Cate Blanchett with Rooney Mara at the Cannes Film Festival 2015
Cate Blachett:
'I'm not a lesbian,
but who cares?'
Last week, Cate Blanchett said she'd had many relationships with women... But none of them were sexual, she clarified as her new film Carol screened at Cannes
Hannah Furness
She caused something of a stir last week after appearing to admit to a string of relationships with women.
Now Cate Blanchett, the Oscar-winning actress, has insisted no one should be remotely interested in her sexuality, as she laments the modern obsession with gay people having to constantly talk about their private lives.
While female baddies abound in Marvel comics, few have made the transition to the screen. But that’s about to change with Blanchett’s role in Thor: Ragnarok
Ben Child Tuesday 1 August 2017 12.41 BST
W
hen it comes to truly splendid villains, there’s nothing like a dame. From Tilda Swinton’s icy, curdled charisma in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) to Margaret Hamilton’s cackling Wicked Witch of the West in the classic 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz, female baddies are more than capable of holding their own in terms of offering up sheer, undiluted evil. Which makes it all the more disappointing that there have been so few in the superhero genre. Sure, there’s been the odd juicy role – Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) or Marion Cotillard as Talia al Ghul in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012). But more often than not, Hollywood’s standard approach towards gender comes into play, and the best supervillain parts go to male stars.
The Oscar-winning actor is back in the race with the romantic drama Carol but what have her career highlights been?
Benjamin Lee Friday 27 November 2015 09.58 GMT
Even in the her more questionable choices (coughs, Crystal Skull, ends coughing), Cate Blanchett remains a captivating presence.
In her latest film Carol, a delicate romantic drama from Todd Haynes, she is deservedly picking up Oscar buzz for her role as a housewife who falls for a younger woman in 50s Manhattan, capping off a year that’s seen her play a Disney villain in Cinderella and a tipsy journo in Truth.
With the film finally in cinemas, here’s a look at her finest moments on screen.
Elizabeth
Despite a few major opportunities – a supporting role in Paradise Road, a key lead in Oscar and Lucinda – it took Shekhar Kapur’s surprisingly gritty period thriller to announce Blanchett’s arrival. She dominates the film with a performance of great strength and wit, belying her relative inexperience. She picked up an Oscar nomination but lost out to Gwyneth Paltrow’s far inferior turn in Shakespeare in Love.
The Talented Mr Ripley
While every performance in Anthony Minghella’s lush thriller is note perfect, Blanchett’s small yet indelible work is often overlooked. In another actor’s hands, the role of meddling society girl Meredith Logue could have turned into screechy caricature, yet she humanises her, adding a tragic edge and making us keen to know more.
Notes on a Scandal
While many dismissed it as a lurid potboiler, there’s something commendably mean-spirited about this perverse thriller. Judi Dench’s sexually repressed, desperately lonely misanthropist attaches herself to Blanchett’s superficially charming yet ultimately unhinged paedophile teacher, and the two go down in flames. Blanchett, in another Oscar-nominated performance, is hypnotic, giving us an uneasy empathy with a difficult character.
I’m Not There
Another two nominations came her way the following year, one for a grand performance in an underwhelming sequel to Elizabeth and the other for her transformative turn as one of the many Bob Dylans in I’m Not There. Of the starry cast, Blanchett was the most impressive, embodying the singer yet giving more than just a token impersonation.
Blue Jasmine
Woody Allen’s latter-day mediocrity came to a dramatic, albeit brief, halt with his transformative character study of a woman drinking and sweating her way towards a breakdown. Blanchett’s Oscar-winning performance lurches between horror and sadness, making us hate and pity her simultaneously. Despite becoming bigger than the movie around her, she remains grounded.
Carol: forget Cate Blanchett and look at Rooney Mara's beatnik style
Therese is the truly stylish one in Todd Haynes’ new film: less glamorous, more ordinary – and above all achievable
Lauren Cochrane
Monday 30 November 2015 14.27 GMT If Cate Blanchett’s character Carol has title billing in Todd Haynes’ Carol, its Rooney Mara’s Therese who is the fashion insider’s character to study. Set in 1952 in New York, Carol has the wealthy grown-up artifice of the decade – all peplums, set hair, trapeze jackets and red lipstick – familiar to fans of Mad Men’s Betty Draper or Grace Kelly. But Therese, a twentysomething shop assistant living in a cold-water apartment, brings a different take. It’s one that’s less glamorous and more ordinary but simple and chic in a sort of beatnik way, like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face before the makeover.
Carol sweeps gay and lesbian critics' awards after Oscars snub
Todd Haynes’s lesbian drama wins Dorians, despite missing out on best film and best director Academy nominations last week, though Rooney Mara remains favourite to take best supporting actress Ben Child Tuesday 19 January 2016 11.15 GMT
Fifties romance Carol was the big winner in the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association awards – the Dorians – taking five top prizes including best film, best director for Todd Haynes and best actress for Cate Blanchett.
There’s one every year. Correction: there are plenty of movies every year whose absence at the announcement of the Academy Award nominationscause head-scratching, teeth-gnashing, and similar displays of displeasure, but every year there’s one whose snub (and I don’t use the word lightly) seems particularly egregious, and worthy of exploration. Last year it was Selma; this year, it’s Carol, Todd Haynes’ magnificent adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt.
Continuing our countdown of the best movies released in the US this year, we doff our hat to Todd Haynes’ beautifully dressed adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian-romance novel
Andrew Pulver Thursday 10 December 2015 12.00 GMT
With Safe and Far from Heaven, director Todd Haynes has already proved himself a master at stories of brittle, repressed women struggling to access and express their innermost emotions. Thus his stewardship of an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s semi-autobiographical novel – published pseudonymously in 1952 as The Price of Salt – instantly appeared an inspired conjunction, especially with Cate Blanchett having already accepted one of the lead roles. “A frock film ... with Cate attached,” is how Haynes himself described Carol and, as a bare-bones conceptualisation, you can see how it suits him down to the ground.
Of course, there’s more to Carol than that. Highsmith’s novel described the tremulous progress of a love affair between a wannabe set designer working in a department store, and an older, fur-coated woman who stops in to buy Christmas presents. Haynes’s film version is tremendously atmospheric, with near-fetishistic levels of attention to detail in bringing the period backdrop to life. (It would be hard to top the laser-eyed concentration on colour co-ordination and soft furnishings that Haynes displayed in Far From Heaven, but Carol is easily its equal.)
But Carol benefits hugely from its two principal actors, Blanchett and Rooney Mara, who distil exactly the right kind of neurotic energy required for the roles. Blanchett’s has a more maternal yet predatory dimension – her character, after all, is the older, and the initiator, but also has more to lose – while Mara radiates a prickly naivete that makes her Therese Belivet harder to like, but somehow just as intriguing. Without these two tremendously sensitive performances, Carol would be in danger of becoming a frock movie and little else; but, aided by the script’s fractured chronology, it becomes a sculptured, restrained treatment of a surging, emotional relationship.
Lesbian-themed romances may no longer command the same level of hostility from the mainstream audience as they once did, but Carol is still a pretty rare beast. It’s neither a cautionary tale, nor special-pleading empowerment; nor it is especially political or celebratory. Instead, it does its best to avert its eyes from its own cinematic novelty; like Brokeback Mountain, its direct male equivalent, it goes about its business with a quiet confidence, mining its complex relationship configuration for empathetic human drama. What has resulted is a film of the highest quality.
The first teaser trailer for Carol, the 1950s-set love story between Cate Blanchett’stitle character and Rooney Mara’s idealistic young clerk, was a beautifully edited musical homage to the film’s central relationship. Short on dialogue and long on emotions, the teaser feels like a tonal companion piece to this new U.S. trailer, which is much more conventional. Unfortunately, it also falls into the common trap of giving away a condensed version of almost the entire movie rather than setting up stakes to make viewers invested.