Cate Blanchett’s blurry wedding photo holds unexpected lesson about embracing the past
Cate Blanchett is taking a glass-half-full approach to her wedding photo collection.
The 55-year-old “Black Bag” actress was asked to recall the first memory that pops into her head during a March 13 appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show.”
Without hesitation, Blanchett recalled the night she married her husband, Andrew Upton, in 1997.
“When we got married we had absolutely no money. We couldn’t have a photographer and we had two friends who were photographers,” she told host Drew Barrymore.
Unfortunately, those two photographers failed to hold up their end of the bargain, she said.
“One guy who got so drunk he forgot to load film in the camera and the other one had such a good time that he didn’t take any pictures,” Blanchett said.
The one photo she does have is blurry, showing the two newlyweds getting into a vehicle for the first time as husband and wife.
“I was so sad and so upset and I wept at the time that we didn’t have any pictures,” she admits. “But in the end I’m kind of quite pleased that I don’t have any pictures because I then constantly try and recall the evening.”
Blanchett met Upton in the mid-1990s, but has admitted their relationship didn’t start on the right foot.
“He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant,” Blanchett explained in a 1999 interview with “Vanity Fair.”
“And it just shows how wrong you can be,” she continued. “But once he kissed me, that was that.”
The couple started dating in 1997 and it only took three days for Blanchett to see they had a future together.
“We were in bed, as you are after three days, and he said, ‘Cate,’ and I thought, ‘S**t, he’s gonna ask me to marry him, and I’m gonna have to say yes,’” Blanchett said on “The Ellen Show” in 2015.
“And then he said, ‘No, I’m hungry, do you want to go get something to eat?’” she added.
Upton proposed three weeks later and they tied the knot in December of that year. While talking to Barrymore, Blanchett described their 27-year marriage as a “miracle.”
During that time, they’ve started a family and welcomed four children, including three sons — Dashiell, 23, Roman, 20, and Ignatius, 17 — and a daughter named Edith, 10.
“He’s one of the few grounded people I know whose head is in the stars,” Blanchett told Vanity Fair. “He’s able to stretch between the sky and the earth.”
“Those people are very rare,” she added.
