Steely types with accents are a specialty for Australian-born Cate Blanchett. She scored a previous Best Actress Oscar nomination as Britain's monarch in Elizabeth (1998), and portrayed a murdered Irish journalist in Veronica Guerin (2003). But she nearly lost the chance to play four-time Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator because she was busy chasing frontier murderers in Ron Howard's The Missing. ''Cate was not available,'' says Aviator director Martin Scorsese. ''We were talking to Nicole [Kidman] about it for a while. Then we pushed back [the start of production], and things opened up.'' By then, Kidman had moved on to The Stepford Wives.
So it was buh-bye Nicole and hello Cate, who her costar Leonardo DiCaprio — with all due respect to Kidman — says ''was ultimately probably more right for it.'' Jumping fearlessly into the daunting task of impersonating possibly the best-known actress of the 20th century, Blanchett nails the athletic stride and the sense of cool ambition. But Blanchett, 35, also makes Hepburn tender and vulnerable, especially in a flying scene where germ-phobic Howard Hughes not only lets Hepburn take the controls of his plane but offers her a swig from his milk bottle. They were the Brad and Jennifer of '30s Hollywood — and thanks to Blanchett, the romance feels real.
And credit screenwriter John Logan for giving Blanchett's dialogue the ring of the screen legend's real-life rhythms. According to DiCaprio, that was deliberate. Logan read Hepburn's 1991 memoir, Me, says the actor, and the scribe ''made her dialogue similar. No periods, just a series of dashes and commas. It was like this bombardment of information.'' In Blanchett's skillful hands, that bombardment seems to come from a living, breathing person, and not a waxwork dummy. And like Hepburn, Blanchett may find herself in Oscar's embrace.
From Entertainment Weekly's look at 2005's Oscar nominees
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Last updated: October 1, 2006