Cate Blanchett

Biography of Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett was born on May 14, 1969 in Melbourne, Australia.

She is the second of three children of June Gamble, a businesswoman and teacher, and Robert DeWitt Blanchett, Jr., a native of Texas, who was a petty officer in the United States Navy and worked as a senior advertising executive. Her parents met when her father's ship broke down in Melbourne.

When Blanchett was ten years old, her father died of a heart attack. Her older brother Bob is a computer systems engineer and her younger sister Genevieve is a set designer.

During her childhood she was inclined to dress in masculine clothing and she went through goth and punk phases during her adolescence, even shaving her head.

She attended Ivanhoe East Primary School and high school she performed at Ivanhoe Girls' Grammar School and Methodist Ladies' College, where she discovered her passion for the performing arts. She subsequently studied Economics and Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne before traveling abroad for a year.

During a trip to Egypt, at just 18 years old, she learned that she was asking for extras and she participated in a boxing movie, Kaboria. On her return to Australia she left the University of Melbourne and transferred to the Australian Institute of Dramatic Arts. She graduated in 1992 and started at the Sydney Theater Company.

After participating in some television series, she made the leap to the cinema with Police Rescue (1994) and three years later she worked with Glenn Close in Paradise Road.

In the year 1999 she was nominated for an Oscar and earned her a Golden Globe as best actress for playing the famous Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth. She also worked on: Out of Control, An Ideal Husband, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, a film for which she earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Peter Jackson directed her as the elven queen in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, eventually appearing in all three films of the trilogy. In 2001 she played Charlotte Gray in the British film of the same name and in 2003 she works in the film Veronica Guerin. In that year she appears in Coffee and Cigarettes, a low budget film and in 2004 in Life Aquatic. In the same year she worked with Martin Scorsese in The Aviator, biographical film of businessman Howard Hughes, which was played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

In 2005, she received her second Oscar nomination and this time she won the statuette for best supporting actress. In 2006 she released three new films and all three were nominated for Oscars. The first was Babel, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the second was The Good German, by Steven Soderbergh, and the third was Notes on a Scandal.

In 2007, she played Elizabeth I of England, directed by Shekhar Kapur who directed her in the first film in 1997. In Elizabeth: The Golden Age, her new performance earned her a new nomination for Best Actress at the Oscars along with the one she won best supporting actress for her other film of the year, I'm not there.

In 2008, she participated in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth installment in the series; she and she also in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, along with Brad Pitt and which had thirteen nominations at the Oscar Awards ceremony that year. In 2010, she premiered the new film version of the legend of Robin Hood directed by Ridley Scott, where she plays Lady Marian. Additionally, she shot Hanna, her first collaboration with director Joe Wright.

For her performance in BlueJasmine, a film directed by Woody Allen, she received very favorable reviews, with some critics calling it the best role of her career. The performance earned her more than 40 awards, including the SAG, Golden Globe, BAFTA, Independent Film Spirit Awards, and on March 2, 2014, Cate Blanchett won her second Oscar for Best Actress thanks to her performance in the movie.

In 2014, she co-starred with Matt Damon and George Clooney in the latter's directed film The Monuments Men, based on the true story of a team of art historians and museum curators who recover artwork stolen by the Nazis. She voiced Valka in How to Train Your Dragon 2, an animated film that was a box office success that won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film and received an Academy Award nomination.

She was a guest star on the Australian series Rake, and in 2015, she played Lady Tremaine in the Disney production Cinderella. She then co-starred with Rooney Mara in Carol, directed by Todd Haynes.

She made her Broadway debut in 2017 with The Present receiving Tony Award, Drama Desk and Drama League nominations for her performance in the play. In the same year, she played Hela in the Marvel Comics superhero movie Thor: Ragnarok.

She married on December 29, 1997 with the Australian screenwriter and playwright Andrew Upton in the Blue Mountains National Park of New South Wales (Australia).

Blanchett and Upton are the parents of four children, biological: Dashiell John (born December 3, 2001), Robert Romano (born April 23, 2004), Ignatius Martin (born April 13, 2008), and daughter Edith Vivian Patricia, whose adoption was confirmed on March 6, 2015.