Cate Blanchett was born on May 14, 1969, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, to June Gamble, an Australian teacher and property developer, and Robert DeWitt Blanchett, Jr., an American advertising executive from Texas. She has an older brother and a younger sister. When she was ten years old, her 40-year-old father died of a sudden heart attack, and her mother never remarried, with her grandmother moving in to help.
Blanchett graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1992 and quickly gained critical and popular acclaim. She won the Newcomer Award from the Sydney Theatre Critics Circle for her performance in "Top Girls" and the Rosemont Best Actress Award for her role in "Oleanna." She co-starred in the ABC Television drama "Heartland" and starred in "Bordertown" and "G.P."
Blanchett made her feature film debut in "Paradise Road" in 1997. She married writer Andrew Upton in 1997, after meeting him on a movie set a year earlier. They had two sons, Dashiell and Roman, and adopted a daughter, Edith, in 2015. Blanchett won numerous awards for her performance in the title role of "Elizabeth" in 1998, including the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama. She was also nominated for an Academy Award but lost to Gwyneth Paltrow.
In 2001, Blanchett starred in "Bandits," "The Shipping News," "Charlotte Gray," and played Elf Queen Galadriel in the "Lord Of The Rings" trilogy. She also gave birth to her first child, son Dashiell, that year. In 2004, she gave birth to her second son Roman and played actress Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's film "The Aviator," for which she received an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress.
In 2006, Blanchett received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for playing a teacher having an affair with an underage student in "Notes on a Scandal." She was nominated for another Oscar that same year as Best Supporting Actress for playing Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There." In 2007, she returned to the role that made her a star in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," earning an Oscar nomination as Best Actress.
