Consider the great Hollywood feud. Perhaps Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s mutual loathing comes to mind? Or Marlon Brando’s 40-year-old beef with Burt Reynolds? Maybe the more recent tensions between Olivia Wilde and Florence Pugh? Well, let me tell you: these are absolutely nothing compared to Cate Blanchett and her indefatigable animus towards … the leaf blower. Seemingly every single leaf blower.
Truly, this is one of the greatest celebrity animosities of this century. The earliest extant Blanchett-rant on the subject is a W Magazine interview, way back in 2007, when she ambiguously characterised leaf blowers – a lot of fence-sitting here – as “everything that is wrong with the human race”.