Cate Blanchett

Catherine Élise Blanchett (born 14 May 1969) is an Australian actress and theatre director. She and her husband Andrew Upton are currently artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company.
She has won a lot of acting awards. Most important awards she has: two SAGs, two Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTAs, an Academy Award, as well the Volpi Cup at 64th Venice International Film Festival.
She came to international attention in the 1998 film Elizabeth. In there she played Elizabeth I of England. She is also well-known for her portrayals of the elf queen Galadriel in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Colonel-Doctor Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, a role which brought her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Blanchett was born in Melbourne. She is the daughter of June, an Australian property developer and teacher, and Robert Blanchett, a U.S. Navy Petty Officer who later worked as an advertising executive. When Blanchett was 10, she lost her father to a heart attack.
She has a older brother and a younger sister.
Blanchett attended 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. She 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.