Cate’s Blanche
Ullmann, Blanchett team up to present Williams’ ‘Streetcar’
Published: November 13, 2009, 12:30 am
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WASHINGTON — It was a theatrical convergence of three continents. Over lunch in London, the actress from Australia and the actress from Norway decided they had to find a way under the skin of the neurotic belle from the American South.
At that meal, Cate Blanchett and Liv Ullmann sketched out the beginnings of their assault on Blanche DuBois, the high-strung butterfly of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Ullmann, ethereal star of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” and “Cries and Whispers,” by now a director, had wanted Oscar-winner Blanchett for the role of Nora in a film version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”
But the money could not be raised, and now they turned their thoughts to Tennessee Williams and the stage. Which was fortunate, because Blanchett was running a major theater company back in Sydney, with her husband, writer-director Andrew Upton.
“Liv got really excited about that,” Blanchett is recalling over lunch recently at the Kennedy Center, where the U. S. premiere of Sydney Theatre Company’s “Streetcar,” directed by Ullmann and starring Blanchett, began performances on Thursday. “It’s really great when an idea creeps up on you from behind, and particularly with a play like this.”
Haughty, needy, broken Blanche is one of those potentially breath-stopping career markers for a great actress, a role that originally belonged on Broadway to Jessica Tandy and in film to Vivian Leigh, and has been assayed to varying degrees by star actresses ever since “Streetcar’s” 1947 debut. Uta Hagen, Blythe Danner, Jessica Lange and Natasha Richardson all gave Blanche a go on Broadway; five years ago, Patricia Clarkson played her at the Kennedy Center. This summer, Rachel Weisz slipped into the role at London’s Donmar Warehouse.
Now Blanchett, 40, super-model- svelte and creamily complected, is taking her turn. That audiences are eager to see an actress whose adventurous range has been on display in her breakout turns in “Oscar and Lucinda” and “Elizabeth” is borne out by the box office. With Blanchett as the only marquee name in the Australian cast, the entire 24-performance run of “Streetcar” sold out weeks ago. (The production heads to New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music where it will run from Nov. 27 through Dec. 20.)
For all her cerebral glamour, her renown for roles in movies as varied as “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “The Aviator” — the last one earning her an Academy Award — Blanchett is actually a theater kid. Maybe even a theater nerd.
From the time she left Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art and was cast in the Sydney Theatre Company production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna” opposite Geoffrey Rush, she has maintained a stage life.
Now, she has added the role of co-artistic director of Australia’s largest theater company, whose 2010 season she formulated with Upton includes a whopping 15 productions in three theaters.
If the actress is sometimes regarded as a bit aloof, that isn’t the impression she gives on this occasion. True, she’s not disposed to small talk like the beautiful, 71-year-old Ullmann, who comes into a room and immediately launches into stories.
What Blanchett projects is the earnest mien of serious business. Intelligent and congenial, she repeatedly lapses into Artistspeak, invoking phrases about her job such as “diverse array of work” and “very collaborative in terms of process” and “inward conundrums.” She tends to answer questions about herself elliptically; the closest she comes to revealing something personal is to say she is “quite solitary.”
Of her status as one of the world’s most in-demand actresses of quality, she’s entirely philosophical.
“Look, it’s timing and luck,” she says. “I was in the theater and very happy working in the theater and of course, it’s the ‘taxi’ measure of success, isn’t it? You get, ‘Oh, you’re an actor, what films have you been in?’ And if they don’t know anything you’ve done you somehow feel by the end of the taxi ride your life is worthless and meaningless. . . . It’s such an intangible profession and we live in such a tangible world that you can often feel that what you do is of little value. And so I suppose success of one kind externally reminds you that perhaps it does have a small value.”
She can be sure the world will pay attention to her Blanche, whose war with her brutish brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski is one of the most harrowing battles American drama has ever conjured.
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