Ranking Cate Blanchett's Oscar-Nominated Roles

Ranking Cate's Greatest

Cate Blanchett has been nominated for six Academy Awards, taking home the statue twice (The Aviator and Blue Jasmine). In Carol, director Todd Haynes' adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1952 lesbian-romance novel, Blanchett has another monumental performance that will surely be in the mix for another nomination. She and costar Rooney Mara have had critics swooning ever since the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. But how will Carol compare to the actress's resume of nominated roles? EW slotted Carol in with her six most lauded performances.

7. Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

Blanchett once again donned Queen Elizabeth’s ruffled collar and white face paint for this rare historical sequel, nearly a decade after the original film won her her first Oscar nomination. If the first film chronicled her transformation from passionate young woman to commanding monarch, The Golden Age finds Queen Bess having secured her power at home and now struggling with threats abroad. Now faced with assassination attempts and the looming Spanish armada, Blanchett’s older, wiser Elizabeth is more regal than ever, rallying her troops with roaring speeches. Blanchett once again gives a powerful performance of a woman forced to choose between her own desires and the good of her country, making her the only actress to ever be nominated twice for the same role in two different films. —Devan Coggan

6. Notes on a Scandal (2006)

In this bombastically fun thriller, Judi Dench chews a small nation’s worth of scenery as an old witch of a schoolteacher who busts her colleague over a sexual affair with a 15-year-old student. Blanchett, as the offending teacher, has the very tricky assignment of making her character convincingly blind to Dench’s manipulations, while also engendering our sympathy even after she commits statutory rape. And on both counts, she jumps in deep, amplifying her character’s bohemian warmth and then graphically detailing how that can lead to terrible recklessness. The film has its detractors, but the brilliance of Blanchett’s performance is in how she never mistakes herself for the story's victim or its heroine. —Joe McGovern

5. The Aviator (2004)

Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic follows the Hollywood legend and aviation pioneer’s descent into paranoia and obsessive compulsion, but it also explores his turbulent romances with some of the silver screen’s biggest stars, including a pre-Spencer-Tracy Katharine Hepburn. Blanchett adopted the iconic actress’ fiery red hair and a pitch-perfect Bryn Mawr accent, becoming the only actor to win an Oscar for playing another Oscar winner. Opposite Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, Blanchett embodies Hepburn’s confident, fast-talking persona on screen while showing the tenderness and sadness of her off-screen relationship with the troubled billionaire. —DC

4. Elizabeth (1998)

After years on the Australian stage, Blanchett catapulted to global stardom and earned her first Oscar nod with Shekhar Kapur’s take on the legendary English monarch. Blanchett’s Elizabeth navigates romantic, religious, and political threats, and although she begins her reign as an inexperienced but passionate young royal, far from the chaste monarch she’s now known as, Elizabeth oversees her own metamorphosis, reshaping herself into the white-faced, steely-eyed Virgin Queen. Blanchett brings a vulnerability to the legendary queen, but she’s at her best when she’s authoritative, declaring, “I will have one mistress here, and no master,” with a stare that would bring any rival to his knees. —DC

3. I’m Not There (2007)

Weinstein Company/Courtesy Everett Collection

Of the six actors that director Todd Haynes employed to play variations on Bob Dylan, Blanchett, of course, attracted the most attention. But what might have been the film’s most preposterous stunt is actually it’s most blazing, resonate chapter. As a character named Jude Quinn, based on the temperamental mid-'60s Dylan, Blanchett makes for an absolutely uncanny doppelgänger, while also drilling deep into the needy, defensive, self-conscious brain of anyone in the painful thrall of what might very well be post-greatness. In her melancholy final moment onscreen, while smoking a cigarette in the back of a car, Blanchett looks directly into the camera and her eyes plead with us to understand that even a musical icon can feel the sting of failure. —JM

2. Carol (2015)

Fans of Blanchett’s last collaboration with Todd Haynes (in which she played Bob Dylan) will also marvel at the astonishing rhythms and brilliantly unnatural mannerisms that the actress displays as Carol, the suburban woman who falls in love with a shop girl in 1951. Blanchett speaks in an imperious, high-class tone and swans into rooms with the air of a woman who believes that she's holding herself together. Especially in two of the movie’s climactic scenes — one in a lawyer’s office (which you’ll likely be seeing as an Oscar clip) and the other in a restaurant, where her eyes serve as a beacon of dazzling promise — Blanchett delivers a magnificent whopper of a performances, undoubtedly one of the year’s best. —JM

1. Blue Jasmine (2013)

Sony Pictures Classics/Courtesy Everett Collection

In the years before this Woody Allen drama, for which she won her second Oscar, Blanchett had taken a hiatus from movies to work in theater, including a 2009 production of A Streetcar Named Desire. It was the perfect training for the tour de force display here, one of the great crack-ups in modern movies. Blanchett plays the once-wealthy wife to a Madoff-type shyster, now forced to live with her working-class sister, and the genius of her performance is in how scarily unpredictable and disturbingly odd it is to watch. With tiny, freaky physical gestures and an under-her-breath stream of babble, she paints a tragic portrait of a woman come spectacularly undone. —JM

Related Articles

We Care About Your Privacy

We and our partners process data to provide: