Cate Blanchett

Okay, so it’s not being a good week for Cate Blanchett. The reviews for Borderlands are pretty universally terrible. However, I’m pretty sure a certain amount of her career, especially these days, is her taking roles that amuse her, so I wonder if she even cares. If she had a good time, that may well be all that’s important to her. I don’t know if it was fun on the set, but if it was, does she need more? She already has two Oscars, as well as a wide array of other awards. (Including, delightfully, the Mommie Dearest Worst Screen Mom of the Year Award from the Women Film Critics Circle for Cinderella.) She’s a member of the Order of Australia. She has three doctorates. She even has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Young Cate seems to have been a bit at a loss in her life. Her father was a Texan whose ship broke down in Melbourne, where he met her mother. He moved there, and the Blanchetts had a family. Then, when Cate was ten, her father died. She had a goth phase and a punk phased in adolescence, including shaving her head. She went to University of Melbourne for a year and then dropped out and traveled. She ended up in Egypt, where she was approached to be in the movie Kaboria, playing an American cheerleader. This was her “I need the money” role, but it also triggered something in her. She returned to Australia and enrolled in the National Institute of Dramatic Art.

She wasn’t exactly a star right away, but it was pretty close. In 1994, four years after Kaboria, she was already the lead in a miniseries for Australian TV. In 1998, eight years after Kaboria, she had her first Oscar nomination. (I think she should’ve won, but that’s at least in part because of my desperate amusement at the idea that both actress awards that year would then have gone to women playing the same role in different movies.) She made her name in the US with that movie, playing the youthful Queen Elizabeth I. She had a certain reputation for being in Serious Drama, but in 1999 there was already Pushing Tin.

If you didn’t know her as Elizabeth I, you came to know her as Galadriel. She’s one of the only two people to have appeared in all of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth movies, which I have issues with, but whatever; there are more women in the Hobbit movies than The Hobbit, so I’ll take it. But she also went on to be in another of the huge movie franchises of our era, playing Hela in Thor: Ragnarok. And then in the What If series, which not all the Marvel actors lent their actual voices to, so one hopes she was enjoying herself in the role. And if all that weren’t enough, while Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is divisive, Spielberg says she’s her favourite villain of the series, and apparently she’s doing a pitch-perfect accent from the part of Ukraine her character is supposed to be from.

She’s also in one of my daughter’s favourite movies, at least in the English-language dub, wherein she plays Ponyo’s mother. And she was in Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio, which my son has stood next to the best Animated Feature Oscar for. From her career’s beginning, she’s done a little bit of everything, and she’s probably one of the easiest people I’ve written about to identify for people because of both how big some of her movies are and how wide-ranging her career is. There’s room in a career like that for the occasional turkey.