20. Pushing Tin (1999)
Cate Blanchett played a pretty generic “wife” role in this interesting, somewhat forgotten US comedy about air traffic controllers from director Mike Newell, whose title is their slang for guiding planes. It was saddled with a terrible ending by its screenwriters, Glen and Les Charles (creators of TV’s Cheers), and blitzed at the box office by The Matrix. Its genesis is amusingly described by its producer, Art Linson, in his memoir What Just Happened? Blanchett plays the wife of hotshot young air traffic controller John Cusack, who has an affair with Angelina Jolie – who is married to Cusack’s workplace rival, Billy Bob Thornton.
19. Robin Hood (2010)
Blanchett brings out a sturdy, unshowy north country accent as Marian (nothing so quaint or sexually naive as “Maid” Marian) – a plausibly tough and capable love interest for Russell Crowe as Robin, whose own accent in this film notoriously ranged across the British Isles. She has long, glistening locks and a martial attitude – but, like the sheriff of Nottingham, her character is not allowed to upstage Russell’s Robin in any way. There’s not much for Blanchett to get her teeth into in Ridley Scott’s film, and it’s an example of how her distinctive, severely patrician beauty sometimes got her typecast in mannish or off-kilter roles.
18. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004)
For Wes Anderson, Blanchett played a terribly grand British magazine writer – mischievously named Jane Winslett-Richardson – whose commission is to write an in-depth piece about star oceanographer Steve Zissou (played by Bill Murray) and his latest maritime adventure. Zissou of course develops a tendresse for her. Effectively, she plays the droll and exquisite unworldly thoroughbred role that Anderson was later to give to Tilda Swinton; perhaps Blanchett did not find the idea of being an Anderson repertory player congenial enough to continue – but she carries it off well here.
17. Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
One of the interesting portmanteau-type movies that Blanchett has made. Jim Jarmusch’s indulgent, doodling sketch of a film has big-name cameos in quirky one-on-one encounters with other big-name cameos. Easily the best is Blanchett meeting Blanchett: she plays herself meeting a cousin (played by herself) for coffee, and this relative is fascinated and envious of Cate’s alpha-celeb lifestyle. It’s a minor film in her repertoire, but a revealing glimpse of what it might well have been like for Blanchett having to deal diplomatically with people who can’t quite get over what a big deal she is.
16. Rumours (2024)
Blanchett can do funny – but is rarely allowed to do so. When she is, the results can be impressive and sometimes even sensational. (See Steve Zissou and Blue Jasmine.) Here, in Guy Maddin’s rarefied absurdist comedy of euro-political breakdown, she plays a German chancellor of Merkelesque seriousness and studied hostess-like charm. She presides over a G7 summit in Germany, dealing with some unspecified crisis, and has to shepherd everyone into signing up to a bland communique that will not commit them to any action (and, meanwhile, the world is coming to an end). Not quite humour with a light touch, but Blanchett gives it class.
15. Notes on a Scandal (2006)
Blanchett is rarely upstaged in any movie, though she had to resign herself to being outshone by Judi Dench on her best-ever big-screen form in this delicious psychological thriller. However, Blanchett handles the subordinate role with typical style. She is Sheba, a new art teacher at a state school with liberal-patrician attitudes, who wafts entrancingly about the place and doesn’t need a teacher’s salary. All her colleagues love her, except the pursed-lipped Barbara (Dench), whose reaction is more parasitically envious fascination that evolves into a delusion of friendship. Blanchett’s Sheba must submit to sexual blackmail and finally disgrace, but rises above her ordeal in a way that the more culpable Barbara cannot.
14. Lord of the Rings series (2001-2003)
Blanchett played Galadriel, queen of the elves, in all three movies of Peter Jackson’s mighty Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it is her voiceover at the beginning that tells us about the mythology of the ring. She is ethereal, blond, queenly and otherworldly, with pointy ears – an interesting caricature of the exotically blue-blooded and at times almost extraterrestrial classiness that Blanchett brings to the movies. She also has a very intense emotional relationship with Ian McKellen’s grey-bearded icon Gandalf.
13. The New Boy (2023)
It was always on the cards that Blanchett would have to play a cantankerous and scary nun at least once in her career, and she gets it under her belt here, in Warwick Thornton’s weirdly mystical drama set in an orphanage in the 1940s Australian outback. She gives it the full wimple as a fiercely authoritarian nun, Sister Eileen, who runs her remote institution with a rod of iron and has covered up the death of a senior male cleric, faking his signature so she has full control – and then has a crisis with the arrival of an Indigenous youth she calls “New Boy”. A huge performance from Blanchett, perhaps overpowering the film itself.
12. Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
This Marvel movie from Taika Waititi is a winning comedy in which Blanchett shows she gets the joke as well as anyone else. In days of old, she might have guested on The Morecambe & Wise show, like Glenda Jackson. Here she plays Hela, the goddess of death, tricked out with evil antlers and black garb, like a mirror-image version of Tolkien’s Galadriel. Hela is the sister of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and she is absolutely hilarious, playing it straight but with a twinkle in the eye: it makes you long for Blanchett to appear in panto.
11. Little Fish (2005)
A valuable, complex and difficult film in the Blanchett canon, which deserves to be better known. She plays against type as a loser in the game of life: Tracy Heart, a former heroin addict living in a blue-collar Sydney suburb, always teetering on the brink of using again. Heart is desperately trying for a respectable life but keeps getting dragged down by her stepfather (Hugo Weaving), who is still an addict, and her ex (Dustin Nguyen), who is now a dealer. Blanchett is tough, forthright and in command of the screen, perhaps unconsciously elevating her character.
10. The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)
One of Blanchett’s most alluring early roles: the super-rich, dizzily naive, young Meredith Logue, taking a trip from the US to Europe on a first-class liner and bumping into the plausible low-born conman Ripley (Matt Damon), who road-tests his impersonation of the wealthy Dickie on her before he has to do it for real. Meredith breezily waves away the absurd trappings of inherited wealth – claiming to be “only comfortable around people who have money and despise it”. An unusually absurd figure for Blanchett to play, the epitome of the vain and insecure rich whose delusions make Ripley’s crimes possible.
9. The Man Who Cried (2000)
Another rich and tasty early role for Blanchett, who showed movie audiences what an extraordinarily seductive and expressive face she had in closeup. Always pushing at the boundaries of theatricality and self-parody, Blanchett plays Lola, a Russian dancer in interwar Paris; she befriends the young immigrant Suzie (Christina Ricci) while pursuing a Sally Bowles lifestyle, yearning for a rich protector of her own. It’s a role she puts over with terrific brio and wit.
8. Elizabeth (1998)
Playing Queen Elizabeth I in her early years, this was the film that made Blanchett an above-the-title star and set the blue-chip, blue-blood style of her screen career ever since: the queen of the screen but with the heart and stomach of a king. It’s a tough, cerebrally complex account of court intrigue (and the film is far superior to the 2007 follow-up, Elizabeth: The Golden Age), which tracks Elizabeth’s ascent from vulnerable princess and insecure young monarch to iconic Virgin Queen.
7. Manifesto (2015)
One of Blanchett’s most audacious and radical screen adventures – and something to show that Tilda Swinton isn’t Hollywood’s only experimentalist and patron muse. Working with artist and film-maker Julian Rosefeldt, Blanchett creates a movie-installation crossover piece – and another of her portmanteau films. She appears as a number of different personae, all mesmerically and slightly scarily addressing the camera, declaiming philosophical manifestos by the likes of Karl Marx, Guy Debord and Tristan Tzara, and haranguing the audience to wake up to the possibilities of art. An exhilarating multi-performance.
6. The Aviator (2004)
An Oscar for best supporting actress was Blanchett’s reward for one of her funniest and most attractive performances – as Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, with whom the gauche multimillionare Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) falls in love. It took some nerve to impersonate Hepburn, but Blanchett succeeds, in the process absorbing some of her prestige: delivering the drawling Bryn Mawr vowels, the Yankee boho patrician elegance and the frank sexuality.
5. I’m Not There (2007)
Todd Haynes’s multiple-personality gallery of Bob Dylans was an intriguing buffet of interpretations by actors like Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin. But everyone was blown out of the water by the extraordinarily funny and convincing impersonation by Blanchett: a stylised, theatrical but still beautifully observed rendition with frizzy hair and dark glasses – Blanchett is playing the Dylan that did the “Judas” tour of England. It was a reimagining of the musician that Blanchett conceived with sympathy and wit, a turn with the vigour of pure comedy but the force of high drama.
4. Nightmare Alley (2021)
This freaky noir melodrama from Guillermo del Toro gave us Blanchett in full Veronica Lake mode: she is wonderful as the shady lady with secrets, sophistication and dark sexual power. She plays Lilith Ritter, a fashionable psychoanalyst in 1930s America, with a curtain of peroxide hair, a vivid slash of lipstick, a palatial art deco consulting room and a super-rich client list. Ritter is intrigued to come into contact with Bradley Cooper’s cheesy nightclub mind-reader Stan, sensing perhaps that he is in the same business as she is, and also feeling attracted to him. It’s another classically theatrical bravura performance.
3. Carol (2015)
This was the movie that showed us Blanchett’s ability to inhabit a character who is grand, haughty, but aware of her own vulnerability – a weakness for beauty – and also self-dramatisingly aware that this is a flaw with something tragically magnificent in it. In this adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel, she is the unhappy divorcing woman, Carol, who is struck by a coup de foudre on meeting Therese (Rooney Mara), a gamine and beautiful young store assistant, and falls in love with her at that moment. Later, they will have an exploratory lunch in which every moment is erotically charged with promise and in which Blanchett’s Carol is thrillingly dominant.
2. Blue Jasmine (2013)
Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine is a tragicomedy of a woman’s social descent, whose resemblance to Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire the director always denied. Blanchett plays Jasmine, a former Manhattan socialite and Park Avenue princess who, divorced and broke, has come to stay with her resentful sister in her modest apartment. She dreams of finding a way back into the broad sunlit uplands of wealth and social standing, from which she feels she has been unfairly exiled. Jasmine talks, talks, talks, believing herself capable of charming her way back in, building magic bridges to prosperity in the air – but she is actually gabbling, monologuing, and becoming embittered and crazy. This won Blanchett a best actress Oscar.
1. Tár (2022)
Here is the most extravagantly haughty and magnificently mad of all Blanchett’s creations on screen: the orchestra conductor Lydia Tár at a Berlin orchestra, a former protege of Leonard Bernstein. Her rock-star prestige and queenly conceit mean that she cannot acknowledge the midlife crisis or crackup that is heading her way, preferring to see it as an imminent epiphany or breakthrough. She is using the mentorship programme for young musicians as a way of pursuing affairs: she is arrogant and cruel – humiliating a bumptious student for presuming to criticise Bach on political grounds, and then terrorising a tiny child outside her daughter’s primary school. The role of Tár brings out the strangely mannish side to Blanchett’s sensuality, her intelligence and breeding, but with a black-comic self-awareness. There could be something Wagnerian in Tár’s lordly deployment of power, although it is Elgar’s Cello Concerto that unlocks her derangement, finally culminating in an unthinkable scene on the conductor’s podium. With the baton in her hand, arms flung out, she is crucified by her own passion and dedication.
• Black Bag is released on 14 March. The Seagull is at the Barbican, London, from 26 February to 5 April.
