This statuesque beauty began her distinctive acting career as a student at Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art, after doing undergraduate study in art history and economics at Melbourne University. In Los Angeles Magazine, fellow Aussie thespian (and Elizabeth co-star) Geoffrey Rush recalled seeing Blanchett in a student production of Electra. "[My housemate] had alerted me that she had an astonishing young woman in her class, and I went to see the play," Rush related. "Indeed, she was an extraordinary performer."

Blanchett graduated from the NIDA in 1992 and began appearing on television and in theatrical productions staged at the Sydney Theatre Company, making her impact two years later playing the female lead in David Mamet's Oleanna. She considered the script to be such a "misogynistic piece of crap" that she was compelled to take the role on as a challenge, and she was rewarded for the effort with a Sydney Theatre Critics Circle Rosemount Award for Best Actress. The production also afforded the relative newcomer her first chance to work with one of her biggest fans, Geoffrey Rush.

After earning further praise for work in Hamlet and The Tempest, Blanchett essayed her first high-profile film, the 1997 Bruce Beresford feature, Paradise Road. Her next big-screen production, Oscar and Lucinda, placed Blanchett in the enviable position of love interest duty to Ralph Fiennes. The movie's theatrical trailer caught the attention of director Shekhar Kapur, who happened to be in the midst of a casting search for an actress capable of portraying Queen Elizabeth I as both a young woman and as a powerful monarch.

Thus, Blanchett jumped from the arms of Ralph to those of the actor's younger brother, Joseph, who portrayed Elizabeth's first love, Lord Robert Dudley. "I'm working my way through the Fiennes family," Blanchett told the Herald. Not that the actress is likely to succumb to such tempting leading men off-screen — she and her husband, Andrew Upton, wed in 1997, despite a less than auspicious start. "He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant," Blanchett confided to Vanity Fair in March 1999. "But once he kissed me, that was that." The couple endured an excruciating separation while Blanchett filmed Elizabeth, and now the two travel together whenever possible, living out of a suitcase "the size of a small African village."

In addition to her sketch of a poised, late-'50s socialite in Minghella's lavish noir The Talented Mr. Ripley, Blanchett appeared in two other films in 1999: Mike Newell's Pushing Tin, in which she played New Jersey housewife Connie Falzone and Miramax's Oscar Wilde adaptation An Ideal Husband, in which she portrayed Lady Gertrud Chiltern.

Next, Cate filmed a role as a Russian cabaret dancer in The Man Who Cried, which also stars John Turturro and Christina Ricci. Then it was off to New Zealand to portray elf queen Galadriel in Peter Jackson's ambitious attempt to simultaneously film all volumes of the Tolkien Lord of the Rings trilogy. The movies, which Jackson originally claimed would have few or no famous actors, now feature big names like Blanchett, Elijah Wood, Liv Tyler, and Ian McKellen.