Cate Blanchett casts a spell over any role she takes, whether on stage or screen, indie or blockbuster. She has played a 16th-century monarch (Elizabeth), an ageless princess (Lord of the Rings), a predatory Nazi collaborator (Th e Good German), Katharine Hepburn (The Aviator), a British schoolteacher who has an affair with a teenage student (Notes on a Scandal), even a version of Bob Dylan, complete with big hair and sideburns (I’m Not There). In each case, she is fully them, and fully herself before our eyes.
After such a breathtaking gallery of characters, perhaps the backstage conflict, onstage triumphs, sublime highs and soul-searching lows of the music world are not so impossible a leap for Blanchett to take in making her latest film, Tár. After all, the process of…