Cate Blanchett: The Standard Nobody Else Is Trying to Meet

Cate Blanchett has spent four decades refusing every category Hollywood tried to put her in. Here is why she remains the most compelling and uncontainable woman in contemporary film.

HER

Will

7/30/20264 min read

Cate Blanchett black glamour dress
Cate Blanchett black glamour dress

Her | FlyAssLife

There is a specific kind of actress who arrives in Hollywood, gets handed a category — the elegant one, the British one, the serious one — and spends the rest of her career managing expectations within it. The industry is efficient about this. It finds what works, assigns it a lane, and pressures everything that comes after into that shape.

Cate Blanchett has been declining this arrangement, politely but without negotiation, for the better part of thirty years.

She has played Queen Elizabeth I and a manifestly unstable woman unraveling in a San Francisco apartment and a villainous elf queen and a jazz-age socialite and a Cold War spy and a concert conductor so singular in her moral complexity that the film built around her performance became one of the most debated releases of its decade. She has done all of this while running a theatre company in Sydney with her husband, raising four children, and wearing clothes on red carpets that make the fashion industry simultaneously nervous and inspired.

She is, by virtually any honest accounting, the most interesting woman working in film today. She is also, almost certainly, doing something tomorrow that nobody saw coming.

Where She Came From

Blanchett is Australian — Melbourne, specifically, which matters because Melbourne has a serious theatre culture that operates at a remove from the Hollywood system and produces a different kind of actor. She trained at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, the school that also produced Judy Davis, Hugo Weaving, and Mel Gibson, and came up through Australian theatre and television before her international breakthrough in the title role of Elizabeth in 1998.

That performance — at twenty-nine, in her first major film role, playing a monarch navigating political treachery and personal sacrifice with a stillness that most experienced actors spend decades trying to develop — announced that something genuinely unusual had arrived. The Oscar nomination followed. The industry immediately began trying to figure out where to file her.

She has been resisting that filing ever since.

The Choices

The career is defined by its refusals as much as its selections. The parts she didn't take are unknowable but the parts she did — Carol, Blue Jasmine, Tár, Notes on a Scandal, I'm Not There (where she played a version of Bob Dylan), the Armani-clad villainess in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — describe someone who is choosing from a completely different set of criteria than market logic.

Blue Jasmine in 2013 was the kind of performance that changes the way a room watches someone — Blanchett as a woman in spectacular, self-constructed collapse, every gesture calibrated to reveal something the character is trying to conceal. The Oscar she won for it was the industry acknowledging, belatedly, something that audiences already knew.

Tár in 2022 was something different again. She played Lydia Tár — fictional conductor, genius, authoritarian, hypocrite — with a totality that made audiences genuinely uncertain whether they were supposed to admire or condemn her. The film asked questions it refused to answer and handed the discomfort to the viewer. Blanchett held the center of that discomfort for two and a half hours without blinking. It is one of the great performances of the century so far and it arrived twenty-four years into a career that had already produced two Oscars.

The Theatre, The Clothes, The Rest

In 2008, at the height of her international film profile, Blanchett and her husband Andrew Upton became co-artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company — a decision that made no particular commercial sense and demonstrated the same priorities that define her film choices. She wanted to do serious theatre work. And so, she did it.

The fashion is a separate conversation and a legitimate one. Blanchett wears things — structural Armani, gender-fluid Haider Ackermann, Givenchy Couture in configurations that require architectural understanding to pull off — that most women would correctly conclude don't work on a human body. On her they function because she treats clothes as an extension of character rather than a display of wealth or brand allegiance. She has appeared at the Oscars in a sequined tuxedo trouser suit. She wore a custom Alexander McQueen to the Venice Film Festival that looked like it had been designed for a ceremony that hadn't been invented yet.

She is not trying to be fashion-forward. She is trying to be interesting. These are different objectives and she has figured out, apparently early, which one is worth pursuing.

What She Represents

The standard that Cate Blanchett operates at is one that most of her contemporaries have stopped attempting to meet — not because they lack the talent but because the industry makes it significantly easier not to. To maintain her level of selectivity, her refusal to repeat herself, her insistence on work that challenges rather than confirms, requires a tolerance for difficulty that most careers cannot sustain.

She has sustained it for thirty years. She shows no particular signs of stopping.

There is a word for this in the FlyAssLife vocabulary. It is not famous, not successful, not even talented, though she is all of those things. We speak of it often. The word is standard. She has one, she holds to it, and the work it produces speaks in a register that time tends to confirm rather than diminish.

Her is FlyAssLife's ongoing feature. One woman. One story. Accomplished, magnetic, and entirely her own.