Golden girl

NDREW Upton is getting used to seeing wife Cate Blanchett in unusual guises. In the forthcoming film, I'm Not There, she's one of the half-a-dozen actors playing singer Bob Dylan. And in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, she plays the virgin queen in her fifties, a good ten years above the actress's real age.

"He thought it was hilarious to see me dressed as Dylan. He didn't particularly want to kiss me with stubble all over my face - it felt a bit odd," says the Australian-born Oscarwinner.

"But he's used to the make-up process. And it was fantastic to be able to have my kids on set. Dash, my eldest son who's not quite five, was into knights and his godmother had given him a plastic Marks & Spencer knights' outfit.

"The first assistant director said that he could stand to protect me during the scene where Walter Raleigh's talking about the immensity of sitting on the throne.

"Actually I'm looking through an archway at my son standing in his knight's costume, protecting me. But he stood for like five minutes and each take was different for him. He's a natural, unfortunately."

Blanchett returns to the royal role she first played in the 1998 film Elizabeth, with director Shekhar Kapur and actor Geoffrey Rush.

The historical drama Elizabeth: The Golden Age finds her having reigned over England for nearly three decades and preparing to go to war against the Spanish to defend her empire.

She had no worries about returning to the role, pointing out that it's more of a theatrical model to reassemble as a group. "I've reprised roles in the theatre which is somehow more accepted and one can automatically go deeper and further into the role," she says.

"With a role like Hedda Gabler, which is incredibly complicated, you often feel that you haven't even scratched the surface the first time around. So you relish the opportunity to do it again, particularly with the ensemble of actors and the company we assembled.

"When you do that in films, you somehow have to make some attempt to uncross people's arms and have to justify why you're doing it. To me, there was never any hesitation."

The character, she feels, is "infinitely fascinating" as her reign was so dense and so long. When the film-makers began to talk about the period of history covering the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth was in her fifties.

"When we left off the last one I was in my 20s, so I needed to age to be a more mature presence on screen - without even uttering a word, have a greater sense of history and maturity about me to offer something different to the role and the story," says Blanchett.

She won an Oscar for playing Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, another real person to add to her gallery along with Elizabeth and Dylan. She's also one of many actresses to play the British monarch, finding that comforting rather than daunting.

"I'm absolutely all for absorbing all of those influences, so you understand the pedigree of the part as much as you understand the figure in history," she explains.

❛ YOU don't say gosh, I want to play Peter Sellers' because you can sort of do that in your own bathroom. The interesting thing is that this director has imagined that I could possibly do this and I'm in conversation with the director and, ultimately, in dialogue with the script.

"No matter how much research you do, whether it's a character from a novel or a completely invented character or one that actually existed, it's a work of faction.

"By the very fact you only have an hour-and-a-half or two hours to tell a story, you're telescoping events. It is, in the end, a work of imagination."

The new film interprets history, taking liberties with the facts. It's debatable, for instance, whether Elizabeth ever wore armour as she does on screen to address her troops before the Armada invasion. The aim, Blanchett says, was to have an image that would create a sense of awe and wonder in an audience like the troops must have felt that their monarch - and a female monarch at that - went to the frontline of battle and was prepared to lay down her life.

"This speech is so well-known and has been done in virtually every version of the events of Elizabeth's life.

So, because the film is a lot about a woman looking back at her youth, turning out a young lady-in-waiting and vicariously living through her, we found a lot of pre-Raphaelite images of Joan of Arc and thought dare we?' and we thought yeah'. There's a couple of lithographs of Elizabeth riding sidesaddle into battle and that felt a little bit received somehow in the context of the aesthetic of the film."

The armour itself wasn't particularly comfortable, and the scene made more difficult because director Kapur wanted her horse to be restless. "So it was a challenge," says Blanchett.

"Also, the winds were against me and I was addressing the troops all day. But it was an absolutely glorious position in the world, the vista was stunning."