Modern-day motherhood folds away the pristine, starch-pressed aprons of Leave It To Beaver’s June Cleaver and curbs the unyielding optimism of The Brady Bunch’s Carol Brady through the films of Cate Blanchett.
Over her storied career, the Australian actor has become the standard bearer for maternal roles that veer away from sitcom archetypes of the 50s and 60s to reflect a more honest, chaotic and relatable view of family life, portrayals that value reality over artifice.
In director Ron Howard’s 2003 Western drama The Missing, there was absolutely no room for glamour.
As Magdalena “Maggie” Gilkeson, a hardened healer and single mother on the 19th-century frontier, Blanchett showcased a raw, feral side to parenting. This wasn’t the domestic bliss of 1950s TV; it was the exhausting struggle of a mother determined to rescue her kidnapped daughter from a brutal landscape.
Similarly messy (although navigating a very different century) was Bernadette Fox, the reclusive architect Blanchett portrayed in Where’d You Go, Bernadette, director Richard Linklater’s 2019 adaptation of Maria Semple’s best-selling novel. In the throes of a midlife crisis, Bernadette is a woman at war with the world, pouring her stifled, volcanic creative energy into her only daughter, Bee (Emma Nelson).
The Missing and Where’d You Go, Bernadette are streaming on Tubi.
Blanchett has often described the role as a cautionary tale about the dangerous territory of losing one’s identity to motherhood.
“I think that’s where I related to the chaos of Bernadette is that you never hold it together,” Blanchett told Savannah Guthrie on US breakfast show Today during the film’s promotion.
“It’s a myth, and I am so glad that we as women have finally, between ourselves, stopped pretending that it’s OK. Because it’s not OK, and it rarely works.”
Raising four children with husband Andrew Upton – sons Dashiell, 24, Roman, 22, and Ignatius, 18, and 11-year-old daughter Edith – Blanchett has never ascribed to the kind of sanitised portrayals that dominated the small screen during her childhood in Melbourne. Instead, she regularly jokes about the mundane reality of her household, famously describing the daily battle of trying to apply sunscreen to a moving child as a feat of endurance.
More seriously, in her February 2025 cover story with Harper’s Bazaar Spain, Blanchett emphasised that life as a mum didn’t consume her.
“I love my children,” she said.
“Motherhood is a vital part of who I am, but it is not all that I am.”
Her Hollywood peers say they have benefited from adopting her parenting philosophies.
When filming Terrence Malik’s psychological drama Knight Of Cups, Natalie Portman turned to co-star Blanchett for advice on the juggle of being a working mum.
In the August 2015 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Portman revealed that Blanchett’s blunt tip, “You just do. Stressing about it doesn’t help,” had become a game-changer for her own motherhood journey, and enthused, “Cate Blanchett is an amazing person.”
Blanchett’s pragmatism was on full display during Covid when homeschooling Edith.
She put on a show, dressing up in costume to play the part of a formal teacher just to get her then-seven-year-old to listen.
Reflecting on the experiment during a guest appearance on erstwhile Channel 10 talk show The Project, she laughed at her own failure.
“I couldn’t even teach her grade one math, and she sniffed that out after 14 days,” she admitted.
“I was a dead duck. There was no respect there.”
From her real life to movies such as Where’d You Go, Bernadette and The Missing, Blanchett dismantles the longstanding myth that mothers can “have it all” as they look immaculate and float effortlessly through their routines. But she also says motherhood affects more than just the children in the family.
As she told Harper’s Bazaar Spain, “I think there are many people who are a mother to communities in the workplace. It is equality, it is a sense of care, respect and nurturing. If we all developed a greater sense of motherhood, in the best possible way, men and women, the world would be a better place.”
The Missing and Where’d You Go, Bernadette are streaming on Tubi.