Gifted actors whose passionate but tragic romance was cut short by death

By Mahlia Lone

Everyone knows that Meryl Streep is the best actress of her generation and that she has been nominated for a record breaking 20 Academy Awards for acting and has won three so far. Gifted with an uncanny ability to mimic accents and with an inherent capability to transform herself into any character, there is another factor that has raised her acting ability above that of her peers. Actors generally tap into the pain in their personal lives to add depth to a dramatic role. Because she lived through a great tragic romance early on in her life before she hit it big as an actress, she was able to bring this combination of vulnerability, fragility, acute sadness and fortitude not only to her next role in Kramer vs. Kramer but also to many others in her career, like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sophie’s Choice, Out of Africa, The Bridges of Madison County, etc. This is the story not of her happy marriage, but her earlier tragic romance that changed her forever and contributed to making her the exceptional actress we all adore

The first born of artist Mary Wolf Wilkinson and pharmaceutical executive Harry William Streep Jr., Meryl was named Mary Louise Streep at birth. She was born in New Jersey in 1949 and was followed by two brothers. Her father had German Swiss ancestry, while her mother belonged to a family of 17th-century English-Irish immigrants who were amongst the first to settle and purchase land in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Her direct maternal ancestor Lawrence Wilkinson was one of the first Europeans settlers in Rhode Island. Another ancestor, William Penn was the founder of Pennsylvania. In the U.S. such families of early settlers are looked upon highly and considered “old, landed gentry.”

Mary Louise, a popular but shy girl, appeared in school plays and was the cheerleader at Bernards High School. Meryl recalled her mother encouraging and motivating her by saying, “You’re capable. You’re so great. You can do whatever you put your mind to. If you’re lazy, you’re not going to get it done. But if you put your mind to it, you can do anything.”

An intelligent, driven girl, she attended the prestigious Vassar College where she appeared in the college production of Miss Julie. Her drama professor Clinton J Atkinson said, “I don’t think anyone ever taught Meryl acting. She really taught herself.” She quickly became known for her ability to mimic accents and to effortlessly memorize her lines, a big requirement for an actor. After earning her BA degree cum laude (with honours) in 1971, she started her MFA from the Yale School of Drama.

Meryl Streep was a high school cheerleader

here, she appeared in over a dozen plays in diverse roles varying from Helena in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy. Her first professional job after receiving her degree from Yale in 1975 was at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference during which she acted in an incredible five plays in just six weeks. Armed with a sound background in theatre, Meryl moved to New York City and was cast in Measure for Measure opposite John Cazale, fourteen years her senior and already a respected theatre and film actor.

John Cazale was born and bred in Massachusetts. He had Irish ancestry from his mother’s side and Italian from his father’s. Cazale had also studied drama at Oberlin College and Boston University, after which he moved to New York City and became friends with another aspiring actor, Al Pacino, with whom he lived in a communal house.

Cazale possessed unusual looks – a slim frame, high forehead, prominent nose and sad eyes. Pacino reminisced, “When I first saw John, I instantly thought he was so interesting. Everybody was always around him because he had a very congenial way of expressing himself.”

Young John Cazale

Of the six movies Cazale starred in (including through archive footage in Godfather Part III) all were nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and three won, a unique feat on his part

The two friends were cast in Israel Horovitz’s play, The Indian Wants the Bronx, for which they both won Obie Awards, given to off-Broadway productions, for the1967-1968 season. Cazale also played the lead in Horovitz’s Line. In this, he was noticed by a casting director who suggested him to director Francis Ford Coppola for his epic gangster movie Godfather (1972). Cazale plays the feeble-minded older brother Fredo to Pacino’s Michael Carleone. The film later became a cult classic and broke box office records making the newcomer famous overnight.

Al Pacino,Marlon Brando, James Caan, , & John Cazale in The Godfather (1972)

The Godfather Part II

Pleased with the success, Coppola cast Cazale opposite Gene Hackman in his psychological mystery thriller The Conversation, which won the Palm d’Or at the ’74 Cannes Film Festival.

Next, Cazale reprised his role as Fredo Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974). Film critic Bruce Fretts wrote in Entertainment Weekly, “Cazale’s devastatingly raw turn intensifies the impact of the drama’s emotional climax.”

With Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon

With Gene Hackman in The Conversation

Dominic Chianese who plays Ola in the second installment of the trilogy spoke about the depth with which he inhabited a role: “John could open up his heart, so it could be hurt. That’s a talent few actors have.”

Cazale again starred alongside Pacino in Sidney Lumet’s 1975 crime drama Dog Day Afternoon, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe award. Lumet said, “One of the things that I love about the casting of John Cazale was that he had a tremendous sadness about him. I don’t know where it came from; I don’t believe in invading the privacy of the actors that I work with, or getting into their heads. But, my God — it’s there — every shot of him. And not just in this movie, but in Godfather II also.”

Michael Schulman relates the story of how Cazale and Meryl met in his biography of the actress, Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep. The 27 year old ingénue met Cazale, the more established and well respected 41 year old actor, during an audition for New York City’s famed Shakespeare in the Park in 1976. They had great chemistry together and she was cast opposite him in Measure for Measure in Central Park. Their instant connection was obvious to their cast mates and director Joe Papp. The relationship became so intensely physical that Meryl’s consistently chapped lips were noticed by the crew on a regular basis.
It was love at first sight for both of them. “Once Cazale was in that play,” actor Marvin Starkman said, “the only thing he talked about was her.”

“He wasn’t like anybody I’d ever met. It was the specificity of him, and his sort of humanity and his curiosity about people, his compassion,” remembered Meryl later.

Though not a huge star, Cazale was considered “a rare talent, in demand among the great directors of the era.” He was known among directors as “20 Questions,” because he wanted a detailed back story of the character he would be portraying.
“Time moved differently for John Cazale. Everything went slower. He wasn’t dim, not by a long shot. But he was meticulous, sometimes maddeningly so.” Pacino described having dinner with Cazale, “I mean, you’d be done — washed, finished and in bed –before he got halfway through his meal. Then the cigar would come out (Cuban of course). He’d look at it, light it, taste it. Then finally smoke it.”

In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Central Park, 1976

At the 75th birthday party for the legendary
Lee Strasberg, the father of method acting in America and director of the Actors Studio

Meryl Streep in NYC’s Theater District,1978

Cazale introduced his best buddy Pacino to his new girlfriend whom he raved about. However, Pacino thought his friend was simply infatuated, “I didn’t go see (the play) but I met her with him and she seemed alright, a bit shy.”

According to film critic Bruce Fretts, Cazale “was the walking embodiment of the aphorism, ‘acting is reacting,’ providing the perfect counterbalance to his recurring co-stars, the more emotionally volatile Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.” Cazale was the perfect foil to his fellow actors and brought out the best in them

Cazale was also described as “shy and emotionally sensitive” by those who knew him well. Though he was famous, money was still tight. Cazale would take Meryl to dinner in Little Italy, where restaurant owners that were fans of The Godfather franchise wouldn’t dream of accepting payment from Fredo Corleone.

“They were great to look at, because they were kind of funny-looking, both of them,” said the playwright Israel Horovitz. “They were lovely in their way, but it was a really quirky couple. They were head-turners, but not because, ‘Wow, is she a beauty!’ ”

“The romance moved as fast as John moved slow.” Soon Meryl moved in to Cazale’s loft on Franklin Street, Tribeca. He promised to marry her as soon as he got his first big break. “They were the envy of the New York theater world,” writes Schulman. Both were naturally gifted actors with legendary director Joe Papp as their patron. All was well until one day in May 1977, Cazale, who was starring in Agamemnon, had been feeling ill enough to miss performances. Papp got him an emergency appointment with his own Upper East Side doctor. The doctor called in Meryl, Cazale, Joe and Gail Papp after the tests results came in. Cazale had terminal metastasized lung cancer. Gail Papp recalled, feeling “like you’ve been struck dead on the spot.”
“John fell silent. For a moment, so did Meryl. But she was never one to give up, and certainly not one to succumb to despair….She looked up and said, ‘So, where should we go to dinner?’”

John Cazale, Robert De Niro and John Savage in The Deer Hunter

John Cazale, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter

While Cazale had to immediately quit the play, Meryl, the consummate professional, who was starring in the musical Happy End showed no sign of anxiety or grief. The show must always go on. Cazale visited her at the theater still smoking his cigars. She didn’t nag or criticize him, but simply made her dressing room off-limits to smokers. The most subtle of hints!

Riding the subway

“She had a kind of tough love,” actor Christopher Lloyd said, “and didn’t let him malinger.” The two lovers tried to keep the severity of his condition between them. Even Cazale’s brother, Stephen, didn’t realize how sick his brother was until one day after the three of them had been lunching in Chinatown, Cazale spat up blood on the sidewalk. Al Pacino took him to radiation treatments and would sit patiently in the waiting room and Cazale would insist he’d get better.

The Gummers

Though mortally ill, Cazale took a role in Vietnam War drama The Deer Hunter, opposite Robert De Niro. Finding out about the extent of his illness, neither the filmmakers nor the production company, EMI, wanted to cast Cazale. It was risky bringing an actor on board who could die on them during filming, his insurance cost would be too high and the film would look dated with a dead star. “I was told that unless I got rid of John, (they) would shut down the picture,” director Michael Cimino said later. “It was awful. I spent hours on the phone, yelling and screaming and fighting.”

In the end, De Niro himself covered the cost of Cazale’s insurance, which the actor has never confirmed or denied. “He was sicker than we thought, but I wanted him to be in it,” De Niro later said.

Meryl also took a role in the film just to be close to her dying boyfriend, though she didn’t think highly of the role of the token “girl” in the movie. Her character was “essentially a man’s view of a woman. She’s extremely passive, she’s very quiet, she’s someone who’s constantly vulnerable,” Meryl said.

They filmed Cazale’s scenes first while he still had the strength and somehow with the actors and director rallying behind him, they managed to get through his part of the shoot. As the shoot wrapped up and the film went into post production, Meryl had no choice but to accept the lead role of a German woman married to a Jewish artist in Nazi era Germany in the nine-hour TV miniseries Holocaust to help pay Cazale’s mounting medical bills. All she really wanted to do was be by his side. But the filming was in Austria and Germany, and Cazale was too weak to leave NYC. Streep never complained, outwardly she was all “cheery professionalism,” but inwardly she quietly agonized. “The material was unrelentingly noble but grim,” she later said. They shot on location at an actual concentration camp, which she found even more disturbing and depressing. The shoot went over schedule and she spent 2½ months in Austria, longer than she’d been told. She felt like that each day they were separated was another day lost forever. “I was going crazy. John was sick, and I wanted to be with him.”

“She was very anxious to do her very last scene and then zip back out,” director Marvin Chomsky said. “I mean, I don’t even think we had a moment to say goodbye.”

When Meryl returned to New York, Cazale was even worse than she had expected. For the next five months, Meryl focused on taking care of Cazale and accompanying him to chemotherapy treatments, morphing from lover to nurse. “Meryl stayed by his side every single moment,” The Deer Hunter director Cimino said. “By her devotion to John, I knew she had great courage.”
During his final days, Meryl stood by his bedside in their Manhattan apartment constantly, performing comedic routines and reading from the newspaper putting on different accents. “She took care of him like there was nobody else on earth,” Joe Papp said of Streep’s commitment to Cazale. “She never betrayed him in his presence or out of his presence, never betrayed any notion that he would not survive. He knew he was dying, the way a dying man knows it. She gave him tremendous hope.” His cancer had spread to the bones, a very painful stage, and he was increasingly weak. She went with him to every doctor’s appointment, every radiation treatment and never betrayed a lack of hope. “She was always a strong-willed, persistent, hopeful person, and I think she just applied all her spirit and strength to taking care of him. She wasn’t one to create drama around it or draw attention to herself. She just bore down and did what needed to be done.” Everyone was astounded by the strength of character, devotion and fortitude such a young woman showed.

“I was so close that I didn’t really notice the deterioration,” Meryl later said that being alone with him helped her cope with what was to be the final parting.

Meryl wrote to her Yale drama teacher Bobby Lewis, of her true emotional state, “My beau is terribly ill and sometimes, as now, in the hospital, he has very wonderful care and I try not to stand around wringing my hands, but I am worried all the time and pretending to be cheery all the time, which is more exhausting mentally physically emotionally than any work I’ve ever done.”

In early March 1978, Cazale was admitted to Memorial Sloan Kettering. Meryl kept vigil at his bedside. “When I saw that girl there with him like that I thought, ‘There’s nothing like that,’” Al Pacino recalled. “As great as she is in all her work, that’s what I think of when I think of her.”

A few days later, one night, his doctor told her softly, “He’s gone.”

“Meryl wasn’t ready to hear it, much less believe it. What happened next, by some accounts, was the culmination of all the tenacious hope Meryl had kept alive for the past 10 months. She pounded on his chest, sobbing, and for a brief, alarming moment, John opened his eyes. ‘It’s all right, Meryl,’ he said weakly. ‘It’s all right.’ Then he closed his eyes and died. Streep’s first call was to Cazale’s brother, Stephen. She sobbed throughout. ‘I tried,’ she told him.”

Actor James Woods, who was in The Holocaust with Meryl, recounted “Cazale was lucky enough to have as the last vision of his life, Meryl’s lovely face.”

John Cazale was buried at the Holy Cross Cemetery in his hometown in Massachusetts. The Deer Hunter hadn’t even premiered yet, a film he had fought so hard to work in despite his prognosis.

Pacino sighed, “All I wanted to do was work with John for the rest of my life. He was my acting partner.”

The Boston Globe ran a story about his legend: “Why was Cazale so influential? In part, it was because of his commitment to the craft of acting.” Meryl was quoted saying he was “monomaniacal” where his craft was concerned and this “challenged his co-stars to take their own game up a notch.” Cazale appeared in archive footage in The Godfather Part III (1990), 12 years after his death. The Godfather Part III was also nominated for Best Picture, so every feature film in which he has starred in has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, quite a unique achievement. His image was also used posthumously in the Godfather video game. Broadway’s McGinn/Cazale Theatre was named after him and he was celebrated in the documentary film, I Knew It Was You, directed by Richard Shepard, which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

After his death, a grieving Meryl went to stay with a friend in Canada not able to bear the apartment she had shared with him. When she returned, she had to vacate the apartment, so her brother arrived to help her move with his friend sculptor Don Gummer, also a Yale alumni, who gallantly offered his own Soho apartment to stay in while he was travelling. They started corresponding through letters and she realized he wanted to be more than her friend. “Meryl was shattered by John Cazale’s death and I did what I could to help and pretty quickly I realised I was falling in love with her,” Gummer confessed later.

1978 was an eventful year for her career wise as well. Despite not liking her role, the subsequent success of The Deer Hunter not only exposed Streep to a wider audience but also earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her performance in Holocaust, which 109 million viewers had watched, bringing her greater visibility.

Despite the awards success, she was still not enthusiastic towards her film career and preferred theatre. Hoping to divert herself from the grief of Cazale’s death, she wanted to keep busy. She performed the role of Katherine in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew for Shakespeare in the Park, bringing greater insight and a different interpretation to the role. She argued that Kate was not an independent woman broken by a man but one who learns the deep satisfaction of giving herself over to love. “What I’m saying is, ‘I’ll do anything for this man. Look, would there be any hang-up if this were a mother talking about her son? Service is the only thing that’s important about love. Everybody is worried about ‘losing yourself’ — all this narcissism. Duty. We can’t stand that idea now either….But duty might be a suit of armor you put on to fight for your love,” she told a reporter.
Just six months after Cazale’s death, Don and Meryl were married in the garden of her parents’ home in September 1978. Her friends, family and even her mother were concerned that the relationship was of a rebound nature coming so soon after Cazale’s death. But Meryl was adamant saying, “I haven’t got over John’s death, but I’ve got to go on living and Don has showed me how to do that.” Her instincts were spot on.

Streep was cast in her breakout role Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) at the same time. “Imagine losing the love of your life, then finding your husband and starring in your first big movie role all at the same time. It’s just crazy,” writes Schulman.

“The death is still very much with me. It has forced me to confront my own mortality, and once you do that, you look at things differently,” Meryl said. And she had become profoundly different as global audiences were about to find out.

At the audition, the film’s male lead Dustin Hoffman said he realized that Meryl Streep was perfect for the role of Joanna because he knew she had lost John Cazale only months earlier, and clearly she was still shaken to the core. Here was an actress who could draw on a fresh pain, who was herself in the thick of emotional turmoil. It was Meryl’s weakness not her strength that convinced him.

The film’s director Robert Benton recalled, “She said a few things, not much. And she just listened. She was polite and nice, but it was—she was just barely there. There was a fragile quality she had that made us think that this was Joanna, without making her neurotic. Meryl’s Joanna wasn’t neurotic, but she was vulnerable, frail.”

Streep, however, has a totally different version of events, and told Ms. magazine that she impressed the directors by telling them exactly how to fix the script. Joanna is an unhappily married woman who abandons her husband and child. Meryl thought that the script portrayed the female character as “too evil” and insisted that it was not a true representation of the real women who faced marriage breakdowns and child custody battles. She did extensive research for the role by observing mothers and children interact in the Upper East Side parks since she hadn’t had any children of her own by then. The filmmakers agreed to the script revisions suggested by her and Benton even allowed her to pen her own dialogue in two key scenes, despite Hoffman’s reported objections.

Filming with Hoffman, himself in the midst of separating from his first wife Anne Byrne—a case of life imitating art—posed a challenge for Meryl due to his intense method acting techniques. Schulman elaborates: “On the second day, they continued shooting the opening scene, when Ted follows the hysterical Joanna into the hallway. They shot the bulk of it in the morning and, after lunch, set up for some reaction shots. Dustin and Meryl took their positions on the other side of the apartment door. Then something happened that shocked not just Meryl but everyone on set. Right before their entrance, Dustin slapped her hard across the cheek, leaving a red mark. Always a professional, Streep continued on with the scene without making a commotion, but Hoffman wasn’t done. In a later scene where Joanna tells Ted she’s leaving him, Hoffman took to extreme measures to get the emotion he wanted from Streep. Improvising his lines, Dustin delivered a slap of a different sort: outside the elevator, he started taunting Meryl about John Cazale, jabbing her with remarks about his cancer and his death. ‘He was goading her and provoking her,’ producer Richard Fischoff recalled, ‘using stuff that he knew about her personal life and about John to get the response that he thought she should be giving in the performance.’ Hoffman brought up Cazale’s death again in a courtroom scene and made Streep’s eyes tear up when he whispered her late boyfriend’s name in her ear.”

Dustin Hoffman & Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer

Mery Streep & Dustin Hoffman both won Oscars for Kramer vs. Kramer

The stars meet Queen Elizabeth II in a special royal screening of the film in London in 1980

By the time shooting wrapped up, Hoffman admitted, “She’s extraordinarily hardworking, to the extent that she’s obsessive. I think that she thinks about nothing else but what she’s doing.” But the lead pair’s relationship had become so tense and strained during filming that producers feared the movie would be a disaster. As it turns out it was a resounding success, raking in more than $106 million at the box office, even beating out Star Trek. Film critic Stephen Farber raved that Joanna displayed Meryl’s “own emotional intensity” and that she was one of the “rare performers who can imbue the most routine moments with a hint of mystery.” Kramer vs. Kramer got nine Academy Award nominations and won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor for Hoffman and Best Supporting Actress for Streep, which she famously left in the ladies room after giving her speech. A star was born, but at quite a personal cost.

With Jeremy Irons in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

In Sophie’s Choice

Accepting her second Oscar for Sophie’s Choice in 1983

With Robert Redford in Out of Africa

In the next decade, Meryl Streep’s career went from strength to strength. She was featured on the cover of Newsweek with the headline “A Star for the 80s.” In the story within a story drama of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) in which she is paired with English actor Jeremy Irons, she puts on a cut glass English accent. She was awarded a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her effort. In Sophie’s Choice (1982), she portrays a Polish Jew at a death camp faced with the unimaginable dilemma of choosing which of her two children lives, only to ultimately lose both. William Styron had written the novel with Ursula Andress in mind for the role of Sophie, but Meryl was determined to play the part. She filmed the harrowing “choice” scene when her character is ordered by an SS guard at Auschwitz to choose which one of her two children would be gassed and which would proceed to the labor camp in one take and refused to do it again, finding it extremely painful and emotionally exhausting. Emma Brockes wrote in The Guardian, “It’s classic Streep, the kind of scene that makes your scalp tighten, but defter in a way is her handling of smaller, harder-to-grasp emotions.” Doubtlessly, she knew how to make hard choices and the feeling of helplessness and acute loss. She won her second Oscar for this tragedy. This was voted the third greatest movie performance of all time by Premiere magazine.

With Clint Eastwood in The Bridges of Madison County

Roger Ebert critiqued, “There is hardly an emotion that Streep doesn’t touch in this movie, and yet we’re never aware of her straining. This is one of the most astonishing and yet one of the most unaffected and natural performances I can imagine.”
Meryl’s next big release was yet another tragedy, Out of Africa (1985). In the film, she stars as the Danish writer Karen Blixen opposite Robert Redford’s Denys Finch Hatton. Director Sydney Pollack was initially dubious thinking she wasn’t sexy enough, and had wanted the much prettier but banal Jane Seymour to play the part. Pollack said Meryl impressed him not with her beauty but with her strength of character and forthrightness: “She was so direct, so honest, so without bullshit. There was no shielding between her and me.” The two reportedly often clashed during the 101-day shoot in Kenya. Meryl had spent much time listening to tapes of Blixen and began speaking in an old-fashioned and aristocratic fashion, which Pollack thought was too affected. However, she was right yet again. The film was not only a box office winner but won the Oscar for the Best Picture as well.

Her third Oscar win for The Iron Lady in 2012

In her acceptance speech when she won her third Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Meryl honoured her husband, “First I’m going to thank Don…And I want him to know that everything I value most in our lives you’ve given me”

Critic Stanley Kaufmann wrote, “Meryl Streep’s performance in Out of Africa is at the highest level of acting in film today.” The scene where she had to calmly and in a dignified manner meet a line of servants in the intense African heat was filmed in one long take. After giving her take, to everyone’s surprise she tore off her dress to reveal an enormous insect that had been crawling around inside, such was her dedication, commitment and focus. Her salary went up to $4 million per film after Out of Africa’s critical and commercial success.

With Hillary Clinton, a personal friend

A feminist, staunch Democrat and vocal Trump critic

Her next most successful film was the romance The Bridges of Madison County (1995) directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, who adapted the film from Robert James Waller’s novel. It tells the story of a photographer working for the National Geographic, who has a love affair with a middle-aged Italian farm wife in Iowa. Her strong yet subtle performance was “crucial to transforming what could have been a weak soap opera into a vibrant work of historical fiction implicitly critiquing postwar America’s stifling culture of domesticity,” according to author Karina Longworth. She considers it to have been the role in which Streep became “arguably the first middle-aged actress to be taken seriously by Hollywood as a romantic heroine.” The reason the film touched a chord in middle aged women everywhere is because her character sacrifices her happiness ultimately, but allows herself the luxury of just a single night. You see her tussling with herself over this and you really empathise with her character and the bravery and stoicism she shows. Again, she had delved in her repertoire of personal feelings.

Streep has taken to playing countlesscomedic and a few musical roles in her later career. Perhaps this is due to the fact that she is so happy and secure in her personal life. Despite her “high level of stardom” for decades, Longworth reiterates that Meryl has managed to maintain a relatively normal and stable personal life, being married for nearly 40 years now.
Don has made a name for himself in art circles and they have four creative children: musician Henry (born 1979), actresses Mamie (born 1983) and Grace (born 1986), and model Louisa (born 1991). Their family home is in Connecticut where their vast property even has a 47 acre lake. However, they try to maintain a down to earth manner.

In every role she plays, Meryl Streep honours John Cazale’s memory by emulating his ability to inhabit a role and letting the pain of her loss elevate her performances. She admitted how Cazale’s death profoundly transformed her and will remain a part of her, “I didn’t get over it. I don’t want to get over it. No matter what you do, the pain is always there in some recess of your mind, and it affects everything that happens afterwards. I think you can assimilate the pain and go on without making an obsession of it.”

Accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award at this year’s Golden Globes, Meryl honoured her recently deceased friend the Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher in her acceptance speech by echoing her words, ‘’Take Your Broken Heart, Make It Into Art’’ just as she has done herself.

To be a supportive partner, or worse a second fiddle, is not something most men can sustain given the size and fragility of their egos, especially if the wife happens to be as big a star as Cate Blanchett. For two decades now theatre director, playwright and screenwriter, Andrew Upton has successfully remained in his wife’s shadow without any resentment on his part, making this one of the most solid of any showbiz marriages

With skin as fine as porcelain, an aristocratic carriage combined with self deprecating wit, uber stylish, impossibly intelligent and talented, Cate Blanchett effortlessly counts as the actress’ of her generation. At the same time, she’s the mother to four children and has been married to Andrew Upton since 1997. This is their story.

Born Catherine Elise Blanchett in 1969 in Melbourne, Cate is the middle of three children of a U.S Naval officer and a teacher, who met when his ship broke down while berthed in the city. Texan Robert DeWitt Blanchett Jr. fell in love with June Gamble, quit the Navy and settled down in Australia, working as an advertising executive. Tragically, he died of a heart attack when Cate was only 10. After the death of her husband, June gave up her job as a teacher and got her property developer certification to earn more money and be able to afford her children’s private school fees.

“She was very resilient,” Blanchett said in an interview to Xan Brooks of The Guardian, “and my grandmother lived with us so I grew up in a matriarchal household. As a child, you incorporate those losses, those hurdles, those moments of grief or challenge or whatever it is. We all have them. My life has been relatively privileged, but I think perhaps I developed enormous empathetic connection with my mother because I could see the hurdles – financial and emotional – that she had to get over. But she was determined that we would have a good education, for which I’m incredibly grateful. Not that I did massively well at school, but I had a lot of fantastic experiences there.”

“Part extrovert, part wallflower” during childhood by her own admission, Cate liked to dress as a boy at the Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School and went through goth and punk phases during her teenage years, even shaving her head. “It was deeply uncool to be white, particularly in Australia,” she told a journalist at The Huffington Post. “I was 10 or 11, and I was desperate to have a tan. I would put baby oil on my skin then go out on a tin roof. I would think it was a great day if I came down looking the color of beetroot. One day my mother came up, took the baby oil away, said come down and gave me a talk. She was a big Oil of Olay, moisturise your neck, moisturise your hands type of woman. She said, ‘don’t do it.’ So I became a goth instead. That was the downside of her advice, but I had to find some kind of expression for it.”

As a tomboyish little girl

Cate was a student at NIDA, Sydney

Andrew and Cate got married in their twenties

At the Methodist Ladies’ College, Melbourne, she channeled her creativity into the performing arts, quickly developing a passion. “Our school plays were all devised by the students, and if we were doing Macbeth, then the girls took turns in playing Macbeth as well as Lady Macbeth because they wanted us to have that Shakespearean experience.”

Dropping out of the University of Melbourne after only a year to travel abroad, Cate was by chance offered an extra’s role of an American cheerleader in a boxing movie, Kaboria, while in Egypt, but she said she got so bored on the set that she quit despite needing the money to pay rent and wanting the free falafel that they were serving on set.

Upon her return to Australia, she moved to Sydney and enrolled in the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) from which she graduated in 1992. “Acting had become like this terrible addiction. I felt I needed to give it five years and see where it took me,” she told Brooks. She played the difficult role of Clytemnestra in the classical Greek tragedy Sophocles’ Electra while still a student at NIDA and her performance became one of the most acclaimed at the institute. Right after graduation, she starred opposite the thespian Geoffrey Rush in David Mamet’s play Oleanna for the Sydney Theatre Company for which in 1993 she won the Best Actress award. She also received the Sydney Theatre Critics’ Best Newcomer Award for her performance in Timothy Daly’s Kafka Dances, making her the first actor to win both categories in the same year. Then, she played another challenging role successfully that of Ophelia in a production of Hamlet. Soon she started accepting roles in TV shows. On the set of one TV show in her mid twenties, she met Andrew Upton, three years her senior.

Andrew had grown up in Sydney, the son of a doctor and a nurse and after seeing Harold Pinter’s Betrayal on a school trip at 16 he wrote his first play. “It was called The Plumber, a Pinteresque title, without any of the skill, depth or capacity… I knew I didn’t want to act – I tried it at school and it just wasn’t my bag,” he recounted in an interview for the Independent. At university in Sydney, he joined the drama society, before he formally started studying directing and playwriting in Melbourne. Hitting a “brick wall” career-wise with theatre, he went into film to earn a living, spending a decade working as an assistant editor for films such as the charming children’s film Babe as well as TV shows. He met Cate while working on Thank God He Met Lizzie in 1996 – “I’d already met her socially because the theatre world is fairly small but then the relationship developed.”

Her metamorphosis from a young, romantic Princess to the Virgin Queen is a work of art

“We didn’t like each other for a long time – about 17 years!” Cate said on The Ellen Degeneres Show. “We knew each other socially and we didn’t really get on.” But then one night they bonded over a poker game. When Ellen asked if alcohol had been involved, Cate said, “There wasn’t actually alcohol – oh no, there was alcohol involved—alcohol and gambling. And then we got tattooed.” And that’s how they initially bonded. After just three days of intense dating, Cate knew Andrew was the one – and she realized this while in bed with him. “We were in bed, as you are after three days, and he said, ‘Cate,’ and I thought, ‘S— he’s gonna ask me to marry him and I’m gonna have to say yes.” Luckily, it was a false alarm. “And then he said, ‘No, I’m hungry, do you want to go get something to eat?’” recalled Cate, laughing. But fast-forward less than a month and Upton was ready to put a ring on it. “Then he asked me after about 21 days and I said yes,” revealed Blanchett. It all happened due to her cooking skills, or lack thereof. “I cooked him the worst meal. I somehow decided that to stuff a trout with walnuts and goat’s cheese would be a good idea,” she said. “He ate it and then he asked me to marry him, so clearly he was, I don’t know, hallucinating. He realized I couldn’t cook.” So it was after those three days – and that horrible meal – that sealed the deal. “You give them food poisoning,” she joked. “They’re delirious, and then you’ve got them!”

With Matt Damon in the gorgeous The Talented Mr. Ripley

If her cooking couldn’t warn him off, neither could her choice of underwear, she modestly claimed, “People would be horrified if they could see my underwear drawer. I swear to God, the only reason I take jobs and do photo shoots is so I can get more underpants,” she told Jodi Gugliemi at PEOPLE magazine, laughing. “I still have underpants my mother made me in high school. I just – something about going to the lingerie section, I don’t know what – I get overwhelmed, I never know what to buy. So I have the most embarrassing, embarrassing underwear.”

They developed an instant connection, and married soon afterwards in 1997. “I think marriage is all about timing. Getting married is insanity; I mean, it’s a risk – who knows if you’re going to be together forever? But you both say, ‘We’re going to take this chance, in the same spirit. Getting married is insanity!”

At the time of her wedding, Cate was also making her feature film debut first with a supporting role as an Australian nurse captured by the Japanese Army during World War II in Bruce Beresford’s film Paradise Road, co-starring Glenn Close and Frances McDormand, and then in the lead in the romantic drama Oscar and Lucinda (1997), opposite the hunky Ralph Fiennes, fresh from his success with The English Patient. I remember watching her in these movies, she effortlessly held her own acting-wise and had the screen presence of a bona fide star, so her name and face stayed with me. Her next movie role made her an international breakout star.

Her first high-profile international role was in Shekhar Kapur directed Elizabeth (1998), portraying the Virgin Queen in a powerful performance that showed how the young Queen transitioned from being a girl to a formidable monarch. Her metamorphosis was so masterful that it earned her a Golden Globe Award, British Academy Award (BAFTA), and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. “I was shocked,” she recalled in an interview. “You know, I called my agent after making Elizabeth and said, ‘I think I’ve ended my career before it’s even begun.’ So yeah, I was completely shocked by how that film was received.”

Back in Australia, Cate and Andrew formed their own film production company, Dirty Films, the first project of which was the short film Bangers (1999), part of Stories of Lost Souls, a compilation of thematically-related short stories, which he wrote and directed, she starred in and they jointly produced. She also appeared in the comedy Pushing Tin (1999), co-starring Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie in which film critics remarked that Cate stole the show, but the other two stars hooking up grabbed the headlines. She was a part of the ensemble star cast for Anthony Minghella’s gorgeous remake The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), starring Jude Law Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Then, Cate scored a recurring role in a blockbuster fantasy trilogy, Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning, The Lord of the Rings. The trilogy holds the record as the highest-grossing film trilogy of all time and Cate got a chance to really expand her fan base. In the middle of all this filmmaking, Superwoman Cate gave birth to the couple’s first baby, Dashiell John in 2001 followed by Roman Robert in 2004.

Playing Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings trilogy

In 2005, she won her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her terrific portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator opposite Leonardo DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes, giving her the distinction of becoming the first actor to get an Academy Award for playing an Oscar-winning actor. To support her country’s film industry, she loaned her Oscar statue to The Australian Centre for the Moving Image. That year, talented Cate also won the Australian Film Institute Best Actress Award for playing a very different role, that of a former heroin addict, in the Australian film Little Fish, which was co-produced by Dirty Films and nominated for 13 Australian Film Institute awards. In 2006, she starred opposite Brad Pitt in the multi-lingual, multi-narrative ensemble drama Babel, directed by the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu that received seven Academy Award nominations, the Steven Soderbergh-directed World War II drama The Good German opposite George Clooney, and the psychological thriller Notes on a Scandal with Dame Judi Dench for which Cate Blanchett received her third Academy Award nomination for her performance.

As Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire

Tobey Maguire, George Clooney & Cate Blanchett in The Good German

With Dame Judi Dench in Notes on a Scandal

Playing Bob Dylan in I’m Not There

A bankrupt, alcoholic, bipolar WASP in Blue Jasmine

In Benjamin Button

With Rooney Mara in Carol As Lady Tremine in Cinderella

In her speech at the 2006 Women in Hollywood event, presenting Cate with the Icon Award, Judi Dench, herself an awe inspiring actress, said of her co-star, “When we came to work, I realized of course that Cate has a fierce intelligence, an unbelievable integrity. Her powers of concentration are phenomenal. Above all, she has a great sense of humour which I think is the most important thing to have and she is a phenomenal family person. The fact that she is working on something with an incredible intensity and at the same time can completely switch off and become a member of an incredibly close family with her children and her husband. When I saw her playing Elizabeth, it was one of those rare moments that I forgot I was watching an actress and I believed I was watching a real person who had actually lived and existed in history. I think Cate is the most extraordinary actress and I’m thrilled we did this movie together.” High praise indeed!

Meanwhile, Upton had started to earn a name for himself adapting classics for the stage, such as Maxim Gorky’s The Philistines for London’s Royal National Theatre. After living in the seaside town of Brighton, England for a decade while she established her international film career, the couple decided to return to their native Australia in 2006. Cate said that they wanted a permanent home for their boys, be closer to their family, and contribute to the Australian theatrical community. Perhaps having devoted a decade pursuing her dreams, it was time that the couple focused on furthering Upton’s theatrical career. They chose the upscale Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill where they bought a mansion, which underwent extensive renovations to be made more eco-friendly in line with their ecological beliefs. But Upton’s original play Riflemind, staged at the Sydney Theatre Company, about an ageing rock star planning a comeback tour closed quickly due to a poor response.
In 2007, Blanchett was named as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the world and one of the most successful actresses by Forbes magazine. That year she was on top of her game appearing in two remarkably different roles: reprising her role as Queen Elizabeth I in the sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age, as well as portraying one of six incarnations of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ experimental film I’m Not There, for which she won the Volpi Cup Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival, the Independent Spirit and Golden Globe Best Supporting Actress Award for her portrayal of Jude Quinn. At the 80th Academy Awards, she received two Academy Award nominations – Best Actress for Elizabeth: the Golden Age and Best Supporting Actress for I’m Not There – becoming the eleventh actor to receive two acting nominations in the same year, and the first female actor to receive another nomination for the reprisal of a role. Famous film critic Roger Ebert said, “That Blanchett could appear in the same Toronto International Film Festival playing Elizabeth and Bob Dylan, both splendidly, is a wonder of acting”.

Living the normal life–at an amusement park with her boys

She next gave a villainous turn in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, becoming Spielberg’s favorite villain from the entire series, and played a ballerina in David Fincher’s Oscar-nominated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, appearing opposite Brad Pitt for a second time. In 2008, she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 2008, the couple took over as joint artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company (STC). While Cate took time off to give birth that year to their third son Ignatius Martin, Upton’s theatrical career flourished as a playwright, adapting Hedda Gabler, The Cherry Orchard, Cyrano de Bergerac, Don Juan, The Maids and Children of the Sun, etc. for the STC.  He spoke about their decision to head the company, “We both trained in Australia and we know everyone, it’s a very small world. When you grow up in a country you’ve kind of got an investment in it. Without wanting to sound like a terrible politician, the most important thing that we do is our family. We’ve always worked together in a way. You have your odd, ‘no, no, no, we have to do this,’ but in the end you can say: ‘Oh, all right, I’ll fight for that next year, then.’ That collaborative approach is a really important part of theatre – it’s compromise that adds, not detracts.”

Andrew Upton frankly and humorously discussed living in his wife’s shadow with Alice Jones for The Independent, calling himself “the hand,” so frequently does he find himself perfectly cropped out of red carpet photographs of him with his wife. Being married to an Oscar-winning film star, one of the finest actress’ of her generation and one of the most beautiful women in the world, he has become an expert in taking a back seat. “They (magazine editors) just look and think, ‘he’s not interesting, cut him out.’ You can almost see the scissors,” he roared with laughter.
“To be fair to those ruthless magazine editors, they do make an odd couple: she, ethereal, statuesque, a cool Armani muse, he, a puckish bundle of energy with thinning hair and tired blue eyes. But in real life there’s no separating the couple,” conjectured Jones.
“I’ve never had that level of success,” he admitted. “Having looked through the prism of Cate, you can see across to the people whom that sort of stuff happens to….I’m never followed but Cate is. Her public identity is associated with her work, which I think is good, right and proper because she’s bloody good at it. When her work is coming into focus, people want to see a photo of her carrying shopping bags. I can understand it – people are interested and I’m glad they’re interested otherwise they wouldn’t come to see it.”

Red carpet style icon

Cate admitted that it was not always easy working together in such a high-profile way as well as raising a family, it’s all about communication. “We would divvy it up in a fluid way that perhaps only a married couple could. We’ve always talked. He’s the first person I met who I could deeply talk about work with, and I think we’ve kept each other healthy in that way because you can go a bit bonkers. And I’m bonkers enough! We’ve never been competitors, and we’ve never shied away from robust argument.”

She told Brooks that she knew the move was a gamble for her as it risked closing the door at her back. “When I stepped away to run the theatre company, a lot of people said, ‘This is a mistake. You realise you have a certain shelf life and you’re throwing that away.’ But I think it’s made me a better actor. If it hasn’t, I’m a fucking idiot.”

Proud of what they achieved at the STC, putting on 16-19 shows a year over four stages, making the organisation environmentally sustainable, and touring productions internationally, she said, “It was a lot of work, but it was in partnership. And it meant that I absented myself from filmmaking for six years. There were a lot of people who I could tell were thinking, ‘You’re in your late 30s, and the film industry’s not going to be your friend forever. Is this really the time?’ They thought I was having some sort of early midlife crisis, but Andrew and I knew the wealth of talent in Australia, and it’s our creative wellspring. So to return to that community and to be inside it was game-changing for us.”

“It’s been an enormous challenge and enormously gratifying,” she added. “Andrew and I wanted to travel less and the opportunity of living and working in Sydney was irresistible, especially when it came to being able to give our children roots. I also felt drawn to the stimulating kind of environment that the theatre offers in a way that is completely different from film. To direct a company has its own challenges, and there’s nothing like the terror and thrill that comes from performing live in front of an audience. So it’s been a marvellous experience for both of us.”

Blanchett took to the stage in a magnificent performance as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Though it has been played numerous times by countless fine theatre actress’ Cate completely made the role her own and played it like it had never been played before. She got rave reviews for her portrayal. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote, “DuBois has been pulled gently and firmly down to earth by Ms. Blanchett. What she brings to the character is life itself, a primal survival instinct … All the baggage that any ‘Streetcar’ usually travels with has been jettisoned. Ms. (Tracey) Ullmann and Ms. Blanchett have performed the play as if it had never been staged before, with the result that, as a friend of mine put it, ‘you feel like you’re hearing words you thought you knew pronounced correctly for the first time.’”

John Lahr raved in The New Yorker, “Blanchett, with her alert mind, her informed heart, and her lithe, patrician silhouette, gets it right from the first beat … Blanchett doesn’t make the usual mistake of foreshadowing Blanche’s end at the play’s beginning; she allows Blanche a slow, fascinating decline … I don’t expect to see a better performance of this role in my lifetime.”

The great Meryl Streep said, “That performance was as naked, as raw and extraordinary and astonishing and surprising and scary as anything I’ve ever seen … She took the layers of a person and just peeled them away. I thought I’d seen that play, I thought I knew all the lines by heart, because I’ve seen it so many times, but I’d never seen the play until I saw that performance.”

Cate won the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and the Helen Hayes Awards, for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Non-Resident Production award, and the production won for Outstanding Non-Resident Production.She then played Yelena in Upton’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which traveled to the Kennedy Center and the New York City Center as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Again, critics were most impressed. The New York Times’ Ben Brantley wrote, “I consider the three hours I spent on Saturday night watching (the characters) complain about how bored they are among the happiest of my theatre going life … This Uncle Vanya gets under your skin like no other I have seen … (Blanchett) confirms her status as one of the best and bravest actresses on the planet.” Again, Blanchett received the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Non-Resident Production, and the Helpmann Award for Best Actress. Clearly the husband wife team was most successful.

Cate told Anita Singh in an interview for The Telegraph about their partnership, saying Andrew allows her unfettered access to his email account and that she runs her household as a “well-oiled machine” by reading all the messages addressed to her husband as “he hates emails,” leaving all his correspondence to her. “We work together and it’s a way of synchronising our lives. I can see what he’s up to – it’s not that I don’t trust him.”

She also takes charge of organising her children’s lives. “I’ve got a whole system going. I know what has to be done by the end of the evening, and what has to be done by the end of the morning. Three lunch boxes, three school bags, three sets of school uniform. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I have to write everything down,” Blanchett said. She has a rule that she will never be away from the children for more than six days; she said there are times when she dislikes the acting profession but “it’s a vocation, something I feel compelled to do. The work is not simple, but I do love it.”

Friends and colleagues said the couple never seem to have any drama, and they work together constantly, especially when they took over the STC.

Lady of the manor

The family’s primary residence is currently Highwell House, East Sussex that was once owned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Blanchett stepped down from her full-time role at the theatre in 2013, but continued to star in a few STC productions, while Upton carried on as artistic director for another two years. Her film work was still limited. “What prevents me from picking and choosing is my geographical location and my desire not to have someone else raise my children.”

Sheryl Garratt wrote in The Telegraph that Blanchett, who is forthright, funny, exceedingly good company and astonishingly beautiful, reckons “the children keep her honest. They force you to be economical. To choose your roles wisely and then shrug them off as soon as you’re done.” People always ask how she is able to juggle her roles as an actor and parent. “Now, I might be wrong, but I don’t think they put the same question to male actors, do they?” How she has changed since she first got married, “I think Andrew would say I’ve got better at my job that I’ve learned to get out of my own way a bit more. I think perhaps he would say I’m a little less socially awkward. I hope so anyway. I used to be very socially awkward. Walk into a room. Not know what to say. But you do carry that fear with you. When I was getting ready to leave (the company, I did think, ‘Well, I’m in my 40s, I don’t know if I’ve even got a film career to go back to.’ And then Blue Jasmine landed in my lap.”

Her role as the brittle Park Avenue princess fallen on hard times in Blue Jasmine won her a second Oscar. But the experience of shooting it was no bed of roses. She described Woody Allen’s directing style as one of “benign neglect. The first day was brutal. He came up to me and said, ‘This is awful and you’re awful.’ As if he were talking about someone else, some other actress, and that maybe I could go and have a word with her. And then three weeks later it turned out that he didn’t like the costumes, he didn’t like the locations, he didn’t like the scene. He said, ‘You’ve got to help me rescue this movie.’”

She did such a wonderful job that some critics called it the best role of her career, better even than as Elizabeth I. The performance earned her more than 40 industry and critics awards, including the Critics’ Choice Award, Santa Barbara International Film Festival Outstanding Performance of the Year Award, Australian Academy Award (AACTA), SAG award, Golden Globe, BAFTA, Independent Film Spirit Award and the Academy Award for Best Actress. She, thus, became the first Australian to win more than one acting Oscar.

The couple fulfilled their dream when they adopted daughter Edith Vivian Patricia in 2015 because Cate said that she and her husband had wanted to adopt ever since the birth of their first child. Despite their high profile status and wealth, Australian adoption authorities still carried rigorous background checks into their lives before confirming the adoption and handing over the baby girl. Soon after, they sold their Sydney mansion for $20 million in 2015 to a Chinese buyer and moved back to England where Andrew and Cate purchased a seven bedroom, five reception room historic $6.25 million English manor, Highwell House, in East Sussex. Originally built in 1890, the home had fallen into disrepair, but had been extensively renovated and restored by its previous owner to its previous grandeur with bespoke materials and hand crafted finishes. Another celebrity owner in the past had been author of the Sherlock Holmes series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Variety magazine reported that around the same time the couple also purchased a five-bedroom house in Sydney once owned by drag queen Dame Edna from its last owner for approximately $8 million. Not a bad life!

Late last year, paparazzi clicked photos of Andrew “getting very close” with 27 year old Love Child star Harriet Dyer

To pay for it all, Cate then played Cinderella’s evil stepmother in Disney’s Cinderella in a fun, campy way. On the other end of the spectrum, she starred opposite Rooney Mara in the lesbian relationship film Carol. At the Cannes film festival Variety reporter Ramin Setoodeh asked her if this was the first time she had played a bisexual. Cate cheekily replied, “On film or in real life?” The reporter prodded if she’s had relationships with women. “Yes, many times,” she shot back referring to her countless female friends, family members and colleagues. The resulting story went viral, and eclipsed the movie itself. “Look,” she clarified to Brooks, rolling her eyes at the memory, “I also just played a journalist. No one asked me how long I’d been to journalism school. If I played someone who has an affair, I think a reporter would probably think twice before asking, ‘Ooh, how many affairs have you had?’ It would be a slightly delicate area. But there are no holds barred about asking me whether I’ve had relationships with women. And so I facetiously said, ‘Oh yes, I’ve had many relationships with women’ – because frankly, who hasn’t? Of course I said it in inverted commas. But the inverted commas didn’t make the page.” So try as you may, reporters looking for a story will blow up the minutest detail trying to come up with a sensational, headline grabbing scandal.
Similarly, Andrew too has had his share of over eager press. Late last year, paparazzi clicked photos of Andrew “getting very close” with 27 year old Love Child star Harriet Dyer. The tabloid, Star reported that the two spent the evening at the Strawberry Hills pub in Sydney, while Cate was thousands of miles away in NYC with their children. “Drinks were flowing. Andrew and Harriet’s hands were all over the place,” revealed an onlooker, who watched the pair play a flirtatious game of pool in the company of friends at the local watering hole – just miles down the street from the home he shares with Cate and the kids. “At one point, Harriet rested her head on Andrew’s chest and he wrapped his arm around her, whispering something in her ear. Andrew and Harriet looked uncomfortable with the camera snapping away,” said the spy. “It they hadn’t spotted the photographer, who knows what might have happened? Even if it was innocent, it certainly left a bad impression.”
Australian magazine New Idea reported that “At one point they were holding hands and he had his arm around her before leaving together to hail a taxi. The pair was never far from each other, engaged in ‘close conversation’ and were quite affectionate. Cate recently relocated to Los Angeles with her children for a film.”

According to the magazine, Harriet told a group of fellow Australian actors, “He’s (Andrew) a notorious party boy, everyone knows that.”

On holiday with their four kids in tow

Though the two have worked together in the past at the Sydney Theatre Company, a lot of speculation as to the nature of their relationship took place. Cate, however, appeared confident and unfazed the next day when the story broke. Paparazzi followed her around NYC to capture any meltdown she may have or even a hint of emotion she may show. Everyone wanted to know whether there was any truth to the story. Whether she really trusts her husband that much or whether she’s the consummate actress in real life as well is anybody’s guess. She had herself admitted in an earlier interview, “It’s not whether you can act or not. It’s whether you can act comfortable and relaxed. I’m not comfortable, I’m not relaxed. It’s all down to acting.”
Later the same magazine New Idea reported that Harriet was overheard telling a group of actors at a premiere that she reached out to Cate as soon as the photos were released to ensure she and the children were okay, “I sent through an email to Cate and said: “This is all ‘s***’ We were just having drinks after a show when the images were taken. “ She wrote back, “We’re cool, babe.”

Happily ever after, or as close to it as you can get

Andrew also broke his silence over the incident, insisting his relationship with Harriet was strictly platonic. ‘We’ve been friends for years. She’s a good friend,’ he explained.

Since then, Harriet has begun dating No Activity co-star Patrick Brammall, after calling it quits with Australian actor Ben Lawson late last year, so there was that narrow window when she was footloose and single.

The Mail on Sunday carried a story of Cate Blanchett generously praising Andrew soon after, “I’m incredibly fortunate to have met the intelligent, generous, risk-taking, stimulating man to whom I am married. He’s really amazing. I don’t think it’s more difficult for actors to have a good marriage than anyone. I think in the end a really important component of any relationship is honesty, and it also comes down to luck.”

Andrew also praised his wife, describing being married to her as “a daily thrill.” Damage control or the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Your guess is as good as mine.

Looking back at their twenty year marriage, Cate said, “It’s been a great creative partnership with my husband and also a great love affair. Working together, running a creative company in Australia. It’s all been fantastic.”

If you would like to see Cate perform live and happen to be in the Big Apple, do check out her Broadway debut in Upton’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play The Present, running now through March 19, 2017.