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Cate Blanchett: ‘People shouldn’t hang onto their younger selves’

Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett has offered up some wise advice for how to age in Hollywood without succumbing to the celebrity ideal.
Oscar winning Australian actress Cat Blanchett

Cate Blanchett.

Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett has offered up some wise advice for how to age in Hollywood without succumbing to the celebrity ideal.

There is no doubt the porcelain skinned actress is a classic beauty – you only need to look at her almost ageless 14 years of playing Galadriel in Lord of the Rings franchise – but in a recent interview she says she wants to trade of her thespian talent, not her looks.

Speaking to Psychologies magazine, the 45-year-old actress said: “You have to know how to evolve with age without trying to hang on to your younger image of yourself from the past.”

Cate Blanchett cover

Cate Blanchett on the cover of Psychologies magazine.

And she has done well to show off her acting aptitude so far – nabbing two Academy Awards so far – but said she still has goals to emulate the careers of veteran actresses, Dame Judi Dench and Dame Helen Mirren, whom she admires.

“I want to be able to follow the example of those extraordinary British actresses who move effortlessly from film to TV to theatre roles,” Cate said.

“I admire the work of brilliant actresses such as Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren, who have had such varied careers. They have never stopped working and they are as great today as they ever were.”

Cate began her life as an actress on the stage in the ’90s appearing in David Mamet’s Oleanna alongside Geoffrey Rush – a role which earned her the Sydney Theatre Critics’ Best Newcomer Award – and still works closely with her husband, Andrew Upton who is the current artistic director of The Sydney Theatre Company.

Because of her career Cate has been in the spotlight for most of her adult life and after the mother-of-three posed un-retouched on the cover of Intelligent Life magazine she said was keen to grow old gracefully.

“There’s been a decade or so of people doing intervention with their face and their body,” she recently told Fashionista.com in 2012.

“Now that we’re emerging from that, people are seeing that long term it’s not so great.”

“I’m not sitting on a soapbox telling women what they should and shouldn’t do, but I know what works for me… I’d just be too frightened about what it means long term. In the end if you have all that stuff done… in the end you just see the work. It doesn’t fill me with admiration, it fills me with pity.”

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