I’m almost positive that Cate Blanchett is going to walk away with yet another Oscar nomination this year, this time for Carol. People are still debating whether Rooney Mara will be included in Supporting or Lead Actress categories, but there’s no debate about Cate – she’s totally a sure thing for a nomination. Probably not the actual Oscar this year, but it will be fun seeing her awards show fashion. Cate covers the new issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK to talk about Carol, Truth and other projects, but mostly she talks about adopting her baby girl, Edith. Cate and her husband Andrew Upton adopted Edith from America, because apparently Australia’s adoption laws are kind of terrible. Some highlights:
Becoming a mom again with Edith: “It’s always the first time. Always. I’m not planning on working much in 2016 either. Our three biological children have been extraordinary. It’s been wonderful watching them become a little brood.”
She & Andrew have wanted to adopt for years: “We got a phone call earlier this year and we adopted a little girl. You’re on the list and then you get the call. You don’t know anything about the child you’re going to meet.”
Why she found Australian adoption laws difficult: “The laws have to shift towards the best interests of the children. Otherwise what happens is these children end up being shunted back and forth through the foster system, and ultimately if that goes on until the child is five or seven, then the damage is just… In Australia, it’s an understandable hangover from the Stolen Generations. When a country has a history of children being immorally and insensitively ripped from their parents and their place of origin and it doesn’t get resolved, the adoption laws swing, understandably, not in favour of the child.”
More orphans to come: “We’re going to see a new wave of orphans coming out of the Syrian crisis and Europe, and the rest of the world is going to have to respond. It’s a world issue.”
If you’d like to read more about the Stolen Generations, go here. A few weeks ago, I read an interview with Zahn McClarnon – who brilliantly played Hanzee in Fargo – talking about playing a Native American character who ended up living with a white family for much of his childhood. The way McClarnon talked about it, it made me realize that Native American children were still being shunted off to white families as late as the 1960s in America. And yet we still manage to have a more lax adoption framework than Australia, I guess.
Photos courtesy of Norman Jean Roy/Harper’s Bazaar UK.
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