Cate Blanchett deliciously wicked in ‘Cinderella’

CATE Blanchett’s stepmother is inspired by Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich.

LOS ANGELES—One of Cinderella’s sisters was assaulting my eardrums inside a tent on the “Cinderella” set in Buckinghamshire, England. Sophie McShera was intentionally singing horribly as Drizella in the scene that we were watching on the monitor. We had headphones on so Sophie’s cat-like wailing was painful to our ears, yet extra-hilarious on this cold, drab and gray day in the United Kingdom.

Then, from out of the blue, a beautiful, glamorous, tall apparition in green materialized in the tent. “So beautifully lit in there [on the actual set] and so badly lit in here,” said the vision in Technicolor about the dark tent. It was Cate Blanchett but even in the gloomy tent, she glowed, truly one of the last real movie stars with glamorous aura. Joan Crawford came to my mind.

“Hasn’t Sandy (Powell) done an amazing job?” Cate asked aloud about the blouse and floor-length skirt she was wearing, one of the three-time Oscar winning designer’s creations for Kenneth Branagh’s live-action version of the fairy tale. True enough, Cate said next, “Sandy’s gone for a blend of the Joan Crawford ’40s thing period.”

“But it’s a blend of periods,” clarified the actress who could be cinema’s most magnificently dressed evil stepmom. “It’s timeless. It’s not set in any particular time.”

Rare aura

I’m tempted to say the Oscar- and-Golden-Globe-winning actress is the reason to watch “Cinderella.” When I recently watched the movie, how she glowingly appeared before us visiting journalists on the set was exactly how she looked on the screen. Few actresses these days have that aura.

And she’s deliciously wicked. In one scene, the Grand Duke (Stellan Skarsgard) asks her, “Are you trying to bribe me?” “Yes,” Cate purred, smiling like a Cheshire cat, eyes ablaze with mischief.

She’s gloriously shot by Kenneth and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos. There’s one scene by the stairs, for example, that evokes dramatic moments from black-and-white melodramas of the 1940s and ’50s.

LILY James, who plays Disney’s most beloved princess, says of Cate, “We made the slight mistake of watching ‘Blue Jasmine’ before we worked with her. So [we] came to the set like wanting to bow at her feet.”

Charismatic leads

But the movie has other charms. Lily James, in the title role, and Richard Madden, as Prince Charming, are charismatic leads. There are at least two breathtaking set pieces: the grand ball, and Cinderella’s race against the clock when midnight strikes and her coach and attendants transform back into their original states. Both are spectacular.

In between, there’s Cinderella’s struggles against her stepmom, Drizella and the other stepsister, Anastasia (Holliday Grainger). “There was a real sense of melodrama in those films which these fairy tales inherently have,” Cate said of the old movies Kenneth pays homage to.

“But it’s a strange hybrid,” the Australian actress said as she decided to sit on a stool in the tent. “Ken has such a great sense of theater and an understanding of film history. If you think about the Disney history with the cartoons and all kinds of evil witches and stepmothers who have been in all those Disney films, it’s like an intersection of all those influences.”

Another side

Cate sees another side in Kenneth’s retelling, which benefits from writer Chris Weitz’s embrace of the charm of the fairy tale and the modern heroine qualities of Cinderella. “For me personally, what interests me in the tale is that there are so many animated and live action films out there that have heroes for boys. This is a female-driven story. What I found really interesting was, what makes a person ugly, why are the stepsisters evil and wicked?

“Why is the stepmother wicked and Cinderella, in equal measures, good? It’s that jealousy that can make someone evil. So it’s quite human in that way. Ken’s fantastic with all that stuff.”

“Fairy tales are actually quite brutal at times and harsh,” said the mom of three kids with her husband, playwright, screenwriter and director Andrew Upton. “All those Hans Christian Andersen and Grimm’s fairy tales are so fantastic to read to children because they don’t pull any punches.”

“You’re always going back to the core of the fairy tale,” she said. “There’s a girl who quintessentially has a light inside of her. While the stepmother and stepsisters are twisted and perverted, she is good and pure. When you’ve got someone like Lily playing the role, who just naturally has a light inside of her.”

Earlier, Sandy Powell gave us a tour of her place in the studio, full of sketches and photos for inspiration. “I wanted Cate to look like Joan Crawford or Marlene Dietrich doing a 19th-century film. I knew Cate before. I knew what would suit her. The movie’s sort of 19th century by way of the 1940s and 1950s. I bought a lot of 1940s, 1950s jewelry.”

LILLY James as Cinderella and Richard Madden as the prince are charming.

Completely normal

Lily, who also came to our tent with Sophie and Holliday, said about Cate, “We all made the slight mistake of watching ‘Blue Jasmine’ before we worked with her. So the three of us came to the set like wanting to bow at her feet (laughs). Then Cate opens her mouth and she’s completely normal which is slightly disconcerting. She’s just so lovely. She helps make it easy. You forget that you were so starstruck when you first saw her.”

When we joke about having to endure the comically bad singing on our headphones, Lily said, “Sophie is the most amazing singer so it was really hard for her to sing badly.”

Sophie offered with a smile, “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know we’d be doing it all day.”

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