much of her excavation. “The way people

speak reveals how they think,” she said. “The rhythm reveals emotion, it

reveals intention.” When she was at Melbourne University, working part time as

a waitress at the Old Homestead Inn to pay her way, Blanchett would jot down

overheard conversations on her pad; those “found moments” went into a play that

she wrote with another student, about life in the city and how people’s

conversations are often “a way of avoiding rather than communicating.”

Over the decades, her methods have become more cunning and more detailed. When

preparing to play the title role in Joel Schumacher’s “Veronica Guerin” (2003),

a portrait of the Irish journalist who was murdered for her investigations into

the drug trade, Blanchett listened to every interview that Guerin had ever

given. “You could hear the way she was thinking,” Blanchett said. “You could

hear the missteps; you could hear when she wasn’t telling the truth; you could

hear when she was unsure of something. I thought, Ah, she’s not sure about her

own intelligence.”

“Every seemingly little trivial piece of information is something that can feed

her,” said Monich, who worked with Blanchett on her version of Katharine

Hepburn’s imperious, vowel-strangled Yankee barrage of words in Martin

Scorsese’s “The Aviator” (2004). It was Monich who first told Blanchett about

Hope Williams, a socialite and actress for whom Hepburn was an understudy in

“Holiday,” on Broadway, in 1928. “She was a genuine rich girl whom Philip Barry

wrote a couple of plays for,” Monich said. “I had this theory that Hope

Williams was a role model for Hepburn as a person, as a character, as an

actress. They called her the Park Avenue Stride Girl. Later, it became clear

she was a lesbian. She had very short hair. . . . Cate was completely intrigued

with my theory. We both became obsessed with Hope Williams.” Monich and

Blanchett told Scorsese, who screened for them Ben Hecht and Charles

MacArthur’s “The Scoundrel,” in which Williams makes an entrance in a stylish

hat with a breezy “Hello, hello.” In “The Aviator,” Blanchett pays homage to

that scene, when Hepburn arrives at her family’s New England summer lunch

party. “Cate is imitating Katharine Hepburn imitating Hope Williams,” Monich

said.

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

certain position, sort of crouching down. Cate said, ‘I think she was like

this.’ Sure enough, she just had it. She had the gesture, she had the body

lines, the look of Katharine Hepburn.” In her research, “the most fantastic

resource,” Blanchett 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 personality had become a burlesque of itself, but it was

fascinating to see how she behaved, and how uncomfortable she was,” Blanchett

told the Times. Her portrayal of Hepburn, for which she won an Academy Award,

managed to suggest a defensiveness 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

Eyre says he got off to “a slightly sticky start with Cate.” He told me, “She’d

had one session with a dialect coach, and was she going to have another? I was

worried about whether she’d be class-specific. Her character is kind of upper-

middle bohemian. I wanted the distinction between her and Judi Dench’s

character, who is petit bourgeois, to be clear.” Eyre continued, “I think she

thought I was overconcerned with the externals instead of the psychology.” “He

was really worried about the issue of class,” Blanchett explained. ” ‘Richard,’

I said, ‘I need to work on it because I’m not a mimic. I need to sit down and

work on it.’ So the accent became an issue, when I didn’t want to focus on the

accent but on the meat of things.” No sooner were Eyre’s words out of his mouth

than he realized that he’d made a mistake. “I was sitting in my kitchen and

talking. She said, ‘Don’t you think I can do this?’ ” Eyre said. “She was

upset. I must have been eroding her self-confidence. I felt as bad as I’ve ever

felt. I apologized. She didn’t extract revenge.”

In fact, Blanchett turned in one of her most thrilling performances, as the art

teacher Sheba Hart. “She was quite ruthless in the way she approached that

role,” the British playwright Patrick Marber, who wrote the screenplay, said.

“This was a woman whom she was not going to explain or apologize for—she was

just going to play it. She never asked me to write something that would make

her more sympathetic or her predicament more understandable.” On the other

hand, Blanchett was willing to disagree with lines that she felt didn’t match

the character she had in mind. In one scene, after Sheba’s affair with her

fifteen-year-old student is made public and she has taken refuge with her

teaching cohort and confidante, Barbara, she discovers Barbara’s toxic diaries,

full of twisted sexual obsession with her, and taped-in mementos of the

infatuation. Sheba melts down. Marber recalls, “I put this line in it, ‘Where

did you get my hair? Did you pluck it from the bath with some special fucking

tweezers?’ She said, ‘I don’t want to say that line. It’s too funny. It will

corrupt the tone of where Sheba’s at.’ We hammer-and-tonged it for about ten

minutes. Eventually, I said, ‘Oh, please, just please.’ I think she felt

compelled to concede to the writer, even if he was a bloody idiot. I think

that’s because she’s come from the theatre.”

On the day that Blanchett and Upton announced their artistic leadership of the

Sydney Theatre Company, she assured the wary journalists, “We’ve got good

instincts and a good eye.” Her visual sophistication is apparent in her art

collection, which includes works by Paula Rego, Howard Hodgkin, and Tim

Maguire. After tea, she suggested that we visit a gallery that featured artists

in whom she had an interest. There was a provocative show by the Chinese

conceptual artist Zhang Huan, that included disturbing images of the artist

buried beneath a mound of books and appearing to sodomize a donkey. At the same

gallery, Blanchett studied the Chinese-born Sydney artist Guan Wei’s “Echo,” a

series of forty-two panels painted as mythological maps of Australia, which

appropriated figures from European colonial exploration, as well as Chinese

landscape painting. On the periphery of another Guan painting, a wild seascape

in black, were iconic emblems of Australia’s past and present: galleons,

soldiers, Aborigines, and kangaroos. At the center were roiling waves and

clouds, in which pink figures fell from boats and bobbed in the surf. At the

edge was the desert.

Blanchett scrutinized Guan’s works. “He’s very witty,” she said. “Towns called

Dread and Bathe. It seduces you with one feeling, then it undercuts it. He’s

got actual creatures, then mythological creatures. He’s got Chinese characters,

to which he’s added little brushstrokes that make them not quite those

characters, so it’s an invented language.” She went on, “It’s about the way we

tell ourselves stories: how we handle failure, how we handle success, how we

place ourselves against the rest of the world. All these things are at the core

of who I am, who we all are. It’s somewhere bound up with this journey inward.”

Two days later, Blanchett, Upton, and I met at the S.T.C.‘s three-hundred-seat

main stage, to look at the set for “Reunion” and “A Kind of Alaska,” which had

just been constructed. Blanchett regarded the moody, brackish gray-green

backdrop and the walkway that led to an angled square in the center; she and

Upton intended to flood the space so that the performing area would appear to

be a floating island. “One thing I do understand is space,” she’d told me

earlier, and so it seemed. The design was playful and daring, poetic and

timeless. “It really liberates preconceptions,” she said. She said that she had

seen a similar effect used at the Saatchi Gallery, in London. “I asked the

curator how deep the water was. He said, ‘It’s as deep as you want it to be.’ “

In “Alaska,” which is inspired by “Awakenings,” Oliver Sacks’s study of several

survivors of “sleeping sickness,” the heroine, Deborah, after having been

“asleep” for thirty years, awakens, struggles to get her bearings in this

strange new world, then sinks back into darkness. “I’ve always been interested

in the emergent consciousness—that point between wakefulness and slumber, that

place where the sense of one’s self is extremely malleable,” Blanchett said.

“She’s a broken person who’s trying to reassemble 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 Blanchett again to accompany her to the opening

night of “Keating!,” a musical revue about the trials and tribulations of

Australia’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 is an amazing pianist and

plays in a jazz trio called the Necks. Abrahams did this music—sort of a

hybrid form,” she said. With her elbows planted on the desk and her face in her

hands, she leaned forward, concentrating on the insistent pounding that was

both funereal and celebratory, like a heartbeat getting stronger. Voices and

archival sounds were layered into it: a piano played a snippet of “If You Were

the Only Girl in the World”; a voice growled “piss in your face.” The cursing

voice was authentic—taken from a video of Sacks’s patients, which Blanchett

had tracked down, she said, after noticing a footnote in “Awakenings.” She

listened awhile longer, then hit “Pause.” “The theme is good,” she said, “but

it’s just too present. You don’t want to give it all away in the soundscape.

There are all these memories, inventions, planes of supposed reality. If you

describe them literally, then it depletes them. The audience has to listen with

their reaching ears.” Blanchett shoved the CD into her bag. “We’re gonna have

to fuck with it,” she said.

When we arrived at the Belvoir Street Theatre, a converted tomato-sauce

factory, the lobby was a scrum of people, with blinking red lights strung

around the low ceilings and the exuberant buzz of a beer cellar. Blanchett

pushed her way through the well-wishers and newshounds until she ran into

Gillian Armstrong. In the hubbub, it was impossible to hear what she was

saying. Instead, as the cameras flashed, I watched her easy smile and thought

about a story that Armstrong had told me on the phone the night before. “I ran

the first answer print of ‘Oscar and Lucinda’ at the lab for the color grader,

Arthur Cambridge, whom I worked with for many years,” she said. “You sit in the

dark. You watch the film at mute, with no sound at all. No one had ever heard

of or seen Cate before.” She went on, “We’re halfway through the film when

Arthur said, ‘Is she a nice person? It just comes through that she is.’ I

thought, Isn’t that great? He’s the first audience.”

After we took our seats, a tall, handsome older man in a blue sports coat

stopped beside us. “Hello, Cate,” he said. It was Keating himself. The lights

dimmed. “I love it when it goes dark,” she said. “It’s like a slumber party.”

She settled back to be, for once, a member of the audience. The show had a fine

set of impudent lyrics and an inventive staging; it seemed to release

Blanchett’s robust sense of humor. The sultry face of the glamour pages gave up

its famous composure; the poised lips dissolved into guffaws. Blanchett rocked

in her seat. At one point, in “Freaky,” a song about Alexander Downer, the

current Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, who became a figure of fun

after he was photographed in fishnet stockings and women’s shoes for a charity

event, Blanchett was surprised to find herself part of the joke. Downer was

played by the show’s lyricist and composer, Casey Bennetto, a large man with a

hairy back who swanned onstage in the tight-fitting garter-belted mufti of a

dominatrix. He looked, more or less, like a bratwurst in heels. Bennetto worked

the room with gusto:

I’m a greasy-cheek freak

A leader of tomorrow,

But I won’t be ‘round next week

‘Cause I’m too freaky.

As he marched up the aisle loudly lamenting his volatile career, he came upon

Blanchett. He looked at her for a split second, then flopped into her lap and,

invoking the singer Barry White, ad-libbed, “It’s S.T.C. / When you’re next to

me.” The audience, and Blanchett, howled.

When the show was over, she made her way toward the exit. Just before we got

there, Blanchett was asked to return to be photographed. When I turned around,

she had vanished, swallowed up by the milling crowd. For a moment, I thought

I’d lost her; then it occurred to me to follow the popping flashbulbs, which,

like the landing lights of an airstrip, led inevitably to Blanchett. About

forty-five minutes later, we made our way back through the theatre, through the

dressing rooms, past the laundry room, the wardrobe, and out into the rain-

cooled air.

Blanchett had made a reservation at an Italian restaurant she liked. From the

table, she phoned home to check on the boys, which led to a discussion of

parenthood. “I find it’s made me more economical, more focussed, more generous,

less self-centered,” she said. “I’m grateful for it.” She went on, “I remember

embarking on ‘Veronica Guerin’ after Dash was born, thinking I have nothing to

give this project because I’m so filled up with this creature we’ve created.

But I’ve become a better actor because of it. I think parenthood is knowing

what cards you’ve got and then throwing them up in the air. You need to let go.

It’s like when you experience intense grief—you often have the deepest

insights because the dead wood’s been cleared out. When you’re absolutely

exhausted, somehow the work you’ve been consciously trying to do gets done on a

different, deeper level.” Earlier, Upton had told me that Blanchett was “in a

constant battle between optimism and pessimism—the futility of all the

effort.” As Blanchett tucked into her fagottini di carne, I asked her about

this. “We sort of liberate one another from melancholy,” she said of her

husband. “At least, he certainly does with me. The only thing that gets in the

way is lack of time.” Nonetheless, they have considered having another child.

Just that day, Blanchett said, Upton had taken a Pilates class at home with a

female instructor who had a newborn baby. Blanchett held the baby while Upton

ran through his stretching regime. “I was in my pajamas,” she said. “I held

this seven-week-old baby. He came out looking at me like ‘Don’t.’ And I did.”

Blanchett looked away for a moment. “The reality of what three children would

be like?” she said. She turned back to her pasta. “We like a bit of chaos,” she

said.

Cate Blanchett branches out.