Cate Blanchett

Much like the country she comes from, Australian actress Cate Blanchett has a fierce but far from conventional beauty. On-screen she is anchored by a still center that hints at a passionate heart, an independent mind, and a serene soul - qualities that have given a decidedly modern edge to the period characters she has so far played. They're apparently part of her own makeup. "She was totally natural and at ease with herself," Ralph Finness says of his costar in this month's Oscar and Lucinda. "She was also quietly perceptive, with a great sense of humor."

By virtue of her work in small but significant films, Blanchett has rapidly graduated from being a blip on casting directors' radar screens. She was an earthy nurse in Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road, and opposite Fiennes' English minister in Oscar, she plays an heiress who becomes obsessed with gambling in 1860s Australia. She next scored a career coup by winning the role of the Virgin Queen herself in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth, which she was filming in London when I called.

KITTY BOWE HEARTY: Oscar and Lucinda must seem a long way away and a long time ago for you now.

CATE BLANCHETT: Yes. I've been working on Elizabeth for months. We've got three more weeks. I've been incredibly homesick.

KBH: Where exactly is home?

CB: Sydney, though I grew up in Melbourne.

KBH: Oscar and Lucinda has enormous emotional energy. I particularly remember that scene where Oscar and Lucinda are gambling for the first time on the ship. It really crackles between you.

CB: There's a lot of static electricity, I think, between the two character, which is kind of different from chemistry.

KBH: How do you mean?

CB: Because they don't get together for so long, and they're together for such a short amount of time, which is their tragedy. it's a corny phrase, but they were ships in the night - their hands just brushed in time. The sparks fly, but it's like static: it's not like the normal sexual tension that you see between lovers on-screen, which is one of the reasons I thought it was such an interesting relationship. That tension had a lot to do with Gill [Oscar and Lucinda director Gillian Armstrong], who's so specific about everything. From the beginning, if she thought something was superfluous, she would say to us. "Throw it away, throw it away, this has to be completely separate and unique."

KBH: Did you still feel you were able to develop Lucinda in terms of you?

CB: I hope so. But it's very hard for me to judge. It was great having Peter Carey's novel as well as the script to rely on, because it meant the internal mechanics of the character were there for me to soak up. [Carey] writes incredible, often obtuse details that you would never think of yourself. I snuck in midnight readings of the book and didn't tell Gill. When you're creating a character, you draw on anything. Cornflake packets . . .

I see Lucinda as someone who's definitely reaching forward but there's nowhere for her emotion to go. Peter wrote about the sensation she had sitting inside a corset, which he described as a "crinoline cage." That's such a metaphor for how she exists in the world: She keeps banging into things, and doesn't know why she keeps bruising herself. She meets Oscar, who's got no skin on his emotions and no skin on his bones - Ralph lost quite a lot of weight for the part: he was a stick insect. Really isolated people don't develop skin the same way that people who are more socialized do.

KBH: Were you nervous at the thought of working with Ralph?

CB: I tend to have this perverse reaction to authority and stress: I become more confident and clear when a challenge is enormous. I was so completely overwhelmed at the thought of acting opposite this extraordinary actor that I wasn't overwhelmed. When I think back, I go, How did I ever come at that?

KBH: They tested a lot of actresses for Lucinda. Do you know why they chose you?

CB: I have to disappoint you, but I don't think I can answer. I like to think it's because I was the right person. They certainly did look around, and it was a coveted role. You just had to mention Ralph and Gill and everybody everywhere wanted to be on that wagon. Gill was adamant about having an Australian play the Australian character [Lucinda]. That she was able to make that demand, and realize it, shows how strong our film industry is at the moment.

KBH: Do you think being Australian has always been a struggle - the result of your pioneer origins?

CB: It was completely savage back then. There were no amenities. It was when all the institutions as we know them today were still being founded. There were no precedents, and the culture was completely borrowed. You look at the topography of the place and think, How could people land here and expect to institute the same laws, the same philosophies, in a country that was so completely alien? Which is what Oscar and Lucinda explores, I think. It's like Oscar goes into the wilderness and it eats up his whole moral code and his whole belief system. That's what Australia did to the settlers.