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Elizabeth: The Golden Age trailer
Like mercury, the more you try to grasp Cate Blanchett, the more elusive she
becomes. Yet even for an actress who has defined herself – or escaped
definition – through her extraordinary range and versatility, the
juxtaposition of her next two roles is startling. First, she has reprised
the part that established her as an international presence and won her the
first of her three Academy Award nominations – Elizabeth I, in Elizabeth:
The Golden Age. Then, she stars in I’m Not There, the audacious, surreal
biopic of Bob Dylan, screening at the London film festival before release in
the UK next year. Blanchett is one of six people playing Dylan; she won the
best-actress prize for the role at the Venice film festival.
It is perhaps more surprising that Blanchett agreed to take on the crown and
sceptre again than that she agreed to play Dylan, with bouffant locks, dark
glasses and a sock in her drainpipe jeans. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
reunites many of the creative team behind the 1998 film Elizabeth, including
Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush as Francis Walsingham, the director, Shekhar Kapur,
and producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. They are joined by Samantha Morton
as Mary, Queen of Scots; Clive Owen, who plays Walter Raleigh as a heroic
swashbuckler in the Errol Flynn style, who captures the heart of the now
middle-aged Virgin Queen; and Abbie Cornish, the young Australian sensation,
as Elizabeth Throckmorton, the queen’s lady-in-waiting, who finds her royal
mistress is a rival for the dashing Raleigh’s affections.
“It wasn’t reticence, but I would rather move forward and fail than go
backward into safe territory,” Blanchett says of her initial reluctance to
tackle Elizabeth again. “Shekhar started talking about making another film
shortly after doing the first, but I thought he was joking: I had just got
married and I wanted to go home to Sydney – it was the last thing on my
mind. Eventually, Tim Bevan from Working Title said, ‘Let us work up a
script and see what you think.’ A story began to emerge that not only
involved holy war,” – which Blanchett feels has resonance today – “but I
could see the potential to discuss the ageing process. I found that very
interesting: the sense of reflection, the middle point of someone’s life.
But it took the time it took, and I am grateful for that, because even if I
don’t open my mouth, I am a more, shall we say, mature presence on screen
than I was eight or nine years ago.”
The historical event at the heart of the film is the defeat of the Spanish
Armada. This enables Elizabeth to ride a splendid white stallion along a
blustery cliff top, her long red hair streaming in the wind, to rally the
nation on the eve of battle. If the first film saw Blanchett playing an
Elizabeth who was younger than she was at the time, in The Golden Age she
plays a woman who is older, contending with the knowledge that she may have
sacrificed her chance of happiness, marriage and children to her duty. But
Blanchett says we have to be careful about imposing our own notions of
happiness and romance on historical figures such as Elizabeth. “No matter
how cynical we are, we somehow believe we have the right to happiness, and
we have this naive belief in romance,” she says. “But marriage and
childbearing had little to recommend them to Elizabeth. The majority of
women died in childbirth, and she would have had to completely subjugate her
power and authority and become a consort if she had married. She lived to a
ripe old age, which I think is a strong argument for the fact that she never
had sexual relations, so she never contracted any related diseases.”
Although Blanchett can sometimes seem austere, that she can utter that
sentence without cracking a smile betrays her very Australian and often
earthy sense of humour. Today, she is sitting opposite me on a high-backed
chair in a small hotel room in New York, where she’s getting ready for the
screening of I’m Not There that night at the New York film festival. Her
shoulder-length hair is very blonde, her extravagant facial features very
pale, and she is dressed entirely in black: high-collared black top, black
suede skirt and knee-high black boots. Now 38, she was brought up in
Melbourne, although her father, who died of a heart attack when she was just
10, was an American advertising executive.
Even as Blanchett graduated from Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic
Art in 1992, word was seeping out of her extraordinary talent, particularly
after she played Carol in Oleanna in 1993, for the Sydney Theatre Company,
where she seemed to find a spiritual home. Blanchett and her husband, the
playwright Andrew Upton, will take the reins of the company for three years
at the beginning of 2008, and have moved back to Australia from England,
where they lived in Brighton with their two young children, to do so.
With that commitment, Blanchett will spend much less time making films.
Luckily, she already has two more in the can: The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button, directed by David Fincher, in which she stars with Brad Pitt; and
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, directed by Steven
Spielberg, in which she apparently plays an evil Russian, although she’s not
allowed to talk about it.
I thought it would be interesting to ask her how her experience of being in
the limelight in the nine years since Elizabeth had affected her second
portrayal of the queen. At court, Elizabeth was also in the spotlight and,
as Blanchett says, she “was very controlling about her image”. But before I
can finish my question, in which I note that the first Elizabeth film had
turned Blanchett into “a major star”, I can see her grimacing. “I don’t
think a major star,” she says. “As a possibility. As an actor for hire. When
you come from Australia, where it’s a potent but small industry, it was a
little business card – I think it was what Catie did next that established
whether I was going to last or not.”
Blundering on, I wonder whether Blanchett had brought some sense of “what it’s
like to be a celebrity” to playing Elizabeth this time. The room fills with
her exasperation at being so crassly defined. “I think a connection to one’s
own experience will innately be there in a performance,” she says, “but I
think to mine the personal experience is to reduce the character’s
experience; it diminishes it to reduce it to some sort of tabloid
experience, which, frankly, I haven’t had. Also, she was more than a
celebrity: she believed she was a monarch anointed by God.”
As Blanchett and I continue talking, I begin to notice a pattern. She almost
invariably answers my questions by first denying the thesis of what she is
being asked. She has an obvious and understandable distaste for the kind of
defining that is the purpose of this kind of interview. As I try to pin her
down, she does her darnedest to escape. It’s not just that she doesn’t like
talking about her personal life – “incautious intimacies with the media” is
how she describes it – but she always seems to steer the conversation away
from the personal to the abstract, particularly if you ask about her
creative process. It’s not surprising, if you consider the way she seems to
subsume herself into a wide range of characters, a testimony to her refusal
to be pigeonholed.
I think she may have become even warier of being interviewed after taking on
Dylan in Todd Haynes’s new film, though. Variety described her performance
as “electrifying”, which is appropriate enough, as she plays Dylan in 1966,
at the time of the European tour in which he shocked his fans by forsaking
folk and going electric. Variety also said: “Blanchett’s casting and
performance [are] a daring coup, and she can now rightly claim to be the
only [actor] on earth ever to have been asked to channel both Bob Dylan and
Katharine Hepburn, and to have done so successfully.” Her portrayal of
Hepburn in The Aviator won her a best supporting Oscar.
Blanchett says that when Haynes told her what he was planning, “I think I
stopped breathing. I said, ‘That’s wild.’ And I knew in that moment that I
was going to have to talk myself out of doing it, because I’d sort of
already decided that I would”. Her character is called Jude Quinn. Five
other actors play versions of Dylan at various stages of his life, including
Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, and an unknown 13-year-old
African-American. “Then I read the script, and it was one of the most
difficult reads I’d had in my life,” Blanchett continues, “because you knew
that the algebraic equation would only be solved by Todd. It was completely
and singularly his vision.”
Shooting just a week after finishing The Golden Age, Blanchett had little time
to prepare, but says: “I saw the brilliant Scorsese documentary and talked
to him, and I read Dylan’s Chronicles, which is amazing. There’s a line
where he says, ‘It wasn’t the kind of song in which you hear the roar of the
universe.’ You think, f***, this guy has heard the roar of the universe. And
Jeff Rosen, his manager, gave me the extended version of the press
conferences Dylan gave on that tour. It was remarkable to chart the
progression of exhaustion and drug abuse, and the mind-numbing inter-face
with the press” – here, Blanchett emphasises “mind-numbing” – “and people’s
expectations throughout his journey from England to France to Stockholm.
What’s amazing about Dylan is that he has somehow been able to dodge
people’s expectations of him and remain liberated from all that stuff
creatively. I find that wholly inspiring.”
Blanchett hasn’t done such a bad job of that herself.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age opens on November 2, 2007
