Cate Blanchett as: Elizabeth I

Director: Shekhar Kapur
Selected Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Fiennes, Richard Attenborough, Vincent Cassel, Kelly Macdonald & Emily Mortimer
Written by: Michael Hirst
Release Year: 1998
Genre: Biopic / Drama / History / Romance
MPAA Rating: R

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Elizabeth Tudor becomes queen of a divided and dangerous England in 1558. She is roundly perceived as weak by threats from within and abroad, and she is strongly advised to marry by counsel William Cecil. But she will be married only to her country.

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Photoshoot by Richard Avedon; Behind the scenes

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Quotes from Cate Blanchett

• “It is the journey of a young girl and the sacrifices she makes in order to rule. The film explores her use of marriage as a political tool. Whether Elizabeth considered marriage is one of the enigmas of her career, but she was smart enough and perhaps sacrificial enough to use marriage not in love, as we now perceive, but as a weapon.” (Harper’s Bazaar Australia, November 1998)
• “Alex [Byrne, costume designer] and I talked a lot about body movement, as Elizabeth closes up, her clothing closes up as well.”
• “There was no script. So I just kind of read a bit about the Act of Uniformity the night before, and when we got to the set, I said to Shekhar, ‘I can’t improvise Elizabeth’s dialogue. And he said, ‘ dont worry about it’. I was scared and probably a bit hostile because I kept thinking, ‘I just can’t do this’. But I did what I could and Shekhar just left the camera running. We did that twice for about five minutes. We didn’t spend a lot of time on it, and to tell the truth, I didn’t think he had anything he could use in the film.” (Detroit Free Press, November 1998)
• “When we were in England last week, people were making parallels between Elizabeth’s situation with Elizabethan paparazzi, I guess, and Diana… And now we’re in the States, where people are talking about Clinton, how his personal life is up for grabs rather then his political platforms, which is kind of I guess a similar situation that Elizabeth found herself in.” (Los Angeles Times, November 1998)

Quotes from Others

• Christopher Eccleston on Cate Blanchett:
  — “She’s got the perfect combination of intellect and instinct, but at the end of the day she’ll let instinct override.”
• Geoffrey Rush on Cate Blanchett:
  — “It’s a role full of conundrums. You need an actress with not just a broad technical range but someone capable of playing an extreme emotional range. One quality that Cate carries is the ability to flicker between extraordinary vulnerability and indomitable power.”
• Richard Attenborough on Cate Blanchett:
  — “Cate has the ability to convey dual elements within a performance which makes that performance absolutely fascinating and out of the ordinary”
• Shekhar Kapur on Cate Blanchett:
  — “Cate has this quality that is ageless. Her face is very modern yet period. She also has the ability to be very strong and vulnerable at the same time.”
  — “I was the one who fought for Cate. I wanted to make a contemporary film that is also historical and Cate has an amazing face, it’s almost translucent. You don’t quite know what age it belongs to. It belongs to then, it belongs to now. Her beauty is regal.”
  — “Nobody would let me take her at the beginning, because nobody knew her. They said, “Why? Every star wants to take that part. Why do you want to take a newcomer?” I said, because the star would be the star playing Elizabeth. I saw [something in] Cate Blanchett. There were three things I wanted with that part; one is the ability to transcend between history and contemporary, and Cate did that beautifully. All that I had seen from Cate before I cast her was one trailer of a film that she’d done that hadn’t been released. The Queen was always saying in the end she lands up a spirit, not quite human, so to be able to be both a spirit and a human, and to be transcended from contemporary and history was what I needed from the actress, and I found that in Cate.”
• Kelly MacDonald on Cate Blanchett:
  — “I love Cate. I’m in awe of Cate. At the time, me and Emily Mortimer were pathetic little wannabes of Cate. We heard that she would go out jogging in the morning, so me and Emily, who were both smoking 40 a day, went too. We’d make it to the second lamppost along from the hotel, wheezing.”
• Martin Scorsese:
  — “She was so brilliant in it [Elizabeth] that I believed her. I kept thinking, her roles are so different, yet she’s so unique to each one.”
• David Fincher:
  “I remember coming out of Elizabeth and thinking, Who is this?! I didn’t know who she was, but that power from someone in relative obscurity was like seeing her leaping fully realized from the head of Zeus.”

Trivia & Facts

• Filmed in England, UK, New Zealand and Australia.
• The film won Max Factor Award for Make-up at the Venice Film Festival and Best Make-up at the Oscars, another 29 wins & 32 nominations, more accolades here.
• Cate Blanchett earned her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
• Cate Blanchett won her first BAFTA and Golden Globes Awards for Best Actress for her role in this film.
• This film launched Cate Blanchett into international acclaim.
• Also known as ‘Elizabeth: The Virgin Queen’.
• Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush have worked together in film and theatre — Oscar and Lucinda (1997) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007); Oleanna (1993).
• Only one of four roles that actress Meryl Streep was turned down for.
• Nicole Kidman was originally considered for the lead.
• Director Shekar Kapur said that he chose Cate Blanchett to play Elizabeth after seeing her on the promo reel for Oscar and Lucinda. He said that there were only five or six shots of Blanchett, he saw her face coming out of the water and thought there’s no doubt in mind that is Elizabeth.
• The film premiered Out of Competition at the 55th Venice International Film Festival on 8 September 1998.
• In the film, and as emphasized in its promotion, Elizabeth has bright blue eyes (Cate’s natural eye colour); however, Elizabeth is well known for having the deep amber brown eyes of her mother, Anne Boleyn, and the bright red hair of her father, Henry VIII. Cate has sensitive eyes, so she was unable to wear coloured contacts for her role.
• The costuming and shot composition of the coronation scene is based on Elizabeth’s coronation portrait. For example, Elizabeth is shown wearing her hair long. This is historically accurate, as the real Elizabeth was giving the public a sign of her virginity.
• 1998 was the only year that two performers were nominated for Academy Awards for playing the same character in two different films in the same year. Judi Dench was nominated (and won) for Best Supporting Actress for playing Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Cate was nominated for Best Actress for portraying Elizabeth I in this film.
• Barbara Broccoli disclosed in the documentary Being James Bond: The Daniel Craig Story (2021) that she wanted Daniel Craig as James Bond after seeing him in this film. She said: ‘ I remember the thing that really set me, and I went, ‘It has to be him,’ was years before anything. It was in Elizabeth, him walking down the corridor. And it was just like, that is the most charismatic person I have ever seen on the screen. So it was clear that he’s a movie star, and a great actor to boot.’
• Cate Blanchett read a collection of Elizabeth’s letters, a gift from her husband Andrew Upton, and went to the British Library to see actual documents in the monarch’s hand to prepare for the role.
• The film is included in BFI’s Top 100 British films surveyed in 1999 by British Film Institute.
• Remi Adefarasin won the Golden Frog at Camerimage Film Festival.