Being Cate B

It's ten in the morning and Cate Blanchett is curled up on a large sofa - her shoulders hunched, bunched together like a small child - fiddling with her hair and her green silk skirt, and touching and then not picking up the cup of hot water with a chunk of lemon in it that counts as her breakfast.

She looks very beautiful and rather cool. She has short feather-cropped blonde hair, those very recognisable high, razor cheekbones, huge, wide mouth and amazing, almost-slanted blue eyes, and as she walks across the room, she is mesmerising. 'Do you want me to close the window?' she asks, looking at me and then away, as if her mind is on something else entirely. 'It's noisy. Is it too noisy for you?' She tries tugging at the double-glazing but it's not budging and she gives up, laughs nervously, and crumples all 5ft 9in of herself into an elongated ball and scrunches back down on to the sofa.

What a strange combination of sophistication and na?vety she is. On the one hand, in front of me is Blanchett the fashionista. It is a cool summer's morning, the type of day when no one really knows what to wear, yet she is immaculately attired. She's wearing the wonderful emerald skirt, a camel top and vertiginous strappy beige sandals.

'I love clothes,' she says, endlessly smoothing down the skirt. After all, this is the woman who is often seen at the front row of fashion shows; who, while certainly not running around with the high-fashion crowd, has been seen wearing eye- popping numbers at fancy parties. She says she got 'the most amazing, vicarious thrill' when, while rehearsing David Hare's Plenty in a typically chilly church hall, she would be called out to have her Oscar dress fitted. It was the one she wore four years ago when she was nominated for Best Actress for her portrayal of Elizabeth. 'It had petals on it,' she says, 'and fantastic tulle. It was hand-made by Galliano. It was the most exquisite thing I'd ever seen.' She says she loves exquisite things. She loves to shop. It's like a form of therapy. 'Have you been to Divertimenti?' she asks, clasping her hands together. 'Oh it's amazing. I love that type of shop. Kitchen things. Beautiful things. I'm a bit of a nester.' She also likes to hang out in those organic pubs near her home in North London. I tell her I've never been to one. 'But you must,' she says. 'It's all organic wine and food.' She says she goes there with Andrew, her husband. They've been married five years and they have a seven-month-old son called Dashiell - or 'Dash' as she calls him.

The marriage of Andrew Upton, not at all famous scriptwriter, and Cate Blanchett, ridiculously famous actress, is one of those showbusiness conundrums. I ask her if it's a Winslet-Threapleton situation, or a J-Lo and Cris Judd, neither of which lasted. 'I'm not sure what you mean,' says Blanchett, suddenly becoming na?ve (it turns out, later on, that she does have stunning areas of, if not na?vety, then no questioning or seeming desire for self-knowledge). Well, I persist, how does he cope with being married to a wife who is very famous? 'I don't think he thinks about it,' she says. Do they talk about it? 'No.' Does he feel threatened? 'No.' What about when you're at the Oscars and it's Cate this and Cate that and he just stands there being Mr Cate? 'The Oscars are just a laugh, really,' she says. 'They're so unreal, so mad and so thrilling that nothing seems normal. I don't even feel I'm really there. I'm sure that's how Andrew feels.' Has she asked him? 'No.' According to Blanchett, he's very happy because she's happy, and she's happy because she's successful and he's so supportive of her and she's supportive of him and he's actually a very good playwright - which I am sure he is - and she would be honoured to be in a play of his, and that's how it is. 'We're about to go to Sydney because he has a play on there.' And then she looks very happy. She's going home. 'I miss home,' she says.

Part of the reason she misses home is that her husband's family and her family - her mother, theatrical designer sister and computer programmer brother - don't see enough of Dash. But it's more than that. Blanchett never meant to leave Australia. 'Why did you leave?' I ask. 'I don't know,' she says, na?ve again. What seems to have happened is that she met Upton and they set off travelling and didn't really stop until they arrived in London. When they got here it 'came' to her that they should stay. In the same way it came to her (and him) that they should be together. 'We'd been around each other a bit,' she says, 'then one day we were talking and... Well, it would be like you and me suddenly kissing on this sofa and we didn't know how or why we got there.' After 'the kiss' (while she was working on Oscar and Lucinda), they got married quickly, within five weeks, and that was that. Since then, they were once apart for four months while she was filming. 'It was horrible,' she says. 'We're never doing that again.' Dash didn't come along immediately but she didn't worry about having a child because 'when you love someone, you naturally want their child'. And so, with that amazing mixture of blind faith, love and almost childlike trust in fate, Dash was born.

She seems to use the same criteria when she chooses her film projects. She doesn't sit there and think, 'Will this be good for my career? Will this be good for me? Will this gross lots of money?' Instead she just 'feels' something about a project. Take Heaven, her latest film (in fact, she's so hardworking and obsessed with acting that she has a host of new movies coming out). In it she plays a British woman who sets off a bomb in a building in Turin, but instead of murdering the jet-setting businessman-cum-drug dealer whom she blames for killing her husband, she manages to blow up four innocents. That's the premise of the film - it then spins off, with the Blanchett character being saved by a young carabiniere who falls in love with her and then the two of them go on the run, shave their heads and disappear in a helicopter.

It's quite a strange choice, given that it's a low-budget, rather confusing art-house movie that ends up with the main characters barely talking. 'That's why I loved it!' she says. 'Oh words, what are words? I am interested in what people don't say. By the end of the film the couple have gone into an almost childlike state where they do not need words and the audience fills in the gaps. It's very clever, instinctive. I like everything in a film to end in a question. I think life is a journey about hope and salvation.'

The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, post-11 September, to a reportedly frosty reception. 'Was it?' she says. 'I don't remember. I get so involved with my performance and so embarrassed and worried that people are staring at me that I can't think of anything else. It makes me squirm.'

As a child, she didn't think she'd be an actress. She has never really liked being in the spotlight. She thought she'd be a visual artist, 'although I am an artist in many ways'. Neither of her parents was artistic. Her father, Bob, who died of a heart attack 22 years ago - when she was ten - was a formal naval officer turned advertising executive from Texas who moved to Melbourne. In the past, she says, she felt very affected by his death. She once said it was so sudden she felt he'd been 'abducted by aliens.'

'It was a joke of sorts, a way of expressing something that was so hard to express,' she says. 'Yes, I felt his absence then, but it's been a long time. I am not exorcising his spirit through my work, if that's what you mean.' Bar that, she had a happy, protected childhood and didn't realise she wanted to act until she changed from an economics course at Melbourne's Methodist Ladies College to study acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. Even then she didn't feel a natural. 'My teacher didn't know what to do with me. At our graduation show, everything I suggested to perform at the final show, when all the agents would be there, was wrong.'

She's never really come to terms with the audition process. In fact, she hates it. In her early years she felt she always got it wrong. Take Oscar and Lucinda, one of her early successes. 'I was playing an Italian albino in a soap on television when I heard about it,' she says, 'and I loved the book. I love Peter Carey's books. I love True History of the Kelly Gang. You must get it. Anyway, I turned up for the audition with no eyebrows, bleached hair and this pale skin and they shot me on tape and I must've looked awful. I know Gillian [Armstrong] had a hell of a battle getting the producers to hire me. No one knew me then.'

Blanchett says she seems to have a thing about eyebrows. When she auditioned for Elizabeth, she shaved them off. 'Eyebrowless again!' she says. But since that major success, everything has gone well for her. She says she's never had to audition again. She's played dippy Meredith in The Talented Mr Ripley and nymphomaniac Petal in The Shipping News and Charlotte Gray. Everyone thought she would be nominated for an Oscar. She wasn't. Was she upset? 'I didn't think about it,' she says. 'Yes, you feel the trepidation and you do want it really and, when I was nominated for Elizabeth, I could barely breathe through the ceremony, I was so nervous. But when I didn't win, I thought, "Great, let's get on with the party." I was up first thing to fly home to continue rehearsals for Plenty.'

There was a time, before the birth of Dash, where she did six films back to back. It's not that she's a workaholic, she says, it's that she gets so emotionally committed to a film she can't say no. 'All these projects came along back to back,' she says. 'And they were all so different I couldn't turn them down. Imagine the change between the darkness of Lord of the Rings and then the fun of the Levinson comedy Bandits.'

Has her ability to work so hard changed since she had her son? She answers this very slowly. 'I'm sure... well, I think I've changed in ways I don't even know. I mean, Andrew and I have an unbelievable relationship and so Dash knows he is loved. Also I'm lucky because my job is so flexible. I've made one film since Dash was born - about Veronica Guerin - he had a great time on set. It's marvellous to have that time with him.

'As soon as you get married and settle in to a relationship, you want children. I think the reason people don't have children is because it's human nature to be selfish, but you rarely know what your capacity is. If you think too much, you can think yourself out of anything.'

And then we're back on to fashion and shops and how much she likes London. Recently, she went to see the Philip Seymour Hoffman production of Jesus Hopped the A Train. She loved it. 'I love all Phil's work,' she says. That's when you are reminded she's a star. All these people - Philip, Gwyneth, Joel (Schumacher, the director of her new film about Veronica Guerin), Jude and Kevin - are names that trip off her tongue.

As she's talking, I'm reminded of something Samantha Morton said recently: 'I don't want to be turned into another Cate Blanchett.' What did Morton mean by that? Blanchett looks fretful for the first time. 'I don't know,' she says, hunching up and clasping her knees. Is it the implication that somehow she has lost some artistic integrity, especially when she has always seemed such an emotionally intelligent, thoughtful actress? That somehow she has been turned into something glossy and mainstream? 'I don't think so,' says Blanchett. 'I hope not. In fact, I know not.' On that note, she disappears into the bedroom and I hear a baby cry and her coo.

Heaven opens on 9 August