Queen Cate

Cate Blanchett wasn’t adverse to playing Queen Elizabeth I again. You don’t, after all, reject out of hand the chance to reprise a role that won you an Oscar nomination and established your movie career.
But when she drove to the Hotel Bel Air two years ago to meet with actor Geoffrey Rush and Elizabeth director Shekhar Kapur, Blanchett needed a reason why she should make a sequel because, frankly, Blanchett doubted she had anything more to offer Elizabeth as an actress.
As Kapur remembers it, he was immediately struck with Blanchett’s appearance.
“I hadn’t seen her for several months, she was looking so beautiful,” Kapur says. “I finally said, ‘Cate, you’ve never looked so stunning in your life.’ And that was all I said. Geoffrey did all the heavy lifting.”
That “heavy lifting” involved laying out the sequel’s story of a monarch choosing divine apartness over human emotions. It also involved a bit of candour, with Rush telling Blanchett not to be so precious about picking roles.
“You’re getting older,” Rush told her. “Parts like this won’t be offered to you forever.”
Blanchett, 38, wasn’t exactly moved by Rush’s reasoning. “I’ve had a pretty good time creatively since Elizabeth,” she says, offering a resume that includes an Oscar for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator and choice roles in movies like Notes on a Scandal and Babel. “A career is born of what you do with the opportunities that present themselves.”
In the end, what convinced Blanchett to play Elizabeth was that enough time had passed for her to play the Virgin Queen in a different way, as a monarch confronting the passage of time and a woman hearing the ticking of her biological clock.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age takes place 10 years after the events in the first movie, which ended with a powder-faced Elizabeth leaving behind her carefree youth and assuming the reserved role of a worshipped monarch.
Blanchett’s Elizabeth falls in love with the dashing explorer Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), knowing her feelings must be denied. There are plots against her, alliances offered through marriage and a nutty Catholic king, Spain’s Philip II, intent on waging a holy war against the Protestant Elizabeth.
“When I finished filming the first movie, I realised it had become an examination of power in the context of squashing of your inner being,” Kapur says. “Now, I wanted to talk about the conflict between wanting children, wanting sexuality and then having to let go. And realising the only way to do it was to become divine.”
“Both films are unabashedly romantic and melodramatic. And that won’t be everybody’s bag,” says Blanchett.
Blanchett doesn’t fully buy into Kapur’s comparisons between Elizabeth and another isolated royal, Princess Diana. Kapur says both women were viewed as divine by their subjects, and that worship both empowered and imprisoned them. He thought about Diana often while making the movie.
“There is a connection, but only tangentially,” Blanchett says. “For someone who is isolated, the public becomes an important part of who they are. But it’s all supposition in the end, isn’t it?”
As is speculation that Blanchett will play Elizabeth again in a third film that will chronicle the queen’s final years. Kapur wants to complete what he envisions as a trilogy of movies examining power. What happens when the divine becomes mortal? That’s the question he says the third film would ask.
“There is that great story of Elizabeth standing for 12, 18 hours in front of a window before she died,” Blanchett says. “That level of control, that kind of will power … it’s astounding. What was she thinking?”
Blanchett pauses, considering the question. “I have to admit,” she says finally, “it would be a great scene to play.”
-GLENN WHIPP