In the decade since she first achieved international movie stardom as Elizabeth's Virgin Queen, Cate Blanchett has been dancing as fast as she can.
She won an Academy Award, has been nominated for four others (two of them this year, which was only the fifth time an actor has done that) and played a wide range of characters, from Katharine Hepburn to a Middle-earth elf to Bob Dylan.
Nice work while it lasted.
"I suppose I'd have a shot at most films I'd like to make," the 39-year-old Australian actress says with a shrug. "But you can pick and choose as much as a mother can pick and choose. I have three kids, two of them are in school, and my husband and I are running a theatre company. I have a few months off a year, and films can't always wait."
If Blanchett really will be throttling back on the movie work, at least she's capping an amazing run with a bang. Not only did a childhood dream come true when she made last summer's fourth Indiana Jones movie, but Blanchett also co-stars in one of the major releases of the prestige picture season, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which she plays a dancer.
Freely adapted and greatly expanded from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, the film charts the life of a man who's born with the constitution of an 80-year-old and ages backward as he grows through the 20th century. Brad Pitt plays Benjamin from his 60s on down. (Or is it his 20s and up?)
Breakthrough CGI processes created the incredibly lifelike Ben of the 1920s and '30s. And Blanchett is his true love, Daisy, a modern dancer fated to grow older as her life partner becomes younger and younger.
Directed by the respected David Fincher, whose Se7en and Fight Club were as diametrically different from the tender and nostalgic Button as movies can get, this film offered the classically trained Blanchett the interesting challenges she seems to crave. But they weren't necessarily the high-tech ones you'd presume.
"No," says the actress, who plays Daisy from her late teens until her death more than six decades later, as the rains of Hurricane Katrina pelt her hospital room window.
"There are ways that you can light people to make them look younger and ways to light them that make them look older. Because digital effects are so readily accessible, people forget the actual power of cinematography, which David really harnessed. There was no, 'Oh, we'll clean that up later.' If you could do it with makeup and the old wiglets, you'd lift a bit and pull a bit. There's an artistry involved in that, too.
"There's a close-up of me when Daisy's 17, and that's obviously had some digital enhancement -- because I'm a long way from 17! But also, they did light it, so they had to do the bare minimum with CG."
Not the case with Pitt's character, whose early incarnations were designed from video maps of all the actor's expressions, which were then digitized into the wizened child's face. Computers also made Pitt look much younger than he really is toward the end of the movie.
Which is when Daisy is showing her years. This is the second time Blanchett has co-starred with Pitt. In Babel, they were a bickering couple whose love was revived when she got shot in Morocco. Of course, that meant the actress spent most of that movie looking like she was at death's door.
Does Blanchett resent Pitt being prettier whenever they work together?
"He's not too pretty in the beginning of this one!" she jokes.
Blanchett did most of her own dancing in the film, but is quick not to take credit for others' work.
"I obviously didn't do the big series of pirouettes, and there's one leg lift which is not me, but the rest is me. And I went right from that to the Indiana Jones movie, so it was a very physical year. And then I got pregnant! That was surreal.
"Look, I never thought ... I lived and breathed those and the Star Wars films when I was growing up," says the Melbourne native, who played wicked Soviet operative Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. "So to be on set with Spielberg and Lucas and Harrison Ford was strange, like revisiting my childhood. But it was fantastic."
As for that third baby ...
"Ignatius, Iggy," Mom tells us. "He is eight months. He was a surprise. But they've all been surprises. We didn't get married to have children. So when they've popped along it's been 'whoops!' but it's been great."
