How many Academy Award–winning movie stars succeed in maintaining a stable, enduring marriage with a professional colleague while building such a stellar career, not to mention raising children away from the paparazzi and keeping everyone’s ups and downs out of the headlines? – Vanity Fair February 2009
Who else?
It’s a gushing article about the incomparable Cate Blanchett after which you realise you still don’t know that much about her…and you prefer it that way. But the nuggets that are offered are, like her, total f-cking amazingness.
Like her relationship with her husband who, refreshingly, is not the prototype of a Hollywood beefcake. Theirs was an attraction borne of art and creativity that continues today as they are now co-directors of the Sydney Theatre Company – Cate has immersed herself deep into rehearsal for an “adaptation of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses cycle, an eight-hour opus that includes Richard II, and the Henrys, and Richard III…with Blanchett herself playing Richard II and Lady Anne.”
Like… please!
Who else?
She’s at the top of her game. Among her peers, her game is better than anyone else’s game. And she didn’t have to move to Hollywood to get there. When she says it’s about the work, you truly believe her:
“I don’t exist in that (Hollywood) world. I observe it, but there’s so much else to be thinking about. Maybe it’s because I’m with someone who’s not with me because of that; I’m not a trophy. He likes the vessel, but he also wants to make sure the vessel is full. The world of film can be so noisy, but the other aspects of my life are actually the noisiest parts of my life. My best friends are a social worker and a visual artist.
I didn’t set out to get somewhere. I thought it might be nice to work. But you just have to have a very accurate internal barometer with your own finger as the dial pointing to success and failure. The film industry is so noisy you have to find little quiet places to keep experimenting—otherwise, exit stage left. But the noise doesn’t interest me; the work does.”
So next time you hear one of those twats complaining, like Jennifer Aniston, about living in LA and the intrusion and the paps and the following in the cars etc, remember it’s a choice. Between noise and work it’s a choice.
Click here to read the full article and to browse through a collection of amazing Cate photos from VF past. She is the best.
