'It's such an intangible profession'

It was a theatrical convergence of three continents. Over lunch in London, the actress from Australia and the actress from Norway decided they had to find a way under the skin of the neurotic belle from the American South.

At that meal, Cate Blanchett and Liv Ullmann sketched out the beginnings of their assault on Blanche DuBois, the high-strung butterfly of A Streetcar Named Desire. Ullmann, ethereal star of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage and Cries And Whispers, by now a director, had wanted Oscar-winner Blanchett for the role of Nora in a film version of Ibsen's A Doll's House.

But the money could not be raised, and now they turned their thoughts to Tennessee Williams and the stage. Which was fortunate, because Blanchett was running a major theatre company back in Sydney, with her husband, writer-director Andrew Upton.

"Liv got really excited about that," Blanchett is recalling over lunch recently at the Kennedy Centre, where the US premiere of Sydney Theatre Company's Streetcar, directed by Ullmann and starring Blanchett, began performances. "I think it's really great when an idea creeps up on you from behind, and particularly with a play like this."

Haughty, needy, broken Blanche DuBois is one of those potentially breath-stopping career markers for a great actress.

Now Blanchett, 40, supermodel-svelte and creamily-complected, is taking her turn. That audiences are eager to see an actress whose adventurous range has been on display in her break-out turns in Oscar and Lucinda and Elizabeth is borne out by the box office. With Blanchett as the only marquee name in the Australian cast, the entire 24-performance run of Streetcar sold out weeks ago.

For all her cerebral glamour, her renown for roles in movies as varied as The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Aviator, the last one earning her an Academy Award, Blanchett is actually a theatre kid. Maybe even a theatre nerd.

Critical plaudits

From the time she left Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art and was cast in the Sydney Theatre Company production of David Mamet's Oleanna opposite Geoffrey Rush, she's maintained a stage life. Of her wildly provocative 2006 portrayal of the title character in Hedda Gabler at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which prompted both critical plaudits and finger-wagging, Ben Brantley wrote in an appreciatively amused New York Times review: "Ms Blanchett is giving roughly a dozen of the liveliest performances to be seen this year, all at the same time."

Now, to that voracious metabolism she has added the role of co-artistic director of Australia's largest theatre company, whose 2010 season she formulated with Upton includes a whopping 15 productions in three theatres. Uncle Vanya, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Our Town, The Oresteia and the Broadway musical Spring Awakening are just a few of the enormous heaves in an eye-popping line-up. Streetcar giving Blanchett, a mother of three young sons, barely time to catch her breath.

"We're now commuters; we leave home and drop our kids at school," Blanchett says of her life as that rarest breed, an actor with an office to go to. As she is allowed three months away each year for other projects, she can still make movies, such as the new Robin Hood flick she recently completed with Russell Crowe in which she plays Maid Marian.

"Andrew had a very close relationship with the company, and was approached and said to me, ‘Why don't we do this together?'" she says of their three-year contract with the Sydney institution. "My response was probably his response: I sort of said, ‘We have to.' ... I feel a bit presumptuous, saying it's about giving back. That assumes I have something to give back. I mean, that's for the audiences to decide."

If the actress is sometimes regarded as a bit aloof, that isn't the impression she gives on this occasion. True, she's not disposed to small talk like the beautiful, 71-year-old Ullmann, who comes into a room and immediately launches into stories.

What Blanchett projects is the earnest mien of serious business. Intelligent and congenial, she repeatedly lapses into Artistspeak, invoking phrases about her job such as "diverse array of work" and "very collaborative in terms of process" and "inward conundrums". She tends to answer questions about herself elliptically; the closest she comes to revealing something personal is to say she is "quite solitary".

Success

Of her status as one of the world's most in-demand actresses of quality, she's entirely philosophical.

"Look, it's timing and luck," she says. "I was in the theatre and very happy working in the theatre and of course, it's the ‘taxi' measure of success, isn't it? You get, ‘Oh, you're an actor, what films have you been in?' And if they don't know anything you've done you somehow feel by the end of the taxi ride your life is worthless and meaningless. ... It's such an intangible profession and we live in such a tangible world that you can often feel that what you do is of little value. And so I suppose success of one kind externally reminds you that perhaps it does have a small value."

She can be sure the world will pay attention to her Blanche, whose war with her brutish brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, is one of the most harrowing battles American drama has ever conjured. Ullmann and Blanchett have very strong ideas about the character, her pain, the mythology she constructs about herself and the way she ultimately unravels.

The filters applied by the production originate far from the Deep South. Blanchett says Ullmann brought "a Norwegian prism" to the play, meaning by this "a rawness".

"It's not a production with a lot of bells and whistles," Blanchett adds. "There's no sort of crazy jungle choreography. It's a very elemental production, very pared back, I think. She wanted to get inside the characters' hearts."

Common thread

Ullmann talks about Blanche not as a victim of Stanley but as architect of her own fate. "For Blanche," she says, "the truth is mortal. I don't believe she is mad. I believe she's in horrible agony, and I believe she makes her own ending."

Blanchett has been reading Williams' letters, getting a sense of where he and his character intersect. The fear of loneliness is a common thread, she avers. But she also hopes audiences don't view Blanche in some of the "pejorative" terms with which she is often identified: manipulative, pretentious, vain. Blanchett seems to be groping for the complexity she finds when poring over the dramatist's other writings.

"What I do love about theatre is you're reminded your responsibility is to reveal what it means to be human with all those terrible flaws and failings," she says. "And to go out and to try to reach that bar that Williams sets every night, I mean, it's a workout."

When a visitor suggests that such a gruelling ritual might lead one to do something to unwind, Blanchett finishes the thought: "Have a vodka!" she says, laughing. And then adds, "But not before the show!"

Did you know?

Blanche DuBois, a role that originally belonged on Broadway to Jessica Tandy and in film to Vivien Leigh, has been assayed to varying degrees by star actresses ever since Streetcar's 1947 debut. Uta Hagen, Blythe Danner, Jessica Lange and Natasha Richardson all gave Blanche a go on Broadway; five years ago, Patricia Clarkson played her at the Kennedy Centre. This summer, Rachel Weisz slipped into the role at London's Donmar Warehouse.