Cate Blanchett - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Blanchett was born in Melbourne, Victoria in the suburb of Ivanhoe. Her mother, June (née Gamble), was an Australian property developer and teacher, and her father, Robert DeWitt Blanchett, Jr., was a Texas native who was a US Navy Petty Officer and later worked as an advertising executive. The two met while Blanchett's father's ship, USS Arneb, was in Melbourne. When Blanchett was ten, she lost her father to a heart attack. She has two siblings; her older brother, Bob, is a computer systems engineer, and her younger sister, Genevieve, worked as a theatrical designer and received her Bachelor of Design in Architecture in April 2008.

Blanchett has described herself as being "part extrovert, part wallflower" during childhood. She attended a 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 eighteen, Blanchett went on a holiday 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. Blanchett returned to Australia and later moved to Sydney, New South Wales to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1992 and beginning her career in the theatre.

Read more about this topic:  Cate Blanchett

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    My life has been the poem I would have writ,
    But I could not both live and utter it.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    In England, I was quite struck to see how forward the girls are made—a child of 10 years old, will chat and keep you company, while her parents are busy or out etc.—with the ease of a woman of 26. But then, how does this education go on?—Not at all: it absolutely stops short.
    Frances Burney (1752–1840)