50 Fun Facts About Cate Blanchett

In which Australian city was Cate Blanchett born?

Melbourne. Her Texan father was serving in the US Navy and met her Australian mother there when his ship broke down.

From which drama school did Blanchett graduate in 1992?

NIDA, Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art. She had first started an art history and economics degree at university before turning to acting.

Short of money while travelling, Blanchett first appeared on screen as a cheerleader extra in a boxing film in which country?

Egypt. She was staying at a cheap Cairo hotel when a chance meeting led to work as an American cheerleader in the 1990 film Kaboria.

Soon after drama school, Blanchett played the student in David Mamet's two-hander Oleanna opposite which Australian actor?

Geoffrey Rush. He played the professor she accuses, and it won her a critics' best actress award in the year the same critics named her best newcomer for another play.

Blanchett's feature film debut was as a captured nurse in which 1997 Bruce Beresford film?

Paradise Road. Glenn Close led the cast as a prisoner who starts a 'vocal orchestra' in a Japanese camp on Sumatra, a story Beresford drew from survivors' diaries.

Who starred opposite Blanchett in her first lead role, Oscar and Lucinda (1997)?

Ralph Fiennes. His Oscar, a clergyman hooked on gambling, bets his inheritance that he can carry a glass church to a remote settlement in New South Wales.

Who directed Blanchett as Elizabeth I in Elizabeth (1998) and its 2007 sequel?

Shekhar Kapur. He was stuck for a lead until he happened to see a trailer for Oscar and Lucinda, and chose the little-known Blanchett on the spot.

Which elf does Blanchett play in The Lord of the Rings trilogy?

Galadriel. Hers is the first voice heard in the trilogy: she narrates the prologue on the forging of the Rings, which begins 'The world is changed'.

Who played the title role opposite Blanchett's Daisy in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?

Brad Pitt. It was their second film together after Babel, and this time her dancer Daisy grows old while his Benjamin grows younger.

Bruce Willis and which actor played the escaped convicts opposite Blanchett in the 2001 comedy Bandits?

Billy Bob Thornton. His Terry and Willis's Joe become the 'Sleepover Bandits', holding each bank manager hostage at home the night before they rob the bank.

Blanchett played an English teacher turned bomber in Turin in which 2002 Tom Tykwer thriller?

Heaven. Krzysztof Kieślowski co-wrote it to open a trilogy but died before it could be made, so Tykwer filmed it and it opened the Berlin Film Festival.

In which Jim Jarmusch film does Blanchett play both herself and her own cousin?

Coffee and Cigarettes. In the segment 'Cousins', the film star Cate fends off digs from her envious, non-famous cousin Shelly over coffee in a hotel lounge.

Who directed The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, in which Blanchett played a pregnant journalist?

Wes Anderson. Her reporter joins Bill Murray's oceanographer as he hunts the 'jaguar shark' that ate his partner, and both he and his possible son fall for her.

Blanchett won her first Oscar for playing which screen legend in The Aviator?

Katharine Hepburn. In the film she tires of Howard Hughes's obsessions and leaves him for Spencer Tracy, and the part brought the first Oscar ever won for playing an Oscar-winning actress.

Blanchett lent her Aviator Oscar statuette to which institution?

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image. She spoke at the 2009 launch of the film museum's permanent exhibition, where the statuette went on show in a section on her own career.

What is the name of the production company Blanchett runs with her husband?

Dirty Films. Its first feature was her own drama Little Fish, and it backs other people's work too: she signed on to the Greek film Apples after discovering it while heading a festival jury.

Who played the obsessive older teacher opposite Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal?

Judi Dench. Her lonely Barbara befriends Blanchett's art teacher, discovers her affair with a pupil and keeps the secret as a way to control her.

Blanchett made a masked, uncredited cameo as the hero's ex-girlfriend in which 2007 comedy?

Hot Fuzz. She is Janine, the ex of Simon Pegg's policeman and a forensics officer, so a mask covers her face in every scene and the star is easy to miss.

In I'm Not There (2007), Blanchett played one of six incarnations of which musician?

Bob Dylan. Her Jude Quinn is the Dylan of the mid-1960s, a folk singer who walks on stage at a festival with a full electric band and outrages his fans.

What is the name of the KGB villain Blanchett plays in the fourth Indiana Jones film?

Irina Spalko. She races Indy to a crystal skull in Peru, convinced its telepathic power will let the Soviets beam their ideas straight into American minds.

Blanchett voiced Gran Mamare, mother of a goldfish princess, in which Miyazaki film?

Ponyo. Gran Mamare settles the story: she rules that her daughter may stay human if the boy Sosuke passes a test, which also restores the balance of nature.

Who directed Blanchett as Blanche DuBois in the 2009 production of A Streetcar Named Desire?

Liv Ullmann. The star of Ingmar Bergman's films had hoped to direct Blanchett in a film of A Doll's House; when that fell through, they made this staging, which went on to New York and Washington.

Blanchett played Lady Marion opposite which actor's Robin Hood in 2010?

Russell Crowe. Ridley Scott's version makes her Marion a spirited widow who distrusts his archer at first and ends up riding into battle beside him.

Blanchett played Marissa Wiegler, a ruthless CIA officer hunting a teenage assassin, in which 2011 thriller?

Hanna. Saoirse Ronan's heroine has been raised in the Finnish wilderness by her ex-CIA father for one purpose: to kill Wiegler.

Blanchett played Yelena opposite Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh on stage in which Chekhov play?

Uncle Vanya. She took the part although Yelena, as she put it, 'isn't even onstage all that much', and the production toured to Washington and New York.

Which director left The Hobbit before filming but kept a co-writing credit on the films that brought back Blanchett's elf?

Guillermo del Toro. He quit in 2010 as delays dragged on, so Peter Jackson took over, and a part was kept for her although her character is not in Tolkien's book.

Who directed Blue Jasmine, the 2013 film that won Blanchett her second Oscar?

Woody Allen. He wrote her a New York socialite who, with her marriage and money gone, lands in her sister's modest San Francisco flat and cannot hide her disapproval of the life she finds there.

Who played Blanchett's husband, a money manager arrested for fraud, in Blue Jasmine?

Alec Baldwin. His Hal is a Madoff-style financier whose arrest wipes out her New York high life and sends her to her sister's modest apartment in San Francisco.

Which character does Blanchett voice in How to Train Your Dragon 2?

Valka. The mysterious dragon rider Hiccup meets turns out to be his mother, presumed dead since a dragon carried her off, who has been rescuing dragons ever since.

Which role did Blanchett play in Kenneth Branagh's 2015 live-action Cinderella?

Lady Tremaine. Herself a widow with two daughters, she marries Ella's father, and once he dies she reduces his daughter to the household's scullery maid.

Carol (2015) adapts which Patricia Highsmith novel?

The Price of Salt. Highsmith's 1952 novel begins when a young assistant in a Manhattan department store serves an elegant married customer at Christmas and is drawn to her at once.

In Truth (2015), Blanchett played which CBS producer opposite Robert Redford's Dan Rather?

Mary Mapes. The 60 Minutes producer's report on George W. Bush's military service came under attack, and the storm ended her time at CBS News as well as Rather's.

Blanchett made a surprise cameo in the final moments of which Netflix series in 2025?

Squid Game. The last scene jumps to Los Angeles, where she is recruiting American players, a sign that the death game is coming to the United States.

Blanchett made her Broadway debut in 2017 in which Chekhov adaptation?

The Present. The play moves Chekhov's sprawling early drama Platonov to a birthday party in the post-Soviet Russian countryside, with Blanchett as the hostess, Anna Petrovna.

Which character does Blanchett play in Thor: Ragnarok?

Hela. The goddess of death turns out to be Odin's firstborn, freed from her prison the moment he dies, and she destroys Thor's hammer almost at once.

Blanchett played Lou, partner in crime to which actress's Debbie Ocean, in Ocean's 8?

Sandra Bullock. Her Debbie, sister of Danny Ocean, walks out of prison and straight to Lou to plan the theft of a $150 million Cartier necklace at the Met Gala.

Which Jungle Book character did Blanchett voice in Andy Serkis's Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle?

Kaa. Serkis's python is a seer who narrates the film and rescues Mowgli from the monkeys, a mentor as in Kipling's stories.

Who directed Blanchett in Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)?

Richard Linklater. He adapted Maria Semple's bestseller about a reclusive former architect who vanishes without a trace, sending her husband and daughter off to find her.

Which conservative activist did Blanchett play in the 2020 miniseries Mrs. America?

Phyllis Schlafly. Nicknamed 'the sweetheart of the silent majority', she led the STOP ERA backlash that kept the Equal Rights Amendment from being ratified.

Who wrote and directed Blanchett in Tár (2022)?

Todd Field. Back after more than fifteen years without a film, he wrote the part for one person: 'Had she said no,' he said, 'the film would have never seen the light of day.'

Blanchett voiced Spazzatura, a showman's mistreated monkey, in which animated film?

Pinocchio. Spazzatura is the lead puppeteer for the showman Count Volpe, working the marionettes that the wooden boy is recruited to perform beside.

Who wrote and directed the Apple TV+ miniseries Disclaimer (2024), with Blanchett as a journalist?

Alfonso Cuarón. He wrote and directed the series, adapting Renée Knight's novel about a journalist who opens a stranger's book and finds she is its main character.

Which character did Blanchett play in the 2024 video-game adaptation Borderlands?

Lilith. The bounty hunter reluctantly goes back to Pandora, the home planet she left as a child, to find a tycoon's missing daughter, and falls in with a crew of misfits.

In 1997 Blanchett married which Australian playwright and screenwriter?

Andrew Upton. They met in Australia in the mid-1990s, and he went on to adapt several of the stage classics she has starred in.

From 2008 to 2013 Blanchett and her husband were artistic directors of which organisation?

Sydney Theatre Company. As co-directors they raised its profile abroad, sending productions with homegrown casts to Europe and the United States, often with Blanchett in the lead.

Blanchett told the UN Security Council in 2018 of atrocities against which people?

Rohingya. She had met families who fled Myanmar, and she praised Bangladesh for sheltering more than 700,000 of them.

Blanchett chaired which festival's jury in 2020 wearing only outfits she had worn before?

Venice. She announced beforehand that she would wear nothing new, to make a point about sustainable fashion, at one of the few festivals held in person that year.

Blanchett played Brie Evantee, co-host of the upbeat morning show The Daily Rip, in which Netflix satire?

Don't Look Up. When two astronomers come on air to warn that a comet will destroy the Earth, her host treats it as a light item to be kept breezy.

In 2022 Blanchett set an actress's record for roles in films nominated for which Oscar?

Best Picture. Two of her films were nominated at once that year, taking her past the eight that Gone with the Wind's Olivia de Havilland had held as the record.

Which Australian honour was Blanchett appointed to in 2017?

Companion of the Order of Australia. The country's highest civilian honour, it cited her acting, her direction of arts organisations and her humanitarian and environmental work.