Cate Blanchett
The changing face of Armani’s new top model
When Woody Allen was asked what it was like to direct Cate Blanchett in
Blue Jasmine (in itself a measure of her standing – normally actors are asked about working with Allen), he responded: “You just point the camera at her and keep the hell out of the way.”
“That’s so not true,” retorts Blanchett, eyes none the less crinkling with pleasure. “I’m very slow when it comes to embodying the character. That’s why I love the theatre. Without sounding too pretentious, saying someone else’s words – and making them sound like your own – is very complex in the neurolinguistic sense.” This from the woman who’s mastered accents from Dublin to Bronx (South African is the hardest, she says). “Somehow, in the theatre, over six or seven weeks, the language sits in your body and naturally happens. Whereas with film, you don’t always have the time to experiment. That’s why I can honestly say the Sì woman is the hardest character I’ve ever had to play.”
Oh, she’s good. In less than 30 seconds, we’ve gone from neurolinguistics to the commercial for Armani Sì that’s about to hit the world’s screens, in which she stars, without her coming across as pushy. She’s also in the middle of a big junket for Carol, the film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 “lesbian” novel, out this autumn, which she co-produced and in which she gives another barnstorming performance as an upper-middle-class housewife who sacrifices everything to run off with a younger woman, played by Rooney Mara. But between discussing mid-20th century and contemporary mores on sexuality, she’s found time to discuss the impact of cassis and chypre top notes, with light incursions of musk – and, furthermore, to sound engaged and interesting.
We met at the Cannes Film Festival, during which, you may recall, the tabloids gleefully outed Blanchett as a bisexual after she allegedly told a reporter from Variety she had had many relationships with women. “What I actually said was something like, ‘I’ve had many relationships with women, but if you mean sexual relationships, the answer is no.’ Somehow the last bit got left out.” She’s less perturbed by the journalist – “we had a great time” – than by what she calls “the toilet-door nature of the internet”.
She still plays the game, though. It helps that her relationship with Giorgio Armani goes back the best part of a decade. They met in 2006, shortly after she’d been nominated for an Oscar for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator. She wore a bronze Armani Privé column gown to the Oscars the following year, and a jewelled, pale gold Armani Privé dress when she collected her Oscar (her second) for Blue Jasmine in 2014 – the result of Woody Allen’s noninterventionist direction. Also of note: Armani’s generous sponsorship helped Blanchett and her husband of 18 years, writer and director, Andrew Upton, run the Sydney Theatre Company, where they were co-artistic directors from 2008 to 2013.
Cassis and musk appear to have been notably absent from the Uptons’ working environment at STC. “Our office there is open plan – not remotely glamorous. Most of our programme planning happens in the disabled loo. That’s our only private space.” Loos are becoming a leitmotif in this interview. Later, when her entourage come to sweep her away to the evening’s events, she’ll look beseechingly at them and ask if she has time to pee.
Upton is in Cannes somewhere. He was also with her a fortnight earlier for Armani’s 40th anniversary celebrations in Milan. That month was definitely his stint as Mr Blanchett. How have they managed to work together and remain married?
“I know – people look at us in horror. We share an office, an email address – which makes it impossible for him to have an affair, even though I try not to monitor him. Andrew was really the first person I’d met that I could talk to in an uncensored way about everything. He’s incredibly well-read and had this sense that I just do not have – but our eldest son [Dashiell, now 14] has – of reading a script and understanding what’s coming next. Working together with the theatre company was a natural extension of that.”
With Upton’s tenure at STC ending, they’re planning to relocate to America with their three sons and Edith, the tiny daughter they adopted earlier this year. I wonder whether the Australian tabloid press, by all accounts even more rambunctious than the British, has finally driven them away. “It’s true we’re a smaller population so we’ve got fewer people to feed on. But we live in a very private suburb. We know we can go to certain restaurants and parties… It sounds banal, but I love cooking. My little one has gut issues so my latest challenge is to try to cook