Australian’s golden girl Cate Blanchett boasts an acting career spanning over three decades, but her time in front of the cameras may come to an end sooner than you’d expect.
In a new interview, she revealed she has often thought about giving up acting. After hesitantly introducing herself to theatre director John Tiffany as an “actress”, she revealed her hesitation was “because I’m giving up,” she said to UK’s Radio Times. “My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it,” she added.
Cate Blanchett said she’s “serious about giving up acting” because there are “a lot of things I want to do with my life.” She didn’t reveal what those “things” were, but she did share insights into why she’s thinking of calling it quits.
“It’s been a long time to remotely get comfortable with the idea of being photographed,” she admitted. “Like a lot of people, I like being alive. I throw myself into life, often in unwanted places. Maybe that’s why my career, if you call it a career, has been so strangely eclectic.”
This isn’t the first time Cate has teased her retirement, as she spoke to The Sunday Project in February 2023 where she implied that she may bow out of the acting world due to the emotional and physical strain her role in Tár inflicted.
The two-time Academy Award winner explained that playing the fictional world-famous pianist Lydia Tár has had a lasting impact on her, saying, “I think it was because it was such a physical role, the echoes of it are still with me and I think I’m like a lot of audience members, I need time to process it.
“So I don’t ever want to work again …” she added, laughing.
But when The Project panellist Hamish McDonald pushed her on this statement, she didn’t try to retract.
“I think it’s time to stop,” Cate declared.
Cate on the red-carpet promoting her film, Tár. (Credit: Getty)
Tár director Todd Field also encouraged Cate to step away from the camera.
”He said ‘don’t work for a while’, and I probably should have taken the advice,” she told Vanity Fair.
Instead she went on to star in Alfonso Cuaron’s thriller, Disclaimer.
But since then she has decided it’s time to ”be quiet,” admitting she has a persistent feeling of wanting to quit acting permanently.
”It’s not occasional – it’s continual,” she said. ”On a daily or weekly basis, for sure. It’s a love affair, isn’t it? So you do fall in and out of love with it, and you have to be seduced back into it.”
Cate and Andrew married in 1997 and have four kids together. (Credit: Getty)
Cate has also admitted she had been “profoundly homesick over the last four years”, after being based in Los Angeles from 2015 alongside theatre director husband Andrew Upton and their four children.
Prior to this they called Sydney home for over five years when the couple were the artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company.
Detailing the specific reasons on why she wanted to return to Australia, water and gardening were revealed as big passions of the star.
“‘I’m very obsessed, as are most Australians, obsessed by water. I want to be by the water, in the water,” she said
“My grandmother was a wonderful gardener and my mother is likewise an excellent gardener and she lives with us, and I really want to spend time in the garden with my mum.”
