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"You have to be really strong to withstand the rejection, the not working. I was incredibly lucky. There were knockbacks, sure, but I did find great work. I have such admiration for people who love it and are so good at it and hang in there for a long time. Because I don't know that I would have been able to."

She made her film debut in Paradise Road, a Japanese PoW drama with Glenn Close and Pauline Collins and then, just a year later, came that breakout role as Elizabeth I. Since then it's been impossible to predict what she will try next. While other actors of a similar stature occasionally dip into the more commercial end of cinema, Blanchett keeps seeking "something different". Her one foray into blockbuster territory was to play a suitably graceful Elf Princess in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. "Oh, that was wonderful fun. I loved it. And working for Peter Jackson, well, who wouldn't?"

She's played a wartime spy (Charlotte Gray), a troubled clairvoyant (The Gift), a grieving widow who takes the law into her own hands (Heaven) and the campaigning Irish journalist who was murdered by drug barons in Veronica Guerin. And if anything, in the past 18 months she has moved up a gear and enjoyed arguably the most creative period of her career, making three movies virtually back to back ­ playing an American tourist accidentally shot in Morocco (Babel), a schoolteacher exploding her own moral code (Notes on a Scandal) and a woman with a terrible past in bombed out, postwar Berlin in The Good German. And in the next few months she'll be back as Queen Elizabeth in The Golden Age and, incredibly, as a mid-Sixties "electric" Bob Dylan in I'm Not There.

"It's been a pretty intense couple of years," she agrees. "I think what helps is that the demands of the roles and the ambitions of the films were very different and the way they were shot was very different, and I think that facilitated me moving between the films. You have to be continually shedding and discarding and moving on."

The Good German is a perfect example of that mantra. Blanchett went straight from making Notes on a Scandal, set in contemporary London, to Los Angeles where Steven Soderbergh was re-creating a blitzed Berlin on the backlot for The Good German and filming, as much as possible, in a style faithful to that era, with fixed cameras, black-and-white film and no overlapping dialogue. "That was a bit odd. They'd already started so I felt I had to catch up a little. But you know, those guys ­ Steven, George [Clooney] ­ are just lovely. George really is a gracious, generous man. So there was no problem."

In Soderbergh's highly stylised homage to the noir thrillers of the Forties, such as Casablanca and The Third Man, George Clooney plays Jake Geismer, an American war correspondent who arrives in his prewar stomping ground, Berlin, to cover the Potsdam conference between the victorious allies. He discovers that his former lover, Lena (a husky-voiced Blanchett, with a nod to Marlene Dietrich) is involved with a young GI (Tobey Maguire) who is carving out dangerous deals on the black market. Lena has survived the war but not without paying a terrible price and now, like everyone else in a city being carved up by the victors, wants out ­ and will do anything to escape including, it seems, use her old lover.

"It's a love story, but set against a very harsh and gritty backdrop," explains Blanchett. "Seeing Jake reminds Lena of who she used to be, how she used to feel and the fact that she used to have a sense of morality. And that's unbearable to her."

But if The Good German was technically challenging, I'm Not There was downright bizarre. Blanchett inhabits one of seven versions of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes's fictionalised account of the life (or lives) of the musician.

Blanchett plays Dylan in the mid-Sixties when the folk balladeer turned electric, prompting accusations of a sell-out from diehard folkies and cries of "Judas!" when he played the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966.

"We even call the character I play Jude. And I think the reason Todd wanted a woman to play that version of Dylan is that on a prosaic level he found his look then to be quite effeminate. I also think that on another level because the silhouette I'm playing is so iconic, if you had a man playing it you would be expecting an impersonation. But if you've got a woman playing it you are automatically liberated from a cabaret version of Bob Dylan." "When Todd approached me I said, ŒThat's so insane ­ where do I sign?' And it was hilarious. I laughed every day when I looked in the mirror. But it was an enormous challenge because on the one hand he didn't want me to do an impersonation. And I'm a woman, so there's a distance there to begin with.

But at the same time Todd was meticulous. I wore the same suit he wore on the tour when he got booed in Manchester, so those kind of details were really important." Blanchett doesn't sing herself and hasn't met Dylan. "God, I'd love to. I don't even know if Dylan's read the script. I said that to one of the producers and he said, ŒAre you kidding? Of course he has!' But to meet him would have been too weird, also because my consciousness has been so altered by his music. It would be very weird indeed." Recently, she spoke of taking a break from filming and worried that she might become overexposed. "The camera tires of everyone," she said. But I mention this now and she says, "Oh look, I hope it doesn't tire of me entirely. As long as the film industry will have me, I'll have it." So she'll keep moving, shedding and discarding. But no tripping or falling.

Cate Blanchett doesn't do pratfalls.

The Good German is released on March 9

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