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NEW YORK -- For Cate Blanchett, multitasking is as natural as breathing. Given her schedule of late, she should be gasping.
Tonight, she's up for a Golden Globe for her supporting role in Notes on a Scandal.
Days before she flew to the States for PR duty for her latest film releases (she has three movies in theaters), the Australian actress and her husband, writer Andrew Upton, just celebrated the premiere of their directorial double bill at the Sydney Theatre Company, where Blanchett got her start on stage 13 years ago.
She directed Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska; he did David Mamet's Reunion. The reception? Mostly positive. Or as she self-deprecatingly puts it, "No catcalls."
It is just a prelude to when she and Upton will take over as co-artistic directors of the company starting in 2008. As part of the three-year contract, she will be allowed three months a year to devote to acting pursuits.
"People are saying, 'Oh, you aren't going to act anymore?' I say, 'Of course I am,'" both on stage and on screen. As for why she seized the opportunity when so many choice movie scripts are coming her way, she says, "It's the most extraordinary offer my husband and I have had in our lives."
Then there are her sons, Dashiell, 5, and Roman, 2, who should be waking up any time now back home. She insists on placing a call to them this afternoon, cutting short an interview.
As if she weren't busy enough, Blanchett is frantically doodling heavily lashed eyeballs, random words ("supreme" and "Darfur") and whimsical shapes as she speaks about her latest round of diverse film roles.
An American tourist accidentally shot in Morocco in Babel. An embittered Teutonic courtesan selling body and soul to survive in The Good German. A flighty British art teacher who heedlessly beds a teen student and suffers shattering consequences in Notes on a Scandal, the source of her fifth Golden Globe nomination.
Scandal's central fling with an underage youth did cause her some concern. "I became so puritanical about it," Blanchett says about her insistence that her co-star, Irish newcomer Andrew Simpson, 18 this month, and his parents understood what was involved. "But he was really precocious and quite up to the challenge. I was the one who was incredibly uncomfortable about it."
The only common thread in Blanchett's roles seems to be that the word "Oscar" is mentioned whenever they are discussed.
"Maybe it's because they insist on releasing everything in December," says the actress, 37, stooping to a common-sense reason as for why the O-word is a constant in her career. Talent might be a factor, too.
The willowy blonde with the blazing blue eyes already has an Academy Award to call her own after winning a supporting honor for her fearless take on the great Katharine Hepburn in 2004's The Aviator. Still, there is a chance she could earn a berth in both lead and supporting categories in this year's race.
Asked if she desires more, the queen of the elves in the Lord of the Rings trilogy inquires with Gollum-like intensity, "You mean, am I going to get greedy?"
Actually, awards are about the last thing that would inspire her.
"I wasn't setting out to win one in the first place. It is fantastic to win one for that role, however, because I thought it was a career killer," she says of tackling the revered actress Hepburn without doing a parody. She credits director Martin Scorsese "and a great script."
Challenges get her thespian blood pumping, especially those with accents attached. She has been regally British in Elizabeth, broadly New Jersey in Pushing Tin, psychically Southern in The Gift, fightingly Irish in Veronica Guerin. Blanchett can only focus on those native tongues she has yet to conquer: "Spanish and Vietnamese."
Even while embodying unhappy characters, there is a palatable joy about Blanchett as she voraciously digs into her disparate parts as if they were a banquet of rich desserts. She doesn't like to repeat herself. Yes, she has deigned to do a sequel that opens next year, The Golden Age. But it is a continuation of her 1998 Oscar-nominated role as Queen Elizabeth I.
"You are very dislocated from your audience while working in film," she says. "The only way I've stayed sane through it all is that I have a great time. I put it all out there. I take risks. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I think it's over with. That's my problem, because I then go on to the next job and I forget I have to publicize them."
Not this time, though. Time is up. Doodle pencil down. She's off to make that phone call.
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