Cate Blanchett
Born: 14th May 1969
Where: Melbourne, Australia
The versatile, Oscar-winning actress has excelled in roles ranging from Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator to Galadriel in Lord of the Rings.
The daughter of a Texan navy officer and a Melbourne schoolteacher, Blanchett's father died of a heart attack when she was just 10 years old.
She was educated in Melbourne at the Methodist Ladies' College, where she explored her passion for acting and studied economics and fine art at the University of Melbourne.
She played the "Tim-Tam" girl in Australian commercials but walked off the set off her first movie, filmed when she was on holiday in Cairo - as an extra.
After travelling, Blanchett graduated from Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1992 and, in a little over a year, had won both critical and popular acclaim.
She immediately went on to play Felice Bauer in Timothy Daly's Kafka Dances, winning the 1993 Newcomer Award from the Sydney Theatre Critics' Circle for her performance.
Blanchett first made an impression on screen in the Japanese POW drama Paradise Road and went on to star opposite Ralph Fiennes in the sublimely surreal Oscar & Lucinda.
In 1999 she won a Golden Globe Award for best actress for her role in Elizabeth but lost out on an Oscar to Gwyneth Paltrow.
Roles followed in the well-received Pushing Tin, The Talented Mr Ripley and the superior horror fare The Gift.
In 2001, before giving birth to her first child, Dashiell, she starred in Bandits with Bruce Willis and debuted as Galadriel in Lord of the Rings - she said she wanted the role because it gave her the opportunity to appear in a movie with pointy ears.
She followed this with less successful projects, including a disappointing dramatisation of Charlotte Gray and E Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.
In 2002, she appeared in the surreal mystery-drama Heaven before returning to Middle Earth for LOTR: The Two Towers.
The following year she played the murdered Irish journalist Veronic Guerin in the biopic directed by Joel Schumacher.
She went on to play a celebrity and her sister in a segment of Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes as well as appearing in the last LOTR instalment The Return of the King.
In 2004, Blanchett stole the show with her sparky Oscar-winning portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's biopic of Howard Hughes, The Aviator.
She also played a pregnant journalist in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic alongside Bill Murray.
In 2005, she starred in the Australian thriller Little Fish and went on to star in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's disturbing drama Babel with Brad Pitt.
The following year she starred opposite George Clooney in the Steven Soderbergh thriller The Good German as well as Stephen Frears'chilling adaptation of the dark novel Notes on a Scandal with Dame Judi Dench.
In 2007, she reprised the role of Elizabeth in Elizabeth in The Golden Age as well as an inventive portrayal of Bob Dylan alongside Heath Ledger and Christian Bale.
Recently she played the Soviet villainess opposite Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
