Cate Blanchett Covers Harper's Bazaar UK April 2012

Cate Blanchett covers Harper's Bazaar UK April 2012. In her exclusive interview for the magazine's Opulent vs. Minimal issue, the gorgeous 42-year-old actress talks about being compared to Meryl Streep, Bond villains, travelling with her close-knit family, her return to the London stage this spring, dancing on screen and the Royal Wedding.

"I had taken one of my sons to a Justin Bieber concert. We were in a box, and the wedding was on television inside. I alternated watching a horrendous singing chipmunk with 'our Kate' coming down the aisle in that beautiful dress that Sarah Burton designed. I saw it in snatches in between 'Baby Baby' with 10,000 screaming seven-year-old girls," Cate says about the Royal Wedding.

Blanchett is known as being devoted to her family with the same boundless enthusiasm with which she throws herself into character.
Speaking about her family and leaving home, the actress says that, "I had this thing for years. If someone was going to the supermarket, I would give them this tearful farewell, like they were leaving in the Queen Mary," adding that, "When I was a girl, I used to always kiss my father goodbye. But on the day he died, I was playing piano, and he walked past this window at the back of the house, and I didn't kiss him."

In her interview with Harper's Bazaar UK, Cate Blanchett also dishes on her teen years when she used to wander the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe searching for her lost imaginary dog.
"When you’re a teenager, you act things out rather than experience them, so that through a relationship being cataclysmic, you reach some emotional catharsis. I have that through work now, so I don’t need to act it out in my daily life. Not that I think all work is therapy," the actress says.

On her unwillingness of directing a film, Blanchett admits that, "There is a film I’d love to direct, but I just don’t know if I’ve got the patience. In theatre, you can have an idea and get on with it. In film, you hear of people sitting on an idea for eight years, by which time the idea has changed and evolved and become something else."

What about playing a villainess in 'Bond 24'?"Oh God! Yes! I’d be there in a heartbeat. I love Lotta Lenya [Ross Klebb in 1963’s From Russia with Love]. She had a club foot and a limp. I’m not a purist in that way," Cate says.

On dancing on screen, the actress says that, "I remember saying to Richard Eyre, 'Look, I often end up [dancing] in films, can I not this time?' And he said, 'No, it's really important to the scene.' So I said, 'OK!'"
Richard Eyre, who directed the actress in 'Notes on a Scandal' back in 2006, says that Cate is "one of the most intelligent, if not the most intelligent, actors I have worked with. She is very, very clear-headed and very, very well read."

Speaking about the actress, Blanchett's friend, Australian photographer Polly Borland, told the magazine that "Her beauty is enigmatic - like an exotic cat. She's down-to-earth but ethereal, cerebral but sensual, beautiful but strange-looking, tough but at the same time vulnerable. At the same time, she's like an old-fashioned circus act. What she does is like magic; you don't see the craft."

Read Cate Blanchett's full interview in the April 2012 issue of Harper's Bazaar UK.