Love on the rewind

If fans hadn't known she was co-starring with Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, they would never have recognised Cate Blanchett in the opening scene, in which she is shown on a hospital bed as an old woman.

The 39-year-old Australian actress, who has won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator (2004) and been nominated twice at the Oscars for playing the queen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, takes up another challenging role in Benjamin Button.

She undergoes a striking transformation, as the life of Daisy, the character she plays, unfolds over eight decades.

Childhood memories

Blanchett says her performance was informed largely by experiences from her youth — from childhood ballet lessons to a close relationship with her grandmother and her first job, at 14, serving meals in an old-age home.

“I would go [to the home] after school and take the food around to the guys. I would have a little chat with them and then clean up afterwards.''

The fleeting passage of time and the theme of lives come and gone are themes explored in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a romantic drama about a man, played by Brad Pitt, who is born in his eighties and ages in reverse.

Abandoned as an infant on the doorstep of a New Orleans retirement home at the end of the First World War, he is adopted by the home's caretaker and raised in the company of the residents there, who become family to him.

In a transformation depicted with the help of computer-generated images, Benjamin spends much of his “elderly'' boyhood in a wheelchair or on crutches.

However, he gradually sheds the disabilities of age as he reaches adulthood.

The rest of the film, nominated for five Golden Globe Awards and considered an Oscar contender, follows Benjamin Button as he sets off to find his way in the world.

Together again

The characters played by Pitt and Blanchett, who previously co-starred as a married couple in the 2006 film Babel, meet as children, with their lives intersecting at various points in the movie as they head in opposite directions.

Directed by David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club and Panic Room), the film was adapted from a 1920 fantasy written by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He, in turn, had been inspired by a quote by Mark Twain: “Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of 80 and gradually approach 18.''

The narration is in flashback mode via journal entries, letters and memories recounted from Daisy's hospital room, where she lies dying as Hurricane Katrina nears New Orleans.