Do we like Cate Blanchett?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of refugee advocacy and no harmful words found, but the record on how she treats people day to day is thinner than the public work.
Cate Blanchett was born in Melbourne in 1969, trained at the National Institute of Dramatic Art and graduated in 1992. She cut her teeth on stage with the Sydney Theatre Company, won a newcomer award in 1993, then broke out as Elizabeth I in 1998. From there it was Galadriel, Carol and a pile of Oscar nominations.
The gongs are real: Best Supporting Actress for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, and Best Actress for Blue Jasmine. From 2008 she co-led the Sydney Theatre Company with her husband, Andrew Upton, so she is as much theatre royalty as screen royalty. Not many Oscar winners spend years running a theatre company.
On the harm check, we found nothing nasty. No slide into conspiracies, no culture-war grifting, and no run of films with the usual suspects turned up in what we read. The record is mostly her speaking up for refugees and for women in the industry. Gaps: we found no statements of hers specifically on trans rights, so that is silence, not a pass earned by words.
The refugee work is the headline good deed. She became a UNHCR goodwill ambassador in 2016 and has since visited Rohingya in Bangladesh, Syrians in Lebanon and refugees in Jordan. At Davos in 2018 she criticised political leaders for failing on the refugee crisis, and her voice broke telling the story of a Syrian family she met.
The recent news is mostly her talking. At Cannes in May she said #MeToo “got killed very quickly”, asking why famous people can share their stories while the average woman posting it gets shut down. She also said, as reported, that a problem has to be named before it can be solved. At the same festival she said it was a sad state of affairs that film festivals are the only places people can talk about wars. The National also notes she had signed the Artists4Ceasefire letter calling for an end to violence in Gaza.
The one dent is small and silly. At the Olivier Awards in April a video showed her telling someone off-camera “Stop it” and then making a rude hand gesture. Nobody has said who it was aimed at or why, and she has not commented. Anyone who has dodged a red-carpet photographer will forgive it.