Since Carol premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival, Cate Blanchett has—once again—landed on the Best Actress short list. Her transcendent acting, style, and glowing skin get regular play (expect more as awards season gears up), but what lies beneath the porcelain perfection? Here, five things you may not know about Cate Blanchett.
1. Though Blanchett was born and raised in Australia, her father, Robert, was actually a Texas-born navy man who met Blanchett’s mother, June, after his ship broke down in Melbourne. Robert put himself through night school back in the States and returned to Australia to marry June. When Blanchett was 10 years old, her father died of a heart attack; in 2007, she recalled the day he died in an interview with The New Yorker. “I was playing the piano,” she said. “He walked past the window. I waved goodbye.” Because she didn’t give her father a final hug, Blanchett now cannot leave her home without giving her family members a proper farewell. “I developed this ritual where I couldn’t leave the house until I could actually physically say goodbye to everyone.”
2. Before her Oscar-winning roles, Blanchett’s first claim to fame was a 1990s commercial for the famous Australian cookie Tim Tams. In the television spot, Blanchett plays a woman who frees a genie from a lamp and receives three wishes (sound familiar?), but Blanchett’s cookie-craving character asks only for an unlimited supply of Tim Tams.
3. Blanchett had a blink-and-you-missed-it cameo in 2007’s Hot Fuzz, playing the surgical-masked girlfriend of Simon Pegg. Director Edgar Wright explained how her cameo came to be: “In a weird way, this whole Cate Blanchett thing was sort of a slight kind of joke on that. ‘Let’s get an Oscar winner in there but not see her face.’ And she was totally up for that joke. She loved it.” Not only was Blanchett quite the sport, she even gave her fee to charity. “And this is why Cate Blanchett goes to heaven,” Wright said. “She is one nice lady.”
4. The Australian actress has won two Oscars, but she has broken many more Academy Award records. Blanchett is the only actress in history to be nominated for the same role, playing Elizabeth I in both 1998’s Elizabeth and 2007’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Her Oscar win for portraying Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator made her the first person to win the award for playing another Oscar winner. And her nomination for her role in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, in which she was cast as a Bob Dylan alter ego, also won her a notable distinction: Blanchett was one of three women to have ever been nominated for an Oscar for portraying a man. “I wanted to be him,” Blanchett has said of the singer. “It’s the first time I ever had that feeling. I actually wanted to be Dylan. Ultimately, he just really didn’t care. He’s on his own path.”
5. Blanchett’s playwright husband, Andrew Upton, has an unusual keepsake from her role as the elf queen Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings series: prosthetic ears. “I’m afraid that is true [that Andrew kept the elf ears],” she has said. “They’re not full ears, either—they’re little prosthetic tips that fit on the top of your ears to make the point. But they’re cute—and a bit weird.” Blanchett seems like she has a bit of a soft spot for the props, too. “But, to be honest, I basically did [Lord of the Rings] so that I could have the ears,” she once joked with The Guardian. “I thought they would really work with my bare head.”
