Cate Blanchett talks to Miles Fielder about her controversial new role
and explains why, after herbusiest year in film, she has decided to go back to her roots.
room, I’d be in there with a meat
cleaver.’ Cate Blanchett is reflecting
on her new film, Notes on a Scandal, in which she plays an art teacher who has an affair with one of her pupils. It was, she says, her most challenging role to date.
‘I certainly can’t imagine doing what Sheba did; breaking apart her life in such a spectacularly devastating way. She’s an adult and he’s her student. There’s a responsibility that goes along with being a teacher,’ says Blanchett, who is sitting in her suite in Claridges hotel in London’s Mayfair. ‘lt’s really been the hardest journey I’ve ever had with a character, because I look at a 15- year—old boy and all I see is a child.’
Adapted from Zoé Heller’s fact-based novel by playwright-turned-screenwriter (and friend of the actress), Patrick Marber, Notes on a Scandal is set in a north London school. The affair Blanchett’s character has leaves her vulnerable, not only to dismissal from her job and criminal charges, but also to extortion by a lonely and manipulative colleague. While the film focuses on the relationship between the two women - fey . art teacher Sheba Hart (played by Blanchett) and her domineering colleague Barbara Covett (a terrier-like Judi Dench) - it is the one between the woman and boy that’s causing a stir.
All of which, Blanchett says, was the main attraction of playing the part. ‘l’m not particularly interested in playing characters that think the way I do,’ she says. ‘I played
f I knew that my son’s art teacher was banging his brains out in the art
WOMAN
mothers before I was a parent. And then there’s the old cliche: you don’t have to have murdered someone to play a murderer.
‘But I really liked playing this part, because I’m not living it. I’m not running out of my front door in my pyjamas into the paparazzi every morning. You do go home every night after work and think, “Thank Christ! I’m in a very healthy relationship”.’
In spite of being worlds apart from Sheba (or perhaps because of it), Blanchett has really nailed the character. It’s to her credit, and that of Marber, Heller and the film’s director Richard Eyre, that Sheba’s moral transgression is made understandable, if not
‘F ORTUNATELY THE PHONE HASN'T STOPPED RINGING. I'VE BEEN VERY LUCKY .'
either palatable or forgivable. Blanc'hett’s performance has been recognised with Golden Globe and Oscar nominations.
The past couple‘ of years have been incredibly busy for Blanchett. She is currently in cinemas in the critically-acclaimed Alejandro Gonzalez Ifiarritu film Babel with Gael Garcia Bernal and Brad Pitt and is in the forthcoming Steven Soderbergh film noir The Good German. Other projects in the pipeline include Todd Haynes’ unconventional Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There and The Golden Age (a sequel to Elizabeth), both of which she has recently finished filming.
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Dressed in a short black dress and knee- high boots and wearing her blond hair scrunched and loose on her shoulders, the 37-year-old Australian looks fresh faced and is glowing with health. Her relaxed but engaging demeanour suggests that far from being worn out by work, she is thoroughly enjoying being at the top of her game. Still, Blanchett readily admits, ‘I’ve had an extraordinary couple of years, and I wouldn’t want to replicate a year like the last. It’s an enormous amount of work to do in one year, but then the diversity of roles like those doesn’t come along every year. Nevertheless, I’d be more than happy to do a film every year, or every other year. I mean, I also have two young children.’
She has been nominated for four Golden Globes in the past, for The Aviator, Veronica Guerin, Bandits and Elizabeth, which resulted in a win. The 1998 biopic of Queen Elizabeth I was Blanchett’s fourth film and it brought her international recognition as well as her first Oscar nomination.
While Blanchett maintains that she prefers the stage to film acting, once a career in the latter took off and Hollywood inevitably beckoned, there was less time for her first love. Blanchett moved to London around the time she made Elizabeth, partly because her husband, the Australian scriptwriter Andrew Upton, was working in the UK. The couple were based in London and Brighton until recently, and both of their children, Dashiell John (five) and Roman Robert (two), were born in the UK capital.
She has worked with some of cinema‘s top
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