DISAPPEARING ACT.(Cate Blanchett, Andrew Upton, Sydney Theatre Company)(Interview)

In Sydney, Australia, on the bright, blustery morning of November 10th, toward the end of Pier 4, a "finger wharf" that reaches out two hundred yards into the harbor and houses the Sydney Theatre Company, a little bit of show-biz history took place. There, inside a cavernous former wool storehouse--now a dusty gray rehearsal room--amid a cluster of cameras, lights, and local journalists, the actress Cate Blanchett and her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, announced their appointment as co-artistic directors of the S.T.C., Australia's most prestigious theatre, which operates three stages. Theatre history is studded with examples of renowned actor-managers--Moliere, Shakespeare, and Sir Laurence Olivier come to mind--but never before had a movie actress of Blanchett's calibre, at the height of her powers and popularity, made this kind of commitment to the theatre community that launched her. Blanchett and Upton will officially begin their three-year appointment in 2008, after a year of shadowing the current artistic director, Robyn Nevin. They also happened to be in the process of staging a double bill at the theatre: Harold Pinter's "A Kind of Alaska," directed by Blanchett, and David Mamet's "Reunion," directed by Upton, both of which opened to strong reviews at the end of November. "Andrew and I are galvanized by a challenge," Blanchett said. "Frankly, this is the most exciting thing that has happened to us, apart from marriage and having children."

"I feel the need to move forward," Blanchett, who is thirty-seven, told me later. "I know it's going to broaden me as a human being. I hope it broadens me as an actor." She added, "Moviemaking becomes a little pointless after a time. You think, Well, yes, that's an incredible role, and, yes, it would probably stretch me as an actor. But performance is not, and never has been, really, all of who I am." Still, it is through film that most of her fans have come to know her. Blanchett's list of twenty-seven movies is notable for both its range and its ambition. In her most recent collection of character studies, she plays a predatory Nazi collaborator (Steven Soderbergh's "The Good German"), an American tourist who is shot in Morocco (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Babel"), a British schoolteacher who has an affair with a fifteen-year-old student (Richard Eyre's "Notes on a Scandal," a performance for which she was just nominated for an Academy Award), and a version of Bob Dylan, complete with big hair and sideburns (Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There"). "I wanted to be him," Blanchett said of the singer. "It's the first time I ever had that feeling. I actually wanted to be Dylan. Ultimately, he just really didn't care. He's on his own path."

At the S.T.C., Blanchett, who calls herself a "theatre geek," was following her own path. Her appointment was also a strategic coup for the company: with Blanchett and Upton as artistic directors, its productions will attract international press and talent. (Philip Seymour Hoffman, for instance, will direct Upton's play "Riflemind," later this year.) And for a theatre company that, in 2005, found itself in the red for the first time in twenty-seven years, Blanchett's stardom will draw lucrative sponsorship. None of this sense of promise and purpose, however, seemed to catch the imagination of the local press back in November. When it was time for questions, the journalists seemed nonplussed.What if Blanchett got a movie role? they asked. Would she have time, in her busy film schedule, to undertake such a job? Did this mean that she and her sons--five-year-old Dashiell and two-year-old Roman--were going to live permanently in Sydney? How would her celebrity affect the running of the theatre? "Celebrity is a by-product," Blanchett replied firmly. "If that by-product can be harnessed to the company's name, fantastic." After the final question of the proceedings--which, like many before, was directed only at Blanchett--she put her hand on Upton's shoulder. "We're a team," she said.

Upton, like his wife, seems to know himself without insisting on himself; he exudes a sort of ironic equanimity. In 1997, the newly married couple spent three months apart while Blanchett was shooting Shekhar Kapur's "Elizabeth," and vowed, Blanchett said, to "never ever do that again." In the decade since then, they have travelled together whenever possible. The S.T.C. offer coincided, serendipitously, with their sense that they needed, for their children's sake, to settle somewhere. Over lunch, at the theatre's restaurant later that day, Blanchett turned to Upton and said, "If it wasn't for you, I think I probably would have imploded. Acting takes its toll on people. There's a kind of madness in it that's thrilling and wonderful but also can be incredibly destructive." She turned to me. "Andrew is an incredibly strong person," she said.

Strength--or the outward appearance of it--is not the first thing that comes to mind when you meet the impish Upton, who is forty-one. His sinew lies in his good-humored stability and in his allegiance to his wife's talent. Upton studied playwriting and directing at the Victorian College of the Arts School of Drama, in Melbourne, and has already done a series of successful stage adaptations for the S.T.C., including a tempestuous version of Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" (2004), starring his wife. He and Blanchett got to know each other in 1996, while working on one of her lesser-known Australian movies, "Thank God He Met Lizzie." "We were both taken by surprise," Upton said. "I mean, it could have been a one-night stand. We just kept going. Three weeks into our relationship, Cate says she thought, Oh, God, he's gonna ask me to marry him. I'm gonna have to say yes. I asked her three weeks later." Their decisions to marry and to run the S.T.C. seemed to share an adventurous sense of optimism. "Our spirit is jump in, then just keep going until you can make the thing work or not," Blanchett said. "If it's not making sense, you pull it apart and try to put it back together again."