Catherine Élise "Cate" Blanchett (English pronunciation: born 14 May 1969) is an Australian actress. She came to international attention for her role as Elizabeth I of England in the 1998 film Elizabeth, for which she won British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and Golden Globe Awards, and received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Blanchett appeared as the elf queen Galadriel in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy from 2001 to 2003, and she is to reprise her role in the upcoming Hobbit films. In 2004 Blanchett's portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator brought her numerous awards, including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Blanchett's other films include Babel (2006), Notes on a Scandal (2006), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).
Blanchett's work has earned her several accolades, including a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTAs, and an Academy Award.

Blanchett and her husband, Andrew Upton, are currently artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company.
Blanchett was born in Ivanhoe, a suburb of Melbourne, the daughter of June, an Australian property developer and teacher, and Robert "Bob" Blanchett, a Texas-born US Navy Petty Officer who later worked as an advertising executive. The two met while Blanchett's father's ship, USS Arneb, was in Melbourne. When Blanchett was 10, she lost her father to a heart attack. She has two siblings; her older brother, Bob, is a computer systems engineer, and her younger sister, Genevieve, worked as a theatrical designer and received her Bachelor of Design in Architecture in April 2008.
Blanchett has described herself during childhood as "part extrovert, part wallflower".She attended a primary school in Melbourne at Ivanhoe East Primary School. For her secondary education, she attended Ivanhoe Girls' Grammar School and then Methodist Ladies' College, from which she graduated, where she explored her passion for acting. She studied Economics and Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne before leaving Australia to travel overseas.
When she was 18, Blanchett went on a vacation to Egypt. A fellow guest at a hotel in Cairo asked if she wanted to be an extra in a movie, and the next day she found herself in a crowd scene cheering for an American boxer losing to an Egyptian in the film Kaboria, starring the Egyptian actor Ahmad Zaki. Blanchett returned to Australia and later moved to Sydney to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1992 and beginning her career in the theatre.
Her first major stage role was opposite Geoffrey Rush in the 1993 David Mamet play Oleanna, for which she won the Sydney Theatre Critics' Best Newcomer Award.She also appeared as Ophelia in an acclaimed 1994–95 Company B production of Hamlet, directed by Neil Armfield, starring Rush and Richard Roxburgh.

Blanchett appeared in the TV miniseries Heartland opposite Ernie Dingo, the miniseries Bordertown, with Hugo Weaving, and in an episode of Police Rescue entitled "The Loaded Boy". She also appeared in the 1994 telemovie of Police Rescue as a teacher taken hostage by armed bandits, and in the 50-minute drama Parklands (1996), which received a limited release in Australian cinemas.