Cate Blanchett Bio

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Cate Blanchett Biography

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This Cate Blanchett biography contains information believed to be accurate as extracted from sources around the internet including Wikipedia. If you believe there are errors or omissions in this Cate Blanchett bio, please let us know so that we can correct any inaccuracies.

Cate Blanchett Pictures

Catherine Élise "Cate" Blanchett (born May 14, 1969) is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe Award-winning Australian actress and stage director. She has won various other acting awards, most notably two SAGs and two BAFTAs, as well as the Volpi Cup at 64th Venice International Film Festival.

Blanchett came to international attention in the 1998 film Elizabeth, directed by Shekhar Kapur, in which she played Elizabeth I of England. She is also well known for her portrayals of the elf queen Galadriel in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, a role which brought her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She is currently the artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company.

Cate Blanchett: Biography

Cate Blanchett - Early life and education

Blanchett was born in Ivanhoe, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, the daughter of June, an Australian property developer and teacher, and Robert "Bob" Blanchett, a Texas-born United States Navy Petty Officer who met Blanchett's mother while stationed in Melbourne and who later worked as an advertising executive. When Blanchett was 10, she lost her father to a heart attack. She has described herself during childhood as "part extrovert, part wallflower". She has two siblings; her older brother, Bob, is a computer systems engineer, and her younger sister, Genevieve, is a theatrical designer.

Blanchett attended primary school in Melbourne at Ivanhoe East Primary School before completing secondary education at Methodist Ladies' College, where she explored her passion for acting. She studied Economics and Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne before leaving Australia to travel overseas. When she was 18, Blanchett went on a vacation to Egypt. A fellow guest at a cheap hotel in Cairo asked if she wanted to be an extra in a movie, and the next day she found herself in a crowd scene cheering for an American boxer losing to an Egyptian in the film Kaboria, starring the late Egyptian actor Ahmed Zaki. Blanchett returned to Australia and later moved to Sydney to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Art; graduating in 1992 and beginning her career in the theatre.

Cate Blanchett - Career

Her first major stage role was opposite Geoffrey Rush in the 1993 David Mamet play Oleanna, for which she won the Sydney Theatre Critics' Best Newcomer Award. She also appeared as Ophelia in an acclaimed 1994-95 Company B production of Hamlet, directed by Neil Armfield, starring Rush and Richard Roxburgh. Blanchett appeared in the TV mini-series Heartland opposite Ernie Dingo, the mini-series Bordertown, with Hugo Weaving, and in an episode of Police Rescue entitled "The Loaded Boy". She also appeared in the 1994 telemovie of Police Rescue as a teacher taken hostage by armed bandits and in the 50 minute drama Parklands (1996), which received a limited release in Australian cinemas.

Blanchett portrays Elizabeth I of England in Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Blanchett made her international film debut with a supporting role as an Australian nurse captured by the Japanese Army during WW2 in Bruce Beresford's 1997 film Paradise Road, which co-starred Glenn Close and Frances McDormand. Her first leading role, also in 1997, was as Lucinda Leplastrier in Gillian Armstrong's production of Oscar and Lucinda opposite Ralph Fiennes. Coincidentally, Peter Carey, the Booker Prize-winning Australian author of Oscar and Lucinda, had known Blanchett's father, Bob, when both worked in the advertising industry in Melbourne. Blanchett was nominated for her first Australian Film Institute Award as Best Leading Actress for this role but lost out to Pamela Rabe in The Well. She did, however, win an AFI Award as Supporting Actress in the same year for her role as Lizzie in the romantic-comedy Thank God He Met Lizzie, co-starring Richard Roxburgh and Frances O'Connor.

Her first high-profile international role was as Elizabeth I of England in the 1998 movie Elizabeth, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Blanchett lost out to Gwyneth Paltrow for her role in Shakespeare in Love but won a British Academy (BAFTA) Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama. The following year, Blanchett was nominated for another BAFTA Award for her supporting role in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Already an acclaimed actress, Blanchett received a host of new fans when she appeared in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. She played the role of the High Elf Queen Galadriel in all three films, which hold the record as the highest grossing film trilogy of all time.

Blanchett portrays Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy

In 2004, she played a pregnant journalist in the Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, yet again earning a nomination for BFCA award for Best Acting Ensemble.

In 2005, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. This made Blanchett the first person ever to garner an Academy Award for playing a previous Oscar-winning actor/actress.

In 2006, she starred in both Babel opposite Brad Pitt, and Notes on a Scandal playing Sheba Hart opposite Dame Judi Dench. Coincidentally, Dench won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for playing Elizabeth I, the same year Blanchett lost for playing the same historical figure, albeit in a different category. Blanchett received her third Academy Award nomination for her performance in the film (Dench was also Oscar nominated).

In 2007, she won the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival for portraying one of six incarnations of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' feature film I'm Not There and also reprised her role as Elizabeth I in the sequel to Elizabeth entitled Elizabeth: the Golden Age. At the 80th Annual Academy Awards Blanchett received two Academy Award nominations including Best Actress for Elizabeth: the Golden Age and Best Supporting Actress for I'm Not There, making Academy Awards history, as she became the eleventh actor to receive two acting nominations in the same year and the first female actor to receive another Oscar nomination for reprising the same role, in Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

In 2007, Blanchett was named as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People In The World and also one of the most successful actresses by Forbes magazine.

She will next be seen on screen in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, both of which will be released in 2008.

Blanchett and her husband commenced three-year contracts as artistic co-directors of the Sydney Theatre Company in January 2008. Their contracts include a clause that will allow either of them to take three months out of each year to pursue other activities. Blanchett made her stage directing debut in 2007 when she directed the play Blackbird for the Sydney Theatre Company.

On 26 February 2008, she was named as a member of the panel that will select participants for Kevin Rudd's 2020 Summit of the best and brightest Australians. Controversially, Blanchett was the only woman on the ten-member panel.

Cate Blanchett - Personal life

Blanchett's husband is playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton, whom she met in 1996 while she was performing in a production of The Seagull. It was not love at first sight, however; "He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant", Blanchett later remarked. "It just shows you how wrong you can be, but once he kissed me that was that." The two were married on December 29, 1997. Their first child, Dashiell John, was born on December 3, 2001; their second child, Roman Robert, was born on April 23, 2004. Blanchett is currently pregnant with the couple's third child, due in April 2008.

After the making Brighton in England their main family home for much of the early 2000s, she and her husband returned to their native Australia. In November 2006, Blanchett stated that this was due to a desire to be closer to her family as well as a sense of belonging to the Australian theatrical community. . She and her family live in "Bulwarra", a 1877 sandstone mansion in the harbourside Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill. It was purchased for $10.2 million Australian dollars in 2004 and underwent extensive renovations in 2007 in order to be made more "eco-friendly".

In 2006, a portrait of Cate Blanchett and family painted by McLean Edwards was a finalist in the Archibald Prize, which is awarded for the "best portrait painting preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics".

Blanchett is a Patron of the Sydney Film Festival.

Blanchett works as the face of SK-II, the luxury skin care brand owned by Procter & Gamble.

In 2007, Blanchett supported the web-based campaign whoonearthcares.com - urging people to express their concerns about climate change in Australia.