"I don’t know what I am. I have no idea ," says Cate Blanchett. "And you know what? I don’t have any particular interest in finding out."

This is in answer to the inevitable questions about what kind of an actress the Australian native is — is she a character actress, a leading lady, a little of both? It may be the media and the public’s need to classify people, to categorize them (which, for movie stars, finds an echo in the categories for the Oscars).

So far, Blanchett has defied description, except that she is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding actors of her generation. Comparisons to such greats as Meryl Streep, Bette Davis, and Grace Kelly come easily. Certainly the range and variety of Blanchett’s roles so far put her in that league: The pale, pure queen (Elizabeth); an earthy Australian nurse (Paradise Road); a gambler heiress (Oscar and Lucinda); an air traffic controller’s wife (Pushing Tin); a quirky bank robber (Bandits); a Georgia psychic (The Gift); a gutsy Irish journalist (Veronica Guerin) and, in 2004, Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, which won Blanchett the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

She has also appeared as the luminous Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings movies, a frontier woman opposite Tommy Lee Jones in The Missing, and a British bomber in Heaven. In all, Blanchett has made 24 films in less than a decade, and that’s not counting her stage work and several television movie appearances.

She has been described as a "shape-shifter," an "emotional acrobat," and a "character actress in a leading lady’s body." She has also been called an "actress’s actress." But perhaps the word most fitting is "chameleon."

She may be all of these or none of these — that’s the mystery of her acting and the thing that confounds critics. But all agree on one thing: She rarely gives a less-thanperfect performance, more often a brilliant one, and she always seems to rise above the material she is given.

"I’d be very restless if I were constantly delving into the same genre or the same character," says Blanchett. "Actors are constantly defining people, and I’ve been fortunate that directors have given me the chance to do things I haven’t done before."

Blanchett has been busy, with three movies being released in the span of a few months: The Good German, opposite George Clooney; Babel, co-starring Brad Pitt, where she plays an American woman who is accidentally shot while in Morocco; and Notes on a Scandal, where she plays a London schoolteacher who has an affair with a student.

Later in 2007, she will reprise her role as Queen Elizabeth in the sequel, The Golden Age, which takes the monarch through middle age and war with Spain.

There’s no doubt that the role of Elizabeth in the first movie was a breakthrough for the willowy, 5-foot-8-inch actress. And directors quickly took notice. "She was so brilliant in it that I believed her," Martin Scorsese has said. "I kept thinking, ‘Her roles are so different, yet she’s also unique to each one.’ " Later, he cast her as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator.

In The Good German, based on the Joseph Kanon novel of the same name, Blanchett plays Lena, a German woman whose husband has disappeared during World War II . Clooney is an American war correspondent who once had an affair with her and tries to find her in the rubble of post-war Berlin.

The film reminds Blanchett of the love story in Casablanca between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. "You have an intense, almost innocent romantic love that existed pre-war," she says. "But they are forever changed by the war. Their spirits are corrupted."

As for the character of Lena, Blanchett says, "I think she is someone who is denied any sentimental notions of love. Any shred of purity in her has been decimated."

Blanchett found working with director Steven Soderbergh exhilarating. "It was a roller coaster, not in the emotional sense," she says, "but in terms of speed and how thrilling it was. There is no ‘trailer time’ on a Soderbergh movie. You can go from a blocking rehearsal into makeup and by the time you get back, the next scene has been lit."

Fresh from Notes on a Scandal in London, Blanchett arrived in Los Angeles for The Good German shoot several weeks into production. "I literally landed on a Friday night and by Monday I was at work. I had to learn a German accent, and I’m not a mimic, so I was in a bit of a panic."

To prepare his actors for the film and to get them used to the 1940s feel of it, Soderbergh screened such black-and-white classics as The Maltese Falcon, Mildred Pierce, Notorious, and, of course, Casablanca itself. The Good German was also shot in black and white. And like those movies, Soderbergh was more interested in the action of the story, not necessarily the motives or psychology of the characters.

"I love The Good German because the plot is so thrilling, so full of twists and turns," says Blanchett. "And the performances are so wildly melodramatic."

The heightened melodrama of some of the lines caused Blanchett and Clooney to pause and, in some cases, find the words difficult to utter. "After some scenes, George and I would go, ‘Ooh, that was eggy,’ meaning that we felt like we had egg on our face," she says. "But Steven was right there, and he said, ‘If it doesn’t feel eggy, you’re not there,’" meaning that it would play better on film than during the actual shoot.

Clooney has nothing but good things to say about Blanchett: "She’s not just the best actress of her generation, she’s the best actor, period." But then, ever the jokester, he adds: "I don’t like her."

Up next for the in-demand actress: a role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, again opposite Brad Pitt (the film is based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story), and a role in a quirky movie about Bob Dylan called I’m Not There, where Blanchett and other actors embody a different aspect of his life. "It’s really not about Dylan per se," she says, "but a character like him called Jude. No one is actually imitating Dylan. We’re trying to capture the spirit of the times."

Blanchett ("Our Cate" to her fellow Australians) caught the acting bug early, but there was a detour along the way. The middle of three children, her mother Australian and her father an American advertising executive (he died when Blanchett was 10), she says she was "always too shy to be cast in school plays," so she and her sister Genevieve would stage their own productions outside of school. "I was always making up little characters and being them for a few days," she once said. "I played a lot of girl detectives."

She enrolled at the University of Melbourne but dropped out to travel. Citing her mother’s example of a single mother raising three children on her own, Blanchett thought she should do something practical, so she decided to return to school and major in economics, which proved to be a disaster.

"It was laughable," she has said. "I tried to study, but my mind is quite nonlinear, so for me to coherently construct a thesis would have been a complete uphill battle. Your true nature will come out one way or another."

And her true nature was acting, so, to that end, Blanchett enrolled in drama school, which turned out to be the best decision she ever made. "Drama school was absolutely a point of focus for me," she once said. "For a lot of people, it can actually stamp out their instincts. But I needed the training."

It paid off handsomely in 1993, when she graduated and started picking up roles on the Sydney stage. Roles in Australian television soon followed. When fellow Australian Geoffrey Rush, now a close friend, saw her in a student production of Sophocles "Electra," he exclaimed, "Who is this extraordinary creature?"

In 1997 she appeared in the movie Oscar and Lucinda opposite Ralph Fiennes, and her exposure to an international film audience had begun. A year later, she starred in Elizabeth, garnering her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

Also in 1997 she married writer and director Andrew Upton, another regular on the Sydney theater scene. Blanchett is very guarded in describing how they finally got together, saying only that there was a "low level of antagonism" between them at first until things suddenly turned around and they wed ("his proposal was the best Christmas present I ever got").

The union has proven fruitful in many ways. The couple now have two young sons, Dashiell, 4, and Roman, 2, and they recently gave up their home in England to move back to Sydney, where Blanchett says that in addition to her busy movie schedule, she wants to become more involved in the theater there. She appeared earlier in a revival of "Hedda Gabler" which sold out its Australian and U.S. runs.

Blanchett believes that the move will also be good for her boys, especially as they approach school age. "It doesn’t mean the adventure is over," she says, alluding to her frequent travels. "I’ve never planned ahead that far, so the idea of living in one place is really quite exotic for me. And I know people whose kids have gone to a lot of different schools. But I think our kids are really craving to be in one spot."

Which brings up an interesting question: Do either of the boys, as young as they are, also have the acting bug? Apparently the answer is yes, at least in Dash’s case.

Blanchett recalls a scene on the set of The Golden Age in London earlier this year where Dash was dressed up as a knight and standing just to her left as she sat on the throne playing Elizabeth.

"It was a costume his godmother had given him," she says. "For some reason he had become obsessed with knights and castles at this stage of his life. Well, Dash wanted to stay behind the throne, but of course he couldn’t because he’d be in the shot. But it was hard to explain that to him. So I said, ‘Dash, if you notice, there are not any other guards around me. But there is a huge open archway at the other end of the studio where the baddies can get in, so you need to go protect that.’ The assistant director saw this, and, having two boys of his own, he knew exactly what to do. As we prepared to shoot the scene, he said, ‘Is everyone ready?’ Then he looked down at the archway and said, ‘Dash, are you ready?’ Dash stood there like a little tin soldier for the entire five minutes it took to shoot the scene. He was saluting the whole time. It was so sweet. I won’t be able to look at that scene without weeping, knowing that he was just off camera."

The fact that Blanchett agreed to play Elizabeth one more time may seem strange at first, given her oftstated feelings about not repeating a role. "I kept saying no because I couldn’t see why," she has said. "But suddenly there was this really fantastic script that had the potential to talk about a woman approaching middle age. And I thought that if the first film was about denial, then this one, in a way, is about acceptance — of the aging process."

Hollywood is notoriously hard on actresses once they reach their 40s and 50s, so does this reflect how Blanchett sees herself and the roles she might get in the future?

Her answer is somewhat oblique. "With grace," she says, "aging is a very positive process if it is laced with wisdom rather than the fear. In the movie, the challenge was to find and mine the depths of Elizabeth at this stage of her life and reign, which I have not yet experienced." In other words, Cate Blanchett appears well prepared to embrace her bright future.