Oscar nominee Cate Blanchett on mum guilt and ‘saying no’ to projects

She’s tipped to become the fifth actress in history to win three or more Oscars at tonight’s ceremony, but for Cate Blanchett, her Hollywood career has come at a cost.

The star recently laid bare the huge sacrifices she made for her most powerful – and controversial – role to date in psychological drama Tár. She had to live apart from her husband, Andrew Upton, 57, and their “extraordinary children” while she filmed in Asia and Berlin for more than two months.

“My daughter was there in Berlin, but I was away from my husband and other three children for quite a while, so it was very painful,” says Cate, who admits her life is a “constant juggle between following your personal, professional passion and trying to serve your family”.

The “mum guilt” weighs so heavily on her shoulders that the 53-year-old actress is now prepared to step back from the career that has made her an international superstar.

“It’s not occasional – it’s continual,” she says as she contemplates her feelings about an early retirement. “On a daily or weekly basis, for sure. I just said no to a couple of things. I think it’s time to be quiet.”

From attending drama school in her native Australia to her Hollywood breakout in 1998’s Elizabeth and Oscar-winning successes as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator and Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, it’s easy to forget that Cate has managed to sustain her career while raising four children.

She met Australian screenwriter and playwright Andrew in 1996 and at first found him arrogant and aloof. But only three weeks after their first date Andrew proposed and, in December 1997, they were married
at the scenic Blue Mountains National Park in New South Wales, Australia.

After welcoming three boys, Dashiell, 21, Roman, 18, and Ignatius, 14, Cate and Andrew adopted a newborn baby girl in 2015 and named her Edith.

“There are a lot of children out there who don’t have the good fortune that our biological children do, so it’s wonderful to welcome a little girl into our fold – we’re besotted,” Cate said at the time.

The star currently divides her life between Los Angeles, where she mostly works, Australia, and rural Sussex, where she lives in a seven-bedroom country pile with her family. Like many parents, she went to great lengths to homeschool her brood during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“My older kids were fine, they would sort of self-direct, but I had to [teach] my seven-year-old, and I realised that I couldn’t even teach her grade one math,” she recalls. “She sniffed that out after 14 days and I was a dead duck. There was no respect there. I had to dress up as her teacher, I had to put on her teacher’s voice and she wouldn’t start the classes until we had a full array of stuffed animals – they had the names of the people in her class.”

Her fondness for the quiet life in Crowborough comes largely down to the “sense of anonymity” it provides for her children. And despite her star status, Cate says her own fame still surprises her.

“There is so much to do in the world and I have learned over the years to just focus on the task at hand, so if someone in the supermarket taps me on the shoulder, I’m always surprised by it,” she admits.

Self-deprecation aside, Cate is more in demand than ever. She is also favourite to win the Best Actress gong at the Academy Awards, where she is up against Ana de Armas, Andrea Riseborough, Michelle Williams and Michelle Yeoh.

In Tár – which director Todd Field wrote specifically for her, insisting he wouldn’t have made the film had she not played the part – she stars as fictional classical conductor Lydia Tár, a complicated genius who’s facing misconduct accusations.

Cate calls the film the most “all-consuming, life-affirming” project she’s ever been a part of and is still unpacking the impact it had on her. In preparation for filming, Todd explained in awe how Cate “did something I have never seen any other actor do: she memorised the entire script – her lines, everyone else’s lines, even the script references. She did a deep dive”.

He added, “I think she is one of the greatest practitioners of the art that has ever lived.”

Cate also learned German, took piano lessons, studied online masterclasses by the great Soviet conductor Ilya Musin, and sought out as many performances of Mahler’s Fifth – a piece of music that plays a prominent role in Tár – as she could.

While the film has been hailed as a masterpiece by many, it has also been hit with a lot of controversy. Its themes touch on cancel culture and the #MeToo movement through the portrayal of a powerful woman who is a bully and possibly a sexual exploiter of a series of young women.

“Well, for me personally, the world in which we live is monstrous,” says Cate. “It enables, invites and often enshrines and rewards monstrous behaviour.

“It’s very easy to say she is monstrous, but the film is much more ambiguous than that. It begins with a close up, not on a person, but on a mobile phone, an instrument of easy opinion and gossip as well as information. I’m not demonising it entirely, but that is the world in which we live.

“The character, on the other hand, is enigmatic. In a way, I felt that I was playing a state of being, or a set of atmospheres, as much as I was playing a person.”

As Cate attempts to dial down her day job and take on less – she says, “Now I say when are they shooting and how long for? It used to be who’s directing?” – would she consider a permanent move back to the motherland, where she recently filmed and co-produced Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy?

“We went to visit friends in Tasmania,” she says. “It had just rained and the sun came out, and suddenly there was the smell of the earth and the smell of eucalyptus. I just wept. I’m so deeply connected to that place.

“But we are in England and the kids go to school there and we are about to plant some trees.

“And our cat died – and once you bury a cat on the land where you live, you are connected. So, I’m torn.”

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