Women On The Verge

All About

Cate Blanchett

Get the latest photos, news, and more

By now, politicized-woman films had firmly become single-issue dramas. Norma Rae tackled the unions, Silkwood took on the nuclear power industry, Gorillas stumped for conservation. With 1995's Dead Man Walking, star Susan Sarandon and her director/companion, Tim Robbins, zeroed in on the death penalty -- but instead of a broadside, the couple, notable for their support of left-wing causes, delivered a nuanced, achingly human tale. Even more surprisingly, Sarandon played a nun: the real-life Sister Helen Prejean who, in the movie, brings Sean Penn's death-row convict to a full acknowledgment of his actions -- and, in doing so, becomes a staunch foe of the death penalty. "I've never seen a nun on screen who's been a real person," said the actress in explaining her attraction to the role. "What I loved about Sister Prejean was that she made so many mistakes." What Academy voters loved was that Sarandon made none. It was her fifth nomination and, at last, her first win -- cause for joy for an actress who had once admitted that she "wept for days" when she wasn't nominated for Bull Durham.

As 1998's Elizabeth proved, queens have to learn how to be politically smart too -- and usually in a hurry. Australia's Cate Blanchett had to master the do's and don'ts of stardom as well; her performance as the coltish young Elizabeth I, navigating with increasing skill and will around throne-room lovers, plotters, and betrayers, landed her on the international stage. As with Weaver's Dian Fossey, audiences were made to see the human cost of a woman's hard-earned independence. "If she would have become someone's queen," Blanchett said of the real Elizabeth, "that would have been the end of her. She was incredibly wily and used this marital-negotiation process as a way of staving off people ... I do think she was a monarch before she was a human being and before she was a woman." That's clear in the playing: By Elizabeth's final scenes, Blanchett has exchanged the open face of a teenager for the inflexible mask of power. It's a discomfiting, thought-provoking sight, and while Blanchett was nominated for Best Actress, Gwyneth Paltrow took home the prize for playing a much more traditional Elizabethan maiden in Shakespeare in Love. (To underscore the irony, Shakespeare's Dame Judi Dench won Best Supporting Actress -- for playing Queen Elizabeth.)

Julia Roberts, by contrast, lets Erin Brockovich's sexuality hang out. In fact, Erin is the first of these characters who clearly feels comfortable in her own body, and who uses it, when necessary, to bamboozle the enemy. That's a long way from Loretta Young's buttoned-up Katrin Holstrom -- but, for its times, it's just as cheeringly optimistic.