“Utterly Terrifying”: Cate Blanchett on the challenges of playing Katharine Hepburn in ‘The Aviator’
Across her illustrious career, which has included bringing some great fictional characters to life, Cate Blanchett has also made waves playing real people. She received her first Oscar nomination for playing Queen Elizabeth I in the film Elizabeth before going on to portray Irish journalist Monica Guerin (Monica Guerin), art curator Claire Simone (Monuments Men), and a version of Bob Dylan (I’m Not There) in various projects. She even reprised her role as the English monarch in 2007’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
Perhaps her most famous embodiment of a historical figure is her performance as Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. A legendary actor who won four different ‘Best Actress’ Academy Awards, Hepburn factors into the film as a lover of idiosyncratic billionaire Howard Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Blanchett absolutely nails the part, humanising a woman who could have so easily been perceived as a caricature of a Hollywood diva. The performance netted the Aussie her own ‘Best Actress’ award, the first of two Oscars she would receive across her career.
The responsibility of bringing such a legend to the screen was not lost on Blanchett. “I tried not to look at it like a problem. I tried to look at it as a challenge. But it was more than daunting, it was completely and utterly terrifying,” the actor told Phase 9.
“I don’t know that I knew what I had agreed to do,” she continued. “When Martin Scorsese calls, you just go into this reverie…I’m such a fan…and so when he asked, of course, I said yes. Then I realised the consequences, but I had agreed to do it. You just have to get on. I find the technical work fascinating. You have to find a balance between paying a homage to her as an actress and being irreverent, and serving the script and unlocking the private human being. She was enormously private.”
Hepburn, who died the year before The Aviator’s release at the grand old age of 96, was known for keeping her personal life out of the spotlight. During her prime, she shunned many conventions of celebrity, dressing in unremarkable clothes and eschewing industry parties and social gatherings. She didn’t even collect any of her Oscars in person, dismissing the statuettes as yet another superficial token of Hollywood artifice.
“A breakthrough finally came in 1973, when Hepburn gave a two-hour interview to chat show host Dick Cavett. I had read about that in a biography,” revealed Blanchett, who was able to find a copy of the broadcast thanks to Scorsese’s impressive research team. “That became my bible. It was listening to the woman herself, even though her voice had calcified, I think, as had her personality as she approached or was in her seventies. But watching her be uncomfortable, it was like a gambler looking at another gambler – you could see where the ‘tell’ is. After watching that interview, I went back and watched her films and tried to compare the awkward gestures with the gestures that she had as a young actress before she had really crystallised into Hepburn as we know her.”
We’ll never know what the great lady would have made of Blanchett’s portrayal of her, but given that Hepburn could be a prickly customer at the best of times, maybe that’s for the best.
