With her regal and elegant visage, Aussie actress Cate Blanchett broke through the mob of aspiring thesps and instantly ascended the ranks to Hollywood stardom, with her Academy Award-nommed turn as Elizabeth I in Shekhar Kapur's 1998 Elizabeth. Her concomitantly poignant and fierce portrayal won admiration from critics and lay filmgoers, but she had maintained a low-enough profile in years prior (and her celebrity materialized so quickly) that the Elizabeth triumph appeared to pull the heretofore unseen actress from out of thin air and caught just about everyone off guard. Born in Melbourne on May 14, 1969, Catherine Elise Blanchett entered the world as the daughter of an Australian mother and a Texas-born American father, with two siblings. Her dad died of a heart attack when she was ten; her mother subsequently raised her. She studied economics and fine art at the University of Melbourne, but - reeling from ennui and dissatisfaction — set off in search of an alternate vocation, and traveled for a period of time, perhaps in search of herself. Blanchett ultimately landed in Egypt, where a chance bit part in an Arabic boxing film introduced her to a newfound love of acting. Taking this as a firm cue, Blanchett harkened back to Sydney, where she enrolled in (and ultimately graduated from) the highly-esteemed National Academy of Dramatic Art (NIDA). Blanchett later joined the Sydney Theatre Company, where she earned positive notices in a production of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls. A subsequent role in Timothy Daley's musical Kafka Dances won Blanchett a 1993 New Comer Award from the Sydney Theatre Critics Circle, an honor doubled that same year when she gleaned a Rosemont Best Actress Award for her performance opposite future Elizabeth co-star Geoffrey Rush in David Mamet's Oleanna. The considerable prestige that accompanied these theatrical triumphs led Blanchett to the small screen, where she appeared in various programs for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, including the drama Heartlands and the cop series Police Rescue. Her television performances caught the attention of director Bruce Beresford, who cast her in his 1997 POW drama Paradise Road, as a shy Australian nurse, opposite Glenn Close and Frances McDormand. Also in 1997, she starred in the comedy Thank God He Met Lizzie, for which she netted an Australian Film Institute Best Actress Award. With the considerable amount of praise and recognition Blanchett was receiving in her native country, it was only a matter of time and opportunity before she became known to a wider audience. Her opportunity arrived that very same year, with her role in Gillian Armstrong's adaptation of Peter Carey's novel Oscar and Lucinda. Opposite Ralph Fiennes, Blanchett won almost uniform praise for her performance in a tepidly-received film. Blanchett came first billed in the following year's Elizabeth. The film drew swift and unequivocal praise, and Blanchett's portrayal of the queen turned her into Los Angeles's newest cause celebre. A plethora of awards greeted Kapur's feature and Blanchett's performance, including a Best Actress Academy Award nomination and eight additional Oscar nods. The actress won a Golden Globe and British Academy Award, in addition a host of critics' circles awards. With that experience under her belt, Blanchett starred opposite Angelina Jolie, John Cusack, and Billy Bob Thornton in the Mike Newell comedy Pushing Tin (1999). Although the film dive-bombed at the box office, critics singled out Blanchett's fine performance as a Long Island housewife. The same year, she played another domestic, albeit one of an entirely different stripe, in Oliver Parker's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. Despite a uniformly strong cast including Jeremy Northam, Rupert Everett, and Julianne Moore, the film divided critics, although, again, Blanchett herself earned favorable notices.Blanchett maintained a busy schedule after the Newell project, appearing in a plethora films throughout 2001. She joined Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci with her role as a kindhearted albeit materialistic showgirl in The Man Who Cried, then starred as a fortune teller who holds the key to a mysterious murder in director Sam Raimi's The Gift, an unwitting accomplice in the crime comedy Bandits, a British schoolteacher in Tom Tykwer's Kieslowski update Heaven, and Galadriel, Queen of Lothlorien, in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Blanchett also appeared in 2001's The Shipping News (as Petal) and director Gillian Armstrong's Charlotte Gray. Blanchett's appeared as ill-fated Irish journalist Veronica Guerin in director Joel Schumacher and producer Jerry Bruckheimer's eponymously titled 2003 biopic. The film split critics in half, and died a quick death in cinemas during its late autumn run, but those reviewers who did respond favorably again singled out the actress's stunning interpretation of the role. The New Yorker's David Denby, for example, remarked, "Apart from Blanchett's performance, Veronica Guerin is not very interesting." The following year, Blanchett effortlessly lit up the screen with a performance as film legend Katharine Hepburn in director Martin Scorsese's lavish Howard Hughes epic The Avaitor. If The Aviator's "Best Picture" loss to Million Dollar Baby proved somewhat disappointing to Scorsese fans when the Oscars were handed out at the 77th Annual Academy Awards, Blanchett landed her greatest triumph that evening: she won the "Best Supporting Actress" award for her turn as Hepburn.Perhaps despairing of the paucity of solid scripts in Hollywood, Blanchett went global after the Scorsese affair. She returned to her native Australia for a follow-up - Rowan Woods's harrowing and skillful Little Fish (2005). The actress stars as Tracy, a recovering former drug addict whose attempts to reform her life are threatened by the reappearance of seedy acquaintances from the old days. A low-key follow up, to be certain, but one that didn't compromise on its co-stars; the cast also includes the great Sam Neill and Hugo Weaving. The picture opened to sensational reviews across the board. 2006's multi-national production Babel, directed by Alejandro Gonz