AS SHE GRACES THE RED CARPET IN LONDON CATE BLANCHETT ON HER LATEST FASCINATING ROLES AND HOW FAME HAS SHAPED HER WORK

When Cate Blanchett started out as an actress, she found it hard to get work. In the words of the Academy Award winner, she "couldn't get arrested", instead only finding employment by helping out at auditions.

- VICKY DEARDEN

"When I first came out of drama school, I didn't work like a lot of my counterparts. But someone who ran one of the biggest casting agencies took a shine to me and asked me to come in and be a reader opposite people who were auditioning," she recalls.

"I couldn't get arrested as an actor. And I was weird-looking; no one knew what to do with me. So, I would go in three or four times a week and spend three or four hours reading." The Australian-born star's luck soon changed and she landed her first film role in Paradise Road in 1997, before her international breakthrough the following year, playing Queen Elizabeth I in period drama Elizabeth.

Now one of Hollywood's leading ladies, the actress is starring in comedy-drama Rumours opposite Charles Dance and in the Apple TV+ miniseries Disclaimer with Kevin Kline and Sacha Baron Cohen.

In Rumours, Cate plays a German chancellor among heads of state who find themselves lost in the woods following a G7 summit, while Disclaimer casts her as a filmmaker whose life is turned upside down when she's given a selfpublished novel that is clearly about her own life.

Despite the vast differences in her latest roles, Cate, 55, says she relished the challenge. "I think I run on instinct as if it were gasoline. I think it's just timing: doing what comes up at the time.