NEW YORK — Afternoon dusk filters in through a hotel window, silhouetting Cate Blanchett's willowy frame as she peers down at the snarl of holiday traffic on Park Avenue 12 storeys below. A visitor is announced and she takes a moment to compose herself before turning around. "You look a little forlorn," she is told. "I think it's probably the natural setting of my face," she replies, offering a wan smile.
"I've just arrived from Sydney with the children," she continues, referring to her two boys, Dashiell, 5, and Roman, 2½ . "I think it's the longest, most hellacious flight you can do with children." She collapses onto the couch, her right hand raised to her head, palm outward, in what seems like a show of surrender.
The 20-hour trans-Pacific flight from her home aside, Blanchett would have good reason to be exhausted. In the last few months alone, she's spun around the world in support of her role as a woman dying on the floor of a Moroccan hut in Babel and her doomed femme fatale in Steven Soderbergh's noirish The Good German, and made her professional directorial debut with a production of Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska at the Sydney Theatre Company, which opened earlier this month.
At the moment, she's trying hard to focus on her role as a reckless London suburbanite in the thrilling drama Notes on a Scandal, which opened in Toronto on Christmas Day and rolls out across Canada next month. Last week, Blanchett was tagged as the best supporting actress by the Toronto Film Critics Association for her role in Notes. Oscar talk is heating up, as it is for her co-star and the film's putative lead, Judi Dench.
Babel and Notes on a Scandal stare Cate Blanchett (AFP/Getty)
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But exhaustion is not a constant state for Blanchett; indeed, nothing seems to be. Watch the 37-year-old actress over the space of an hour and she will transform like mercury under your gaze, flitting from studious to sexy, playful to sombre, girlish to womanly, demure to bold and back again: all built atop an almost invisible backbone of emotional reserve.
Blanchett puts a similar range to use in Notes as Sheba Hart, a weekend artist and mother of two in a not-unhappy marriage (to a fellow played by Bill Nighy, no less) who falls into an affair with a 15-year-old student at the school where she's just taken a teaching job. She complicates the error by confessing her sins to an older teacher (Judi Dench) who, after initially offering support, takes advantage of the information and becomes something of an emotional stalker.
"It's utterly beyond my comprehension," says Blanchett, speaking of what could drive a woman like Sheba to cross those moral and legal lines. "What I like about the film is it doesn't seek to justify Sheba's actions, it simply presents them. Personally, I don't know what you'd talk about with a 15-year-old. Once someone opens their mouth -- no matter how gorgeous they are, they start talking about rugby, it kind of kills it for me."
Blanchett's face is a canvas of sharp angles framed today by a wave of wispy blonde hair that falls to the right side of her face and ends a couple of inches below her chin. As she speaks, her eyes at a downward angle, you might almost think she's half asleep. And then she looks up, eyes aflame, and her entire demeanour lights up from within. Her voice swoops from a dangerous purr to an amused singsong.
"Once I conceived of Sheba as being somebody who was utterly lost and adrift, and therefore quite desperate -- the fact that she had sex with the boy in the summerhouse at the bottom of her garden, in full view of her husband in the bedroom -- that woman is someone who wants to blow her life to smithereens. Then there was a window in for me."
But how does someone like Blanchett get in touch with the malaise and discontent that seem to be at Sheba's core when she is herself fantastically fulfilled -- at least as seen from the outside?
"Well there you go," says Blanchett, latching onto the last phrase of the question as she drops her voice into a lower register rasp like the one she deploys in The Good German. "We're all flawed. There's a great Auden poem -- or is it John Larkin? -- where he wakes up at 3 a.m., and looks at the wardrobe and contemplates death. We all have those 3 a.m. moments when we wake up and we're confronted with our own mortality and the pointlessness of our existence. To pretend otherwise is just to be disingenuous. I mean, anyone who is devoid of self-doubt isn't really alive." She giggles softly.
"It's not that I need to get in touch with that," she continues, "because a character is not an expression of myself. I find that a bit repugnant. I think it's about shedding yourself and investigating another way of thinking. I don't feel that acting is a form of self-expression, of telling the world what I think. It's a curious endeavour to find out the way other people think.
"So it's not that I think the same way as Sheba. But, you know, we're all flawed and fragile, no matter what we present."
Is being an actress a way of keeping those 3 a.m. moments at bay? "I was talking to my husband about this the other week," she says, suddenly sitting up on the lip of the couch and twisting her limbs into a contortionist's triumph: body wrapped in a beige Marni knit dress, legs in fishnets and supple Louis Vuitton boots.
"Look, it's a wonderful privilege to be a working actor, because you get to have the catharsis, you have the chance to re-offend and get out there and move through it. And I wonder, you know, if I wasn't a working actor whether I would be as emotionally healthy. It's a fantastic outlet to kind of move through other people's experiences. It's visceral, it's psychological, it uses every single part of your being. I think it's meant that I could have a very healthy private life."
With three films in theatres right now (and a turn as one of the Bob Dylans in Todd Haynes' 2007 biopic about the singer, I'm Not There) this may be the last great flush of Blanchett we see for a while. Recently she and her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, accepted a term beginning in 2008 as co-artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company, where she got her professional start. In that office, they are charged with programming four performance spaces as well as overseeing the company's development arm and its educational activities for local schoolchildren.
Why take on a role like this when she has become one of the most respected and in-demand actresses of her generation? "I'm very collaborative," she replies. "I think that's the way I work as an actor, and the thought of doing this with my husband -- we work very well together, we bounce off one another really well and complement one another really well -- it just felt incredibly natural. There are all these latent qualities I think that I have been, unbeknownst to me, developing: my understanding of text, working with actors, working internationally, working in both mediums. I think the acceptance of the job meant there was finally a focus beyond myself to which these skills could be harnessed."
Directing the Pinter was a small step toward a greater integration in the company. She will direct another play next season, David Harrower's child abuse drama Blackbird. In A Kind of Alaska, which Pinter wrote in the early eighties, a woman awakes from a coma of 30 years to realize with horror that life has proceeded without her. The difficulties of adapting to the world as it now exists are almost enough to push her back into her comatose state.
"What I love about Pinter is he explores the difference between what we want and what we need, and in A Kind of Alaska you're also dealing with the difference between the desired-for reality and societal reality. Which I think is endlessly fascinating. And memory: What do you remember and what is real?"
