Roles of attraction

Meet Cate Blanchett - Oscar-nominated actress, sophisticated sex symbol and, above all, woman who knows what she wants. When the 34-year-old, Melbourne-raised actress tilts her head playfully, runs her hand through a fork of platinum hair and admits, 'I can be fairly strong-minded,' the sense of understatement is overwhelming.

Blanchett looks slim and toned in her figure-hugging peach-and-black top and black trousers, but her presence is subtly forceful, laced with a hint of devilish mischief that tells you she knows how to enjoy herself. 'I don't care how many lines I have in a script,' she trills happily. 'I do what I enjoy.'

A good example is Anthony Minghella's 1999 hit The Talented Mr Ripley, in which she had scarcely more than a cameo as bubbly heiress Meredith Logue. 'I looked at the script and said, "I want to do that part."' She mimes pointing to a tiny speck of dust. 'Anthony said, "Are you sure you want such a small role?" I thought that was such a strange attitude.'

Perhaps it is this undimmed determination that makes her upcoming role as Katharine Hepburn, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, feel like the one she was born to play. You don't have to strain too hard to imagine the posters proclaiming 'Blanchett isHepburn' --the two may already be close to equal in spirit and fieriness. 'I never actually met Hepburn,' she reflects, 'though who she was at 96 would have been incredibly different from who she was at 28, which is the age I'm playing her. That's when she was box-office poison. No one knew what to do with her, and she had to buy her way out of her contract.'

Katharine Hepburn might have sprung from a different world than the journalist Veronica Guerin, whom Blanchett portrays in her latest movie, but both women were cut from the same resilient cloth. Guerin was an uncompromising Dublin newshound whose dispatches on Ireland's drugs trade led to her murder in 1996 at the hands of the ghouls she had exposed.

In the film, she marches from one scoop to another, brushing aside threats and violence the way most people shake off a nasty cold. Blanchett bravely makes it clear in her performance that Guerin is relishing the beatings and bullets that come her way. 'Well, wouldn't you?' Blanchett booms. 'Her attitude was, "If I've been shot, I must be on the right track."' With a lilting Dublin accent, a feathery hairdo and an all-purpose smile that flashes on like a searchlight, Blanchett's Guerin resembles nothing so much as a tenacious Avon lady. 'People always talk about her toughness, so I deliberately latched on to her more feminine aspects,' she says. 'For example, she had a great relationship with her hairdresser.

And she always wore earrings. It would have been too easy to characterise her as some sports-loving, beer-swilling hardnut.'

As a new mother --young Dashiell, by her husband the screenwriter Andrew Upton, is now 18 months old - Blanchett also appreciated the struggles that Guerin had to endure for the sake of her own child. 'Parenthood is a constant juggling act. When I started filming Veronica Guerin, Dash was nine weeks old, and I thought, "How can I leave him?" But it's even harder leaving for work now that he's older.'

She will need to become accustomed to it if her career continues at this dizzying pace. Since her 1997 film debut in the Australian PoW drama Paradise Road, she has barely paused for breath. She made an almighty splash five years ago in Elizabeth, for which she received her Oscar nomination, and then boldly demonstrated her versatility by plumping for the most unusual roles on the block.

She has now played everything from a bored, brassy housewife (Pushing Tin) to a twitchy clairvoyant (The Gift) and a mystical elf queen (The Lord Of The Rings trilogy). Whether or not she has a game plan, everything is going right. 'It's a scream,' she laughs. 'Growing up I could never decide what I wanted to do - there always seemed so many choices. Being an actor means you never really have to decide because you're really just trying out different things. It's a form of prolonged restlessness.'