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Schlafly's style — angry, combative, uncompromising and at times, surprisingly playful — was effective in tying Republicans into a close marriage with the religious right. No prizes for guessing who took notice; the day after she died in 2016, her book, making the case for Donald Trump, was published. Trump, on the presidential campaign trail at the time, paid tribute when speaking at her funeral: "A movement has lost its hero." Who to play this polarising, mysterious woman? No one could do it better than Cate Blanchett, the star of Mrs. America, the new mini-series about Schlafly and her mighty legacy. For while Blanchett, at 51, is undoubtedly one of the most talented actors of her generation, in none of her 70-odd films does she play the girl next door. She is Katharine Hepburn — and won an Oscar for it in The Aviator — never Audrey. Sure, she plays an elf in The Lord of the Rings films, but it is the regal Galadriel, "the mightiest elf." Even directors realized that they had to ignore matters of sex and cast her as Bob Dylan to find the necessary quantities of forbidding aloofness. She has joked about playing the U.S. president — "I would play Donald Trump in a heartbeat. The comb over? I'm there." — but the casting would be terrible; the inscrutable Melania or Barack Obama would be better. And, of course, no other actress has been Oscar- nominated twice for playing the same role in two films nearly a decade apart. Queen Elizabeth I is the part of Blanchett's life; the solitary mask of power, the brittle hauteur of the undemocratic leader. Great writers may have a splinter of ice in their hearts, but there is ice in the eyes of this great actress. In short, for an Australian in the entertainment industry, she is the least Australian and least "luvvie" you could expect to meet. The snag: a life's work in unknowability makes it hard to get to know her. The director Anthony Minghella once said, "Though I have worked with her, I barely know her. I would be hard pressed to say more than three things about her with any confidence." Blanchett suffers media appearances like a Special Operations Executive expert at resistance to interrogation (a part she played in Charlotte Gray). She grew up in Melbourne, the middle of three children. Her father, Bob, was a former naval officer from Texas; he died when she was ten, from a heart attack in a cinema. He was a figure of mystique for her. She once said that she fantasized for a while that he had not died. "I somehow thought the CIA had taken him; that one day he would just turn up," she said, although she later retracted that thought. It has become commonly known that this economics undergraduate got her first taste for acting when appearing in a boxing movie in Cairo, while traveling there. "Nooo," she groaned when someone asked her about it. "But say that if you want. Print the legend of the boxing movie." In a press conference to publicize Carol, in which she plays a lesbian, she said she had had "many" past relationships with women, which the world took as a revelation of bisexuality. She later said that this was misconstrued and that none of those relationships were sexual. You can imagine the response when one journalist found out she had a tattoo in an intimate place and asked her if she would identify what it depicted; never has the word "no" carried more froideur. In a series of retreats from the glare of being one of Hollywood's highest-paid, most garlanded actors, Blanchett spent ten years living in Brighton, then a five-year stint as joint-artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company with her husband of 23 years, the Australian playwright Andrew Upton. Shortly after adopting a baby girl in 2015, a dream she has said they had since the birth of their first child, the couple moved back to a house in the East Sussex countryside to bring up the baby and their three older sons. This is well known, but when I start the three- way phone call with Blanchett and Stacey Sher, the executive producer on Mrs. America, my first chatty question is: where is everyone calling from? Sher says, "My home in Los Angeles," and Blanchett says, "The UK." I ask roughly where in the UK and she repeats, after a pause that is far longer than the time lag on our international line, "The UK." This series was finished in lockdown —Blanchett says she was "sitting inside my closet to finish off the sound"— and Blanchett is doing the publicity for it while homeschooling her children, the eldest of whom is 18, among their pigs and chickens. Schlafly was also an early champion of phonics and has inspired Blanchett to do some phonics-based reading with her 5-year-old girl, but as she said on an American news show, "a teacher I ain't." For Sher, who worked on the prescient pandemic film Contagion, this period has "felt like my dreams on that set turned into reality." Mrs. America, though, is a passion project for Blanchett, precisely because of her political antipathy to Schlafly. She had spotted Schlafly, then a frail 92, being brought on at the tail-end of Trump's campaign events and given standing ovations, then had seen Trump eulogizing his guru at her funeral. She thought, "Who is this woman?"