Cate Blanchett Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Cate Blanchett trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Cate Blanchett's first screen credit was as an American cheerleader extra in an Egyptian boxing film, taken because she needed the money. Within a decade she was Elizabeth I, Galadriel and Katharine Hepburn, the last of which made her the only actor ever to win an Oscar for playing another Oscar-winning actor. A second Academy Award followed for Blue Jasmine, and Tár brought her eighth nomination. This quiz covers the whole range: her Melbourne childhood and NIDA training, the Sydney stage work with Geoffrey Rush, the Shekhar Kapur films, the Tolkien trilogies, the Scorsese, Jarmusch, Malick, Haynes and Field collaborations, the Marvel villain and the Disney stepmother, the voice roles from Ponyo to Pinocchio, the Sydney Theatre Company years with Andrew Upton, the Broadway debut, the miniseries, and the refugee and climate work that now fills her time between films. Fifty questions, four options each, with a short explanation after every answer. Play on your phone or print it for a film-night quiz.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Australian city was Cate Blanchett born?
Melbourne
Melbourne. Her Texan father was serving in the US Navy and met her Australian mother there when his ship broke down.
Q 02From which drama school did Blanchett graduate in 1992?
NIDA
NIDA, Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art. She had first started an art history and economics degree at university before turning to acting.
Q 03Short of money while travelling, Blanchett first appeared on screen as a cheerleader extra in a boxing film in which country?
Egypt
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.
Q 04Soon after drama school, Blanchett played the student in David Mamet's two-hander Oleanna opposite which Australian actor?
Geoffrey Rush
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.
Q 05Blanchett's feature film debut was as a captured nurse in which 1997 Bruce Beresford film?
Paradise Road
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.
Q 06Who starred opposite Blanchett in her first lead role, Oscar and Lucinda (1997)?
Ralph Fiennes
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.
Q 07Who directed Blanchett as Elizabeth I in Elizabeth (1998) and its 2007 sequel?
Shekhar Kapur
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.
Q 08Which elf does Blanchett play in The Lord of the Rings trilogy?
Galadriel
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'.
Q 09Who played the title role opposite Blanchett's Daisy in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?
Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt. It was their second film together after Babel, and this time her dancer Daisy grows old while his Benjamin grows younger.
Q 10Bruce Willis and which actor played the escaped convicts opposite Blanchett in the 2001 comedy Bandits?
Billy Bob Thornton
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.
Q 11Blanchett played an English teacher turned bomber in Turin in which 2002 Tom Tykwer thriller?
Heaven
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.
Q 12In which Jim Jarmusch film does Blanchett play both herself and her own cousin?
Coffee and Cigarettes
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.
Q 13Who directed The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, in which Blanchett played a pregnant journalist?
Wes Anderson
Q 21Blanchett voiced Gran Mamare, mother of a goldfish princess, in which Miyazaki film?
Ponyo
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.
Q 22Who directed Blanchett as Blanche DuBois in the 2009 production of A Streetcar Named Desire?
Liv Ullmann
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.
Q 23Blanchett played Lady Marion opposite which actor's Robin Hood in 2010?
Russell Crowe
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.
Q 14Blanchett won her first Oscar for playing which screen legend in The Aviator?
Katharine Hepburn
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.
Q 15Blanchett lent her Aviator Oscar statuette to which institution?
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image
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.
Q 16What is the name of the production company Blanchett runs with her husband?
Dirty Films
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.
Q 17Who played the obsessive older teacher opposite Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal?
Judi Dench
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.
Q 18Blanchett made a masked, uncredited cameo as the hero's ex-girlfriend in which 2007 comedy?
Hot Fuzz
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.
Q 19In I'm Not There (2007), Blanchett played one of six incarnations of which musician?
Bob Dylan
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.
Q 20What is the name of the KGB villain Blanchett plays in the fourth Indiana Jones film?
Irina Spalko
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.
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.
Q 24Blanchett played Marissa Wiegler, a ruthless CIA officer hunting a teenage assassin, in which 2011 thriller?
Hanna
Hanna. Saoirse Ronan's heroine has been raised in the Finnish wilderness by her ex-CIA father for one purpose: to kill Wiegler.
Q 25Blanchett played Yelena opposite Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh on stage in which Chekhov play?
Uncle Vanya
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.
Q 26Which director left The Hobbit before filming but kept a co-writing credit on the films that brought back Blanchett's elf?
Guillermo del Toro
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.
Q 27Who directed Blue Jasmine, the 2013 film that won Blanchett her second Oscar?
Woody Allen
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.
Q 28Who played Blanchett's husband, a money manager arrested for fraud, in Blue Jasmine?
Alec Baldwin
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.
Q 29Which character does Blanchett voice in How to Train Your Dragon 2?
Valka
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.
Q 30Which role did Blanchett play in Kenneth Branagh's 2015 live-action Cinderella?
Lady Tremaine
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.