"The Cate who would be Kate"

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"The Cate who would be Kate" The New York Times 2004/12/12 http://0rz.net/a005a Since graduating from drama school in 1992, the actress Cate Blanchett has been, among other things, a storied English monarch ("Elizabeth"), an Irish journalist ("Veronica Guerin"), a southern psychic ("The Gift"), a Long Island housewife ("Pushing Tin"), a WASP heiress ("The Talented Mr. Ripley"), a Middle Earth elf queen ("Lord of the Rings"), a Scottish member of the French Resistance ("Charlotte Gray") and a New Mexico frontierswoman ("The Missing"). And in Wes Anderson's ensemble comedy "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" (which opened in New York and Los Angeles on Friday ), the 35-year-old Melbourne native plays a starchy, very pregnant globetrotting journalist. But this month, Ms. Blanchett appears in a role that may outdo all her previous ones in nerve and ambition. In "The Aviator," Martin Scorsese's period drama about Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire industrialist and Hollywood mogul, she plays Katharine Hepburn, the legendary star who was considered the most distinctive screen presence since Garbo and whose athletic, chiseled beauty, upper-class mien and formidable New England accent transformed Hollywood's - and the country's - definition of femininity while remaining her trademark until her death last year at 96. Even before the film's Dec. 17 opening, Ms. Blanchett's go-for-it performance - complete with red wigs, striding walk and vowel-strangling speech - as the sui generis actress is drawing attention among Academy voters, critics and industry bloggers of the kind Ms. Blanchett last garnered when she smeared on white face, shaved her hairline and was nominated for a best-actress Oscar as the Virgin Queen in "Elizabeth." Even in a year when several actors are turning in noteworthy performances as real historical figures (including Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin in "Beyond the Sea" and Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in "Ray") Ms. Blanchett's portrayal is already generating the kind of love-it, hate-it reaction within Hollywood that greeted Nicole Kidman's prosthetic-enhanced and ultimately Oscar-winning performance as Virginia Wolfe in "The Hours" two years ago. While some early viewers have expressed negative reactions, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have given Ms. Blanchett excellent reviews, and on-line wags are suggesting her performance is a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination. "It's such a brave performance by Cate, with the accent and the mannerisms, that naturally there are those who will feel a certain way about it," said Mr. Scorsese, who had been impressed with the actress's "precision and boldness" since "Elizabeth" and considers Ms. Blanchett's role in "The Aviator" one of the most "daunting in the film, even if some younger viewers won't know who the real Katharine Hepburn was." A. Scott Berg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose 20-year friendship with the actress was chronicled in his biographical memoir, "Kate Remembered," published last year, has not seen Ms. Blanchett's performance but said that the challenge to any actress portraying Hepburn is "to keep the performance from becoming a caricature, because Katharine Hepburn was almost a caricature herself." Mr. Berg emphasized that Hepburn was more than a fast-talking dame. "She had a very brittle exterior," he added, "but there was also a softer underbelly that most people never saw, and that was what propelled her" success as an actress and a movie star. As for her fans' response to Ms. Blanchett's portrayal, he predicted "reactions will be extreme." Because she was so beloved, he said, "people feel a kind of ownership about Kate and they will watch the film and say, 'That's not my Katharine Hepburn.' " Ms. Blanchett, who signed on without even reading "The Aviator" script, is braced for that kind of response. "Of course! It's Hepburn! I'm absolutely expecting that sort of reaction," she explained during a whirlwind 15-hour visit to Los Angeles from Australia. "People have a sense of ownership about the actors they love. So when someone plays them, of course there will be dissent. There should be. But what can I do about it? Not play the role?" In fact, she almost didn't. Two years ago, when Mr. Scorsese began assembling the cast for "The Aviator" - a group that would eventually include Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, Kate Beckinsdale as Ava Gardner, Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow and Jude Law as Errol Flynn - Ms. Blanchett's dance card was already filled. It was not an insignificant problem for the director who saw the Hepburn role as crucial. With an original screenplay by John Logan, "The Aviator" chronicles the era in Hollywood from the late 1920's to the 1940's. During most of that period Hepburn was one of its most famous, if noncommercial, actresses, and Hughes, who would eventually become debilitated by his obsessive-compulsive disorder, was becoming a major powerbroker, directing and producing movies, designing and flying experimental aircraft - and romancing some of Hollywood's biggest stars, including Gardner and Hepburn. Although she had won an Oscar in 1933, by the time Hepburn and Hughes met during the filming of her 1935 drama, "Sylvia Scarlet," the athletic, outspoken Connecticut Yankee had experienced a string of box-office failures. "They were two misfits and that was the attraction," said Mr. Scorsese. "They were both highly famous and very ambitious, but in Hollywood he was the outlaw director and she was washed up." With Ms. Blanchett previously committed to starring in Ron Howard's western "The Missing," Mr. Scorsese turned to Nicole Kidman as his possible alternative. Whether Ms. Kidman was officially offered the role - and whether she turned it down, as has been widely rumored in Hollywood - remains unclear. But Mr. Scorsese ultimately wound up casting Ms. Blanchett when the start date for "The Aviator" was delayed by several months. "Cate was always my first choice," he said. Watching Ms. Blanchett slide discreetly into a corner table of the patio restaurant at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills - or as much as anyone can be discreet when she is 5-foot-8 and wearing patent-leather high heels - one can see Mr. Scorsese's reasoning. Less than four hours since she uncurled herself from a first-class airline seat on an overnight flight from Sydney, where she is currently shooting the Australian film "Little Fish," in which she plays a recovering heroin addict, Ms. Blanchett looked every inch the glamorous celebrity in a caramel-colored suede jacket, white trousers, gold earrings and with her white blond hair swept into a chicly gnarled chignon. Despite her buffed, camera-ready appearance, and the fact that she gave birth to her second son, Roman, seven months earlier, there was also something Hepburnesque in her lanky, rangy physique, steady, intelligent gaze and the wide swooping planes of her face. As the film's costume designer Sandy Powell said, "Cate has the right body shape to play Kate." STILL, the line between performance and impersonation can be a fine one, especially when stepping into the shoes of one of Hollywood's most recognizable leading ladies. Unlike other real-life figures like Ms. Guerin, who was murdered in 1996 by drug dealers and was little known outside Ireland, or Elizabeth I, who reigned in the 16th century, Hepburn was still alive when Ms. Blanchett took the role, and still very accessible in the public memory. "Representing Kate in the same medium, film, in which she existed was very daunting," Ms. Blanchett said. "But because she was so private and few people really knew her, we basically know Hepburn through her films," she adds. "So of course you have to give a nod to her screen persona when playing her." That was especially true since Mr. Scorsese was adamant about wanting the Hughes and Hepburn scenes, which occur during the film's first half, to have "a screwball comedy take" appropriate to the period setting and to the unusual two-color film process he was using to give "The Aviator" a distinctively dated look. In one early scene, Ms. Blanchett is seen striding across a golf course in trousers and cropped hair as she yammers at a rather stunned looking Howard Hughes - a speech pattern that she sprinkles with such folksy colloquialisms as "hot dog" and "my goat," and which she maintains throughout the film until her final meeting with Hughes, late in the film, when she tries to coax her eccentric and reclusive former lover from his screening room. As Mr. Scorsese explained, "There was a different style of talking then, fast and with a certain amount of humor, which is different than how people speak today." The day Ms. Blanchett arrived on "The Aviator" set in Montreal in June 2003, Hepburn died. "I picked up the paper thinking, 'Isn't it odd that Katharine Hepburn's on the cover?' " she recalled, adding that she found her death to be "impeccable timing," in terms of her own preparation. "She had such a remarkable life, and then with her death, she was even more present in everyone's mind," said Ms. Blanchett. During the film's three-week rehearsal period, Ms. Blanchett worked closely with the film's hair, makeup and costume designers as well as a vocal coach in numerous camera and lighting tests. The goal was not only to make Ms. Blanchett resemble Hepburn as much as possible - without the use of prosthetics, which Mr. Scorsese was against - but also to also find a way to translate the actress, then a star of black-and-white films, into color. "I don't think any of us had realized that Katharine Hepburn was the first freckle-faced, red-haired actress to become a major star," said Morag Ross, the film's makeup artist, who had worked with Ms. Blanchett on four previous films. The painstaking painting of freckles on her face, arms and chest, as well as the three different red wigs Ms. Blanchett wears in the film, became "the big part of the daily makeup application," Ms. Ross said. Ms. Blanchett also logged considerable preparation time in the screening room. At Mr. Scorsese's request, she watched 35-millimeter prints of all the first 15 of Hepburn's films, starting with her first movie, "A Bill of Divorcement," in 1932. "I wanted Cate to be immersed in Kate's body language, to establish a sense memory of her mannerisms, her poise," Mr. Scorsese explained. Ms. Blanchett also found the films to be an indispensable biography. "While I knew Hepburn's successes and highlights of her career, I didn't know her failures,"she said, referring to her lesser known films like "The Little Minister" and "Break of Hearts." Finding the inner Hepburn, as it were, proved more elusive but crucial. Kate Mulgrew, who played Hepburn in the one-woman Off Broadway show "Tea at Five" last year, found the key to her own peformance to be "that deep vein of vulnerability that coursed through Kate's performances," she said. "That just below that maverick surface was great sorrow that stemmed from the great tragedy in her real life." While the basic facts of Ms. Hepburn's life are well known - her upper-class upbringing as a doctor's daughter in Hartford; the death of her beloved older brother, Tom, when she was 10; her long love affair with Spencer Tracy, whom she never married - Ms. Blanchett wanted to understand much more. "It's just a given that we know every single thing about an actor's personal life today, but it wasn't true back then," she said. "Their lives were so monitored by the studios, and Kate was just so very private in her real life." Not a fan of written biographies, "which are usually more about the writer than the subject," she said, Ms. Blanchett embarked on her own eclectic research. Besides reading Mr. Berg's memoir, she had lessons in golf and tennis, she took cold baths, for which Hepburn was famous, and she watched several television documentaries. But it was a rare two-part television interview Hepburn, then in her 60's, gave Dick Cavett in 1973 that she found especially illuminating. "She was older and her voice had calcified and her whole personality had become a burlesque of itself, but it was fascinating to see how she behaved, and how uncomfortable she was," she said. "I mean, it's amateur psychology 101, but you take that and then try and find your way into the young woman's voice and head." It was Hepburn's distinctive voice, loud, clipped and with a pronounced upper-class New England accent, that became crucial to Ms. Blanchett's performance. Although Mr. Scorsese hadn't insisted on her using an accent, Ms. Blanchett, along with the film's voice coach, came to believe it was crucial to her performance. Tim Monich, the film's voice coach, who had worked with Ms. Blanchett on "The Talented Mr. Ripley," was even more convinced. "There are a handful of historical figures, including J.F.K., F.D.R. and Katharine Hepburn, who are chiefly associated with their voices, and if you're going to play any of them, you really have to go for the voice," he said adding that was especially true with Hepburn. "She didn't sound like any of the ingenues at the time, with their shy, trilling voices," he said. "Kate really created a whole new style of American actress - of American woman - with her voice and mannerisms." Ms. Blanchett worked with Mr. Monich on daily vocal exercises to emulate Hepburn's regional upper-class accent "which isn't spoken anymore," said Mr. Monich, as well as her unusual forceful delivery. They also spent considerable time studying the work of another, little-known actress, Hope Williams. A New York heiress turned Broadway star, Williams was known as the "Park Avenue Stride Girl" for her distinctive walk and vocal delivery. Mr. Monich had discovered that before Hepburn moved to Los Angeles, in the early 1930's, she had understudied Williams during the Broadway run of "Holiday," the Philip Barry comedy that was later made into the 1938 film starring Hepburn and Cary Grant. "Hope was a real trendsetter, forthright, almost masculine with a very loud upper-class voice," said Mr. Monich, who found in Ms. Williams's performance style many of the same mannerisms that would later become Hepburn's signature style. "Tim and I became obsessed with Hope Williams," said Ms. Blanchett, who watched Williams's 1935 film "Scoundrel," which Mr. Scorsese had in his personal film library. "Hope's quite a big girl, so different from Hepburn that way, but with that same very confident stride," she said adding that she saw Hepburn begin to exhibit a similar bold-stroke confidence in her sixth film, "Spitfire." "Here's this upper-class New Englander playing an Arkansas hellcat with this weird Southern New England accent going on," she said with a laugh. "Kate was just this athletic, confident, youthful presence throwing herself about and I think people were horrified by it." That boldness of voice, carriage and gesture became the defining characteristic of Ms. Blanchett's performance in "The Aviator," from the opening scenes when she meets Hughes on the set of "Sylvia Scarlett" to the lavish party at the legendary Los Angeles nightclub, the Cocoanut Grove, where Hughes is dazzled, and not a little envious of her star presence. "Cate's a force of nature in those opening scenes," said Mr. Scorsese. "It's why Hughes fell in love with her." Whether audiences will feel the same remains to be seen. For Ms. Blanchett, love isn't the goal in any event. "As an actor, you do your homework," she said, "but then you have to courageous enough to trim it back because in the end, what it's all about is having the audience believe you are who you say you are." -- 年頭必是大紅人年尾提名她沒份～凱特‧布蘭琪今年雙片氣勢高凱特女王將淚噴～ CATE BLANCHETT 【鍥而不捨】【鬼影迷蹤】【神鬼玩家】【海海人生】 -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 218.161.18.211