page_title: Cate Blanchett
section_title: 2008–2011
hierarchical_section_title: Cate Blanchett / Career / 2008–2011
caption_attribution_description: English: Actress Cate Blanchett at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival.
context_page_description: Catherine Elise Blanchett AC is an Australian actress and theatre director. One of Australia's most accomplished actresses, she is well known for her diverse roles in both blockbusters and independent films. She has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and three British Academy Film Awards.
  After graduating from the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Blanchett began her acting career on the Australian stage, taking on roles in Electra in 1992 and Hamlet in 1994. She came to international attention for portraying Elizabeth I in the drama film Elizabeth, for which she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress and earned her first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing a neurotic former socialite in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine. Her other Oscar-nominated roles were in the dramas Notes on a Scandal, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I'm Not There, and Carol.
  Blanchett's most commercially successful films include The Talented Mr.
context_section_description: She next appeared in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, as the villainous KGB agent Col. Dr. Irina Spalko, Spielberg's favourite villain from the entire series, and in David Fincher's Oscar-nominated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, co-starring with Brad Pitt for a second time. Blanchett voiced the character of Granmamare for the English version of the film Ponyo, released July 2008. On 5 December 2008, Blanchett was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a motion pictures star at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard in front of Grauman's Egyptian Theatre.
  In 2008, Blanchett and her husband became co-CEOs and artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company (STC). Blanchett returned to acting in the theatre in 2009 with the Sydney Theatre Company production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Liv Ullmann. She starred as Blanche DuBois alongside Joel Edgerton as Stanley Kowalski. Ullmann and Blanchett had been meaning to collaborate on a project since Ullman's intended film adaption of A Doll's House fell by the wayside. Blanchett proposed embarking on Streetcar to Ullmann, who jumped at the opportunity after initial discussion.
  A Streetcar Named Desire production traveled from Sydney to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. It was critically and commercially successful and Blanchett received critical acclaim for her performance as Blanche DuBois. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley said, "DuBois has been pulled gently and firmly down to earth by Ms. Blanchett and Ms. Ullmann ... What Ms. Blanchett brings to the character is life itself, a primal survival instinct ... Ms. Ullmann and Ms. Blanchett have performed the play as if it had never been staged before, with the result that, as a friend of mine put it, "you feel like you're hearing words you thought you knew pronounced correctly for the first time."" The Washington Post's Peter Marks proclaimed, "What Blanchett achieves in the Sydney Theatre Company's revelatory revival of "A Streetcar Named Desire" amounts to a truly great portrayal – certainly the most heartbreaking Blanche I've ever experienced." John Lahr of The New Yorker said of her portrayal, "Blanchett, with her alert mind, her informed heart, and her lithe, patrician silhouette, gets it right from the first beat ... Blanchett doesn't make the usual mistake of foreshadowing Blanche's end at the play's beginning; she allows Blanche a slow, fascinating decline ... I don't expect to see a better performance of this role in my lifetime." Jane Fonda, who attended a New York show, deemed it "perhaps the greatest stage performance I have ever seen", and Meryl Streep declared, "That performance was as naked, as raw and extraordinary and astonishing and surprising and scary as anything I've ever seen ... She took the layers of a person and just peeled them away. I thought I'd seen that play, I thought I knew all the lines by heart, because I've seen it so many times, but I'd never seen the play until I saw that performance." Blanchett won the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The production and Blanchett received Helen Hayes Awards, for Outstanding Non-Resident Production and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Non-Resident Production award, respectively.
  In 2010, Blanchett appeared opposite Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott's epic war film Robin Hood. In 2011, she played the antagonist CIA agent Marissa Wiegler in Joe Wright's action thriller film Hanna.
  In 2011, Blanchett took part in two Sydney Theatre Company productions. She played Lotte Kotte in a new translation of Botho Strauß's 1978 play Groß und klein (Big and Small) from Martin Crimp, directed by Benedict Andrews. After its Sydney run, the production traveled to London, Paris, the Vienna Festival and Ruhrfestspiele. Blanchett and the production received wide acclaim. Blanchett was nominated for the London Evening Standard Award for Best Actress, and won the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and the Helpmann Award 
caption: Blanchett at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival
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