Cate Blanchett has been doing night shoots for a film all week, but you wouldn’t have known it from her appearance at the 2025 Standard Theatre Awards, blonde hair artfully dishevelled in a dramatic black dress. Offered champagne on arrival she instead orders a martini. There’s style, and then there’s Cate Blanchett style.
The Australian star, 56, was nominated for the Natasha Richardson Award for best actress for her performance as Arkadina in an updated version of Chekhov’s The Seagull, by German director Thomas Ostermeier, at the Barbican. That prize went to Hayley Atwell for her role in Much Ado About Nothing, but Blanchett received the Lebedev Award — one of two special statuettes given at the proprietor’s discretion — for “breathing new life” into Chekhov’s play. It was also an acknowledgment of an extraordinary career, in which Blanchett has run the gamut from stage classics to cinematic blockbusters and back again.
