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The career of Cate Blanchett is one that combines immense celebrity as a Hollywood A-Lister with much quieter, but equally vital work on stage. Her success has not erased the memory of being a penniless actress struggling to make ends meet, and Blanchett has always been careful to pay her dues to the theater communities that kickstarted her career and propelled her to global stardom. 

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A TRAGIC LOVE STORY

Cate was born in 1969 in Melbourne, Australia; her mother, June, was a native Australian who worked as a teacher and property developer, who met Cate’s father - Robert, a US Navy officer - when his ship broke down in Melbourne. The two spent a fortnight together before Robert’s ship was repaired, and they then exchanged love letters for three years before Robert was finally able to return to Australia, when the pair married and had three children. Cate’s early childhood was uneventful, but tragically Robert died of a heart attack when she was just 10 years old, leaving June to raise her family alone. Cate has sometimes claimed to have “no memories” of her childhood, but on occasion has described the family’s circumstances after her father’s death, telling journalists: “My father died when I was young, and after he did, my mother had it tough. Very tough. It was very important to her that all of her children had a good education, and so she went out to work and stretched the money she had and put herself into debt to pay for that.’

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Cate also strived to help ease the financial burdens on her family. As a 14 year old, she went to extreme measures in order to get her first job, working as a carer in a nursing home: “I lied about my age, because I was officially too young to do it. I’d go there after I’d finished school. The cook would have prepared the food earlier in the day and I’d reheat it and serve it and sit there and talk to the patients and then I’d clear up and wash up and go. ‘I loved that job, actually. I love old people – after my father died, my grandmother moved in to live with us, and I always thought it was an incredible privilege I had, living in a house with three generations. A lot of people are frightened by old age – by being around people who are, basically, on their way out – but I’m fascinated by it. It’s an amazing thing to be around someone who has had a life well lived.’ She would continue working at the nursing home into her twenties.

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A REBELLIOUS STUDENT

If that makes the teenage Cate sound excessively level-headed and sober, there was a more rebellious side to her personality. She went through goth and punk phases, and as a 15 year old she shaved her head, which almost got her fired from the nursing home. Cate has famously described herself as “part extrovert, part wallflower”, and both sides of that coin were evident throughout her upbringing, but her passion for acting only came about as a college student. She had enrolled at the University of Melbourne to study art history, and began appearing in student plays. Her sister was in the audience for one performance, and later told her “I can’t see you any more on stage – I can only see the character”, and this led Cate to consider a career as an actor. 

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She dropped out of university to travel, and soon made her first on-screen appearance as an extra in a dance scene in Kaboria, an Egyptian musical about boxers released in 1990. On her return to Australia she moved to Sydney, and enrolled at the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art. As she later described, her financial situation remained precarious: “Sydney is a very expensive city, and when I came out of drama school I was in a share house where my room... well, it did have a window, but the window looked out at a brick wall. ‘I wasn’t working, I wasn’t making money, and I had to ration the money I did have so that I could have a cup of coffee in a cafe every alternate day.”

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RUSH TO THE FRONT

This would soon change. After graduating in 1992, Cate finally began to get roles, beginning with a prestigious spot opposite one of Australia’s most respected actors, Geoffrey Rush, in a Sydney production of the David Mamet play Oleanna. This began a five year period at the forefront of Sydney’s theater scene - including an acclaimed run as Ophelia in Hamlet, again alongside Geoffrey Rush - as well as occasional television work. She made her feature film debut in 1997, in Paradise Road, and by 1998 was making her first appearance at the Oscars, with a Best Actress nomination for her role in the historical drama Elizabeth, where she portrays the English queen alongside none other than Geoffrey Rush, playing her bodyguard, Francis Walsingham.   

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Although Blanchett is probably best known for her graceful, ethereal performances as Galadriel in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations, her eight Oscar nominations (to date) and two wins make her the most successful actor in Australian Academy Award history. What’s more remarkable, however, is her unstinting commitment to the theater throughout her glittering Hollywood career. Cate and her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, became artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company in 2008, and stepped away from Hollywood to focus on the stage once again. This was immediately after she had achieved the remarkable feat of being nominated for two Academy Awards for different films in the same year - Best Supporting Actress for I’m Not There, and Best Actress for Elizabeth: The Golden Age - a feat that had only been achieved by 10 other actors in the history of the awards. This was the last that Hollywood would see of Blanchett for three years, as she toured with her company putting on performances of Uncle Vanya and A Streetcar Named Desire. The presence of such a massive star in these productions did a huge amount to boost ticket sales, but Blanchett’s electrifying performances were just as valuable in ensuring audiences were rewarded for choosing traditional theaters over movie theaters. 

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A RETURN TO STAGE AND SCREEN

Blanchett’s return to Hollywood in 2011 was swiftly followed by more awards; she picked up her second Oscar - this time as Best Actress - for her role in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine,  She continues to broaden her artistic horizons, and has returned to television screens with her acclaimed portrayal of Phyllis Schlafly in the FX/Hulu drama Mrs. America, as well as  Stateless, a real life cult drama produced by Australian channel ABC in collaboration with Netflix. Perhaps more importantly she has retained her close ties with the theater, making her Broadway debut in 2017 in The Present, for which she was nominated for a Tony award. 

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She’s also justly famed as a philanthropist, humanitarian, and activist; most notably she’s a highly active Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, but has also made public stands on a wide variety of societal issues, and also challenged Hollywood’s innate sexism with vocal criticism of typecasting, gender inequality and the difficulties faced by actresses in balancing their family and working lives. Her tremendous skill as a communicator makes her ideally suited to these discussions, and she has been highly successful in raising awareness of the issues she highlights, but it is her quieter work supporting the theater that marks her out as a Secret Superhero.

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