Carte Blanchett
By Michael Idato
06/09/2002
Sydney Morning Herald

There is a fantasy common in people who go to A-list parties that somehow the illuminatingly famous will find us, the 
mind-numbingly anonymous, a source of much fascination. 

It is my fantasy that when Cate Blanchett enters the room she will wade through the sea of faceless invitees, place a 
gentle Galadriel-esque hand on my head, and say something like "Michael, your hairless pate is so fascinating. I once 
saw a hairless pate like that on a statue of a Spanish conquistador in a small art gallery in Castilla-La Mancha." 

Or words to that effect. 

Fantasy almost became reality this week ("almost", in hindsight, being the operative word) at the opening of Blanchett's 
new film, the appropriately titled Heaven. I was wearing my spiffiest black suit and a pair of shiny black shoes. 

Schmooze's posse arrived at In Style magazine's cocktails-with-Cate bash at Arena at Fox Studios at 6.30pm. The radiant 
Plus One was on my arm. Truly, she is looking splendid these days. Her hair has devolved into a sort of post-'70s 
reinvention of Farrah Fawcett's bangs and she's wearing shoes so pointy that I'm sure they could crack Jimmy Choo's 
sharpening stone. 

There was no sign of Cate Blanchett when we arrived, though someone did say they saw a small baby in a baby carrier being 
lugged about by what appeared to be a security guard. "How very Hollywood," someone declared, and we all assumed the guarded 
offspring was Dashiell John Upton, the son of Cate and playwright 

husband Andrew Upton. He was named, Plus One reports, after Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon. Ah, La 
Blanchett is truly fascinating, even in motherhood. 

(We later discovered that the bub was not Dashiell, but merely the offspring of a non-celebrity.) 

David Wenham was there, looking as smashingly handsome as always. We know this, because wherever Wenham walks, there is a 
posse of women trailing behind, blushing and banging on about how good-looking he is. 

There was chatting, laughing, a bit of hilarity and much discussion about my upcoming excursion to the Emmy Awards in Los 
Angeles - truly, a night of nights if there ever was one - but curiously, there was no Cate Blanchett. Not at first, anyway. 

She was, I am told, fashionably late. Not as fashionably late as first suspected - we had presumed no-show by 7.45 until 
someone discovered she had, in fact, taken up residence at the other end of the room, shrouded from our view by a throng of 
admirers. 

By the end of the night Blanchett and I were not, as I had always imagined, deep in conversation about the transnational 
dispute between France and Madagascar over control of the Glorioso Islands. Rather, she was deep in conversation with 
someone far more fascinating than I, and I was perched on a couch with a crowd of nobodies, taking breaths between 
sentences long enough to pop a bit of salt and pepper squid down my throat. 

I did, however, do a swoosh past her and get what could only be described as an intimately personal peek at the back of 
her blonde head. "Her head is looking good," I reported to my calamari-chomping circle when I returned. "Her hair is a 
sort of post-Toni Collette spike with some lovely blonde highlights. It didn't say much, but I feel the back of Cate's 
head and I are like this." 

After cocktails the guests swooshed down Fox Studios' main drag and into Cinema Paris for the film. Blanchett plays Philippa 
Paccard, the wife of starship captain Jean-Luc Paccard, who is involved in a terrorist plot to blow up some Klingon drug 
dealers. 

"How much of that calamari did you actually eat?" Plus One asked me, before explaining the film. Blanchett's Paccard is 
actually a British teacher living in Turin who plots retribution against a drug dealer, for the death of her husband. 

Her plan fails and she is jailed - but she meets a young police officer, Filippo, played by Giovanni Ribisi, who becomes 
involved with her. 

I think my version sounds far more exciting.