'Elizabeth' the second

LOS ANGELES — The queen - always imperial, rarely impetuous - was not game from the get-go.

Cate Blanchett considered reprising her career-making turn as Queen Elizabeth I, then reconsidered. She worried she'd already done it a decade ago and done it right. The awards, the accolades, had all come her way afterward.

If "Elizabeth" (1998) had been "a risky little film," as Blanchett put it, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" risked running down its predecessor's reputation as a historical classic. Not to mention that she wasn't a nobody anymore. In the intervening years Blanchett had won an Academy Award for playing another figure from real life, Katharine Hepburn, in "The Aviator," been called the best actress of her generation by no less an authority than George Clooney, and wowed audiences with her impeccable taste in designer togs on the red carpet. She was definitely a somebody now.

"In the first one, I was an actress working in the theater and completely unknown internationally," said Blanchett, who, not surprisingly, shows perfect posture whether seated on a hotel suite couch or striding across the room to get herself some water. "I think more people are saying, 'Why are you going to revisit it again?' In a weird way, we've got more to lose this time around."

But director Shekhar Kapur ultimately convinced her to reteam with him on a love story set against the Spanish Armada and Inquisition that is at heart about religious intolerance in any age. If the original was an exploration of betrayal and the context of power, the follow-up, which opens Friday, is meant to grapple with the idea of absolute power.

"What happens when people worship you? What happens when you become Diana?" Kapur asked. "You're expected not to be mortal anymore. You're expected to be an angel. You're expected to be divine. And you start to believe you rule by divine right."

That divinity extends to Kapur's opinion of the woman he plucked out of relative obscurity when he was casting the first "Elizabeth." He says he happened to see a reel of scenes from her "Oscar and Lucinda," saw five shots of Blanchett, and announced, "That's Elizabeth. . . . I picked the person who is now being called the greatest actor on planet Earth. . . . I honestly did not know that she would come up with the performance she came up with. I just knew I needed Elizabeth to have an imperial, timeless quality."

Which the 38-year-old Blanchett does, on screen and off. There's something both old-fashioned and futuristic about her. Maybe it's the skin that's pale to the point of transluscence. Or the impossibly high cheek bones. Her clothes, of course, are classic with the slightest edge: sleeveless navy dress, perfectly manicured but unpainted nails, no earrings. Plus, she's impressively tall.

In the decade since she first donned wigs and white face paint to play the queen, Blanchett has had to talk about herself a lot. That's what comes from starring in two dozen or more movies, even if most weren't mainstream blockbusters. Then again, her resume does include the three "Lord of the Rings" and the long-awaited "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," set for release in 2008. In other words, she's no stranger to stardom - or teenage boy fans who fall into stunned silence in her presence.

"I went through being the geek queen with 'Lord of the Rings,' " she said, laughing. "Now what's exciting about doing 'Indiana Jones' is that there is a whole generation of people who have yet to discover it. I grew up on this stuff so it's exciting not only to be reliving my childhood but carrying that torch on and spreading the word."

Blanchett is done filming her "Indiana Jones" scenes, and after a two-year span that saw her working without breaks alongside such costars as Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt ("Babel"), George Clooney ("The Good German"), and Judi Dench ("Notes on a Scandal"), she's ready to wind down back in her native Australia, where she and her screenwriter/playwright husband, Andrew Upton, are slated to take over as co-directors of the Sydney Theatre Company. After years of living in England and on the road, they are going home again with their two young sons.

The seemingly unflappable Blanchett sounds a bit nervous.

"Is it exciting to go home? It's confronting, because we've been living in England for a long time and in the end you've got this fantastic sense of anonymity, which is great because you can constantly expand and evolve and you're not accountable to anyone's preconceptions of who you were," Blanchett said. "But when you go back, it's like going back to the family for Christmas. You've got longstanding relationships and also, in the end, that's the culture that we come from, that we draw from, that we want to be the most responsible to."

Still, she says she doesn't worry about scrutiny. Blanchett has been called a chameleon, and she says she rarely gets recognized. Despite a highly public choice of careers, she's managed to maintain her privacy and private life. She doesn't make the gossip rags, except for best-dressed features. She isn't often heard from, unless she's got a film to promote - and after two years of nonstop work, she's got plenty of those.

Among them is the quirky "I'm Not There," costarring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere, all of them playing Bob Dylan at various points in his career. Blanchett, who's never met the singer, is said to do a dead-on interpretation, if not impersonation. All she knows is that her husband wouldn't come near her when she was on set and dressed as Dylan. But she can't see the resemblance: "I can only see me" on screen, she said. "I hate watching myself."

Her view of herself aside, Blanchett as Elizabeth does disappear beneath her massive costumes and makeup and become the 30-something virgin queen, vulnerable but imperious, in love but unable to act on that love, and forced to go to war with Spain instead. "Elizabeth" No. 2, which also stars Clive Owen and Geoffrey Rush, is hers to rise or fall on. She knew that going in, and that's another reason she was reluctant, Kapur said. There was also her tight schedule to contend with; he had to find a three-month opening and persuade her to give it to him.

"The trouble was not so much would she be available but would she be resistant, and she was," Kapur said. "She said, quite rightly, that the last film, whatever it's done, has become a landmark, an iconic film about an iconic figure. She worried, 'Are we going to destroy that?' To me, I was just interested in making another movie and following our interpretation of the story."

As Blanchett sees it, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" offers the best of all acting worlds: a juicy female lead juxtaposed with a war between two then-superpowers, the England she rules and Spain - all told in what she calls Kapur's "unabashedly romantic and melodramatic" style. Allusions to what is occurring in the world today are apparent.

"I think we have a populist story that's about religious extremism, and at the center of that you've got this struggle that this woman who's approaching middle age is dealing with," Blanchett said. "When I could see what the juxtaposition of those energies produces, I could see there was a reason for making another movie."

For now, Blanchett's waiting to see how "Elizabeth" is received while Kapur already has a third one in mind. And it would be the perfect franchise for a woman to age within. The queen died in 1603, at the age of 70. At the rate of one every decade, that's another four films to come. But Blanchett isn't so sure.

"It's true there aren't many roles for 70-year-old women; I should save it up," she said, half joking. "You never say never to these things, but we'll see how much the public can tolerate."