pale perfection; With 24 films behind her, this shape-shifting star is an icon of style and beauty, a mother of two, and a master of transformation on both stage and screen.

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

At the other end of the world the half moon rises on its back over a series of bays crusted with beaches and harbors that make up the city. The pink people speak English, the skyscrapers could be anywhere, but August comes at the end of winter, strange flowers rise from the road dividers, abalone is a staple, kangaroos are vermin, sheep are prized, and up north, as Cate Blanchett will tell you, people lick the backs of cane toads to get high. The money is called dollars, and the bills are made with plastic (local joke: "Clean and wipe and use again"). It's a no-nonsense place, where the haughty are shot down for "big-noting themselves," but the suburbs have camp names-La Perouse, Beverly Hills, Balmain, Sans Souci.

This is Australia, where the actors come from. The great ones who can make you believe anything. The ones who don't take any shit. The men are carousers, from Errol Flynn through Peter Finch to Mel Gibson to Russell Crowe, and the women have astonishing range, from Dame Judith Anderson through Zoe Caldwell to Judy Davis, Rachel Griffiths, Nicole Kidman, and most recently and most stunningly, Cate Blanchett, the human chameleon, so adept at modifying her face, her body, and her energy that even people who have worked with her can fail to recognize her on-screen. She's described as a character actress in a leading woman's body, but the kind of beauty that she can project is beyond the usual norms. Her characters all share a kind of radiant transparency, which along with her white skin and penchant for minimal makeup has earned her the adjective "luminous," repeated so often that Anthony Minghella (who directed her in The Talented Mr. Ripley) declared a moratorium on it. He has also, brilliantly, described her quality in Elizabeth as a "chalky phosphorescence."

Cate Blanchett may claim not to be driven, but she goes very fast. She graduated from drama school in 1992, earned an Oscar nomination for her pale, noble, and angry Elizabeth I in 1998, followed that with a startling turn as an air-traffic controller's wife in Pushing Tin, and in a film career that barely spans seven years she has played a dizzying variety and a staggering number of roles: earthy Australian nurse in Paradise Road, gambler heiress in Oscar and Lucinda, monarch in Elizabeth, Russian showgirl in The Man Who Cried, quirky bank robber in Bandits, Georgia psychic in The Gift, Middle Earth elf in all three Lord of the Rings films, British bomber in Heaven, Irish journalist in Veronica Guerin, New Mexico frontier woman in The Missing, defensive movie star and her entitled rocker cousin in Coffee and Cigarettes.

She has a gift of consistent authenticity, rare in actors and rarer still in stars. With Cate Blanchett, unless you are told in advance that it's her, you mostly have no idea who you're watching on-screen. She's a shape-shifter who gives the viewer, each time, the uncanny sensation of peering into the private life of a complete human being. If you can manage to draw back from the reality that she creates, it's like suddenly watching a virtuoso musician at the top of his form, in complete control of exceptional skills.

Cate Blanchett this month will be on-screen as Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. In it, she's a quick-talking, fast-moving, golf-playing, bossy, determined actress whose energy and style cannot help but back Leonardo DiCaprio's Howard Hughes into a series of self-hating corners. She's also a journalist in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a character he says he based on Jane Goodall; Cate plays her as a wispy but determined intellectual. She has just finished a short run as Hedda Gabler, Ibsen's heroine who inspired Freud in his studies on hysteria and is every actress's Hamlet, onstage every minute, neurotic and dangerous.

The entrance to the wharf that holds the Sydney Theatre Company is hidden behind a chicken-wire fence, dotted with a random cluster of red and yellow plastic crash barriers. The theater itself is 500 feet down the uneven floorboards of a reclaimed loading bay, where Cate Blanchett's face on the poster for Hedda Gabler is only one among many. The theater seats 330 people, the show was sold out six months before it ...