Cate Blanchett (Actor)

"Cate has this slightly magic quality, as if she can be transported into other worlds." - director Gillian Armstrong to The New York Times, Dec. 28, 1997

"Film just chews up actors like nobody's business, and I'm not particularly interested in being chewed up. I think the camera can only look at somebody's face for so long. I guess you have to accept the roles you think are right at the time. You CAN build a career, but these days there doesn't seem to be much interest in people being actors. I'm sounding very holier than thou, but I sometimes think the whole thing is like one big commercial. I can't seem to separate the ideas from the images. Maybe I shouldn't be trying. But you do want people to remember the films you do for longer than the time it takes them to eat their popcorn." - Cate Blanchett in Interview, January 1998

"Go on. Say it. I've looked ugly. That's O.K. The greatest compliment I think I've ever had was when another actor said I had an 'actor's face'. There's a line in the Botho Strauss play 'Big and Little' where it describes a character as 'a woman... not old, not young,' and I hope that I'm a woman, not ugly, not beautiful. I'm as vain as the next person, let's face it, but it's really important to try to shed that vanity. I'm not opposed to looking what is commonly termed as ugly." - Blanchett quoted in Vanity Fair, March 1999.

"I almost don't know what a character is until six months after I finish playing it." - Cate Blanchett quoted at the Web magazine Urban Cinefile (www.urbancinefile.com.au), Feb. 9, 2000

"I like to do things I've never done before," she says. "I like things to be tough because then you've got to nut out a way of doing them. It's like rally driving: you kind of know where you're going but you don't really. And the bigger and more diverse you body of work, the more adept you become at tackling new things, the more you have at your fingertips." - Blanchett quoted to Empire magazine, December 2007

"I'll see an extraordinary performance by a woman and it's reduced to the word 'luminous', it does piss me off. I read a review of Kate Winslet in 'Hideous Kinky', and it said she looked ravishing; it didn't even talk about her [acting]." - Blanchett on how critics evaluate actresses to Premiere, March 1999

"I'm very interested in the ephemerality of the theater. It's like falling in love, really. People talk about those gossamer days when they first met the love of their life. I think the same thing happens in theater. Each night 300 or 400 or 500 people are going to see something that's only going to happen once. It's a bit like a cloudscape, it's never exactly the same." - Blanchett quoted in The Boston Globe, Nov. 15, 1998

"It's really important to me as an actor that I try to rise to a part and not reduce it down to me. Obviously I agree with [David] Mamet. You never want to lose yourself in a role. I'm interested in doing someone who is bigger than me." - Cate Blanchett quoted in The Chicago Sun-Times Nov. 15, 1998

"People always treat me like I'm being coy or untruthful if I say there's no grand plan, that acting is just an interesting thing that I found myself doing. It's not an end point." - Blanchett to The Guardian, Dec. 1, 2000

"She is, without question, one of the best actresses of her generation. And when I say best I mean that she is someone who could play anything. I could give her any character, and she could do it. She can transform. Besides having an incredible quality on camera, a real unusual beauty, she is very intelligent and has great emotional depth. But she could also play a really dumb broad, too." - director Gillian Armstrong quoted in The New York Times, Dec. 24, 2000

"She's so fantastic. She reacts to small instructions, works in fine brush strokes. If you say, 'Can you adjust this performance?' she'll be able to do it in degrees, 5%, 10%, each take is just a little different, She's the most finely tuned actress I've ever worked with." - "Elizabeth" director Shekhar Kapur quoted in The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 6, 1998

"The older I've become, I'm much less self-involved. I wince when I think about myself in my early twenties." - Blanchett to Premiere magazine, October 2006

"Theater is a space where you cross over from everyday life, because there are real people in that moment moving in front of you." - Blanchett quoted to Esquire magazine, January 2009

"When she does speak, there's that remarkable voice, silky on the surface but drawn downward as well, primed for her sudden dives into a rich, dark lower register. Blanchett is fluent when talking about the nuts and bolts of acting, never once drifting into ditsy actor speak about 'getting centered'" - From "Cate Blanchett's Pale Fire" by Laura Jacobs, Vanity Fair, March 1999