None of this is to say that Blanchett, the 41-year-old daughter of a Melbourne teacher and a U.S. Navy officer, is aloof. In person her beauty is more fragile than the strong planes of her face on film suggest, with crinkles appearing around her eyes as she speaks. During lunch on the Berlin set of W’s photo shoot, she distractedly begins scooping up chicken and salad with her hands, then wiping them on her white bathrobe. Later I catch the actress dipping her finger into someone else’s cappuccino and licking off the foam. She is careful with her words rather than withholding, but the caution falls away when talking about life with her three little boys: Dashiell, eight; Roman, six; and Ignatius, two, who goes by Iggy. “Everyone says, ‘Oh, you must have [been trying] to have a girl,’” she says, adding that she’s open to having another child, regardless of gender. “If the next one was a boy, then that’s just our lot! It’s true you do get a bit demented [with three boys].” But, she adds, “the chaos of it is great.”
Chaos is precisely what ensues when the uniformly blond Dash, Roman and Iggy, adorably clad in matching striped shirts and Uggs, show up at the shoot: Christian Louboutins become weapons, costume jewels that are nevertheless pricey become toys, and a mischievous Roman sucks down a bottle of juice in record time before bellowing with glee, “I’m feeling hy-per!” None of the boys seem the least bit fazed by the sight of their heavily made-up mother, her narrow Ichabod Crane frame towering atop terrifyingly tall platform heels and poured into a dramatic Etro kimono. Ullmann recalls that Blanchett often had her sons with her during the Streetcar tour and would tend to them at every break in the play’s action in the cramped backstage of BAM, where Blanchett had volunteered to share a dressing room with two male costars to alleviate space constraints. “Some people would have their kids come once and make a big thing of it, but that’s not her,” says Ullmann. “Actors are dramatic, and they like to make drama of their own lives. Not Cate.” Not even during a performance of Streetcar in Sydney when she was accidentally hit in the head with a prop, an incident that left her a gory mess. “She was very bloody, and we had to stop the show for insurance reasons, but she was laughing,” Ullmann says. “She wanted to keep going, in spite of the blood all over her costume.”
Although she’s most famous for her work alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Russell Crowe, among others—and has nice things to say about them all, of course—Blanchett reserves her most passionate praise for a decidedly non–Us Weekly crowd. “It would have to be Geoffrey Rush,” she says of her collaborator in film (the Elizabeth movies) and onstage (in Oleanna and Hamlet, both before her movie career took off) when asked about the costar who had made the biggest impression on her as an actress. “But also Hugo Weaving. And then the incredible experience with Judi. And it was also amazing to work with Max von Sydow. And John Turturro—”
