Catherine Élise "Cate" Blanchett (born 14 May 1969) is an Australian actress and theatre director. She has won multiple acting awards, most notably two SAGs, two Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTAs, an Academy Award, as well as the Volpi Cup at 64th Venice International Film Festival.

Blanchett came to international attention in the 1998 film Elizabeth, directed by Shekhar Kapur, in which she played Elizabeth I of England. She is also well known for her portrayals of the elf queen Galadriel in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Colonel-Doctor Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, a role which brought her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She and her husband Andrew Upton are currently artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company.

Blanchett was born in Ivanhoe, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the daughter of June, an Australian property developer and teacher, and Robert "Bob" Blanchett, a Texas-born U.S. Navy Petty Officer who later worked as an advertising executive. The two met while Blanchett's father's ship USS Arneb was in Melbourne. When Blanchett was 10, she lost her father to a heart attack. She has described herself during childhood as "part extrovert, part wallflower". She has two siblings; her older brother, Bob, is a computer systems engineer, and her younger sister, Genevieve, worked as a theatrical designer and received her Bachelor of Design in Architecture in April 2008.