The first time Cate Blanchett was cast in The Seagull, she was in Sydney and in her 20s, a young stage actor playing the part of another young stage actor who was desperate for fame and dizzyingly in love. It was 1997, at Belvoir St theatre, and Blanchett was very much in love herself, having recently got together with the writer-director Andrew Upton, who she would marry later that year. Though the part of Nina in Anton Chekhov’s drama involved far more heartbreak – the character is left emotionally wrecked after being dropped by her lover – and Blanchett remembers “I’d just met Andrew and was madly in love and thought: ‘How am I going to go out every night and be broken open when I’m so deeply happy?’”
She clearly pulled it off: among those who saw her in the Australian director Neil Armfield’s production was the director Jane Campion, who reportedly thought Blanchett’s portrayal so “utterly perfect and true” that she wished Chekhov had been there to see it. If the audience fell in love with Blanchett then, she in turn fell in love – with Chekhov’s play: “It’s so fuelled by perplexed, dissatisfied, annoyed people who do really strange things, but in Chekhov those people really are anchored by love,” she says today.
