Cate Blanchett

Photographed By Ellinor Forje

Acting is the art of creating an illusion. Cate Blanchett excels at it, so completely that the boundary between performance and reality seems to dissolve. She embodies her characters with such conviction that they feel fully lived rather than performed.

Wearing a restrained Stella McCartney dress that revealed her arms and torso with understated elegance, Blanchett, brand ambassador for IWC Schaffhausen, opened the “Timeless Portofino” exhibition at the Zurich Film Festival on 27 September 2014. The exhibition presented IWC’s latest campaign, photographed by Peter Lindbergh, whose influence on contemporary fashion imagery includes persuading Linda Evangelista to cut her iconic hair.

The “Timeless Portofino” campaign also features Christoph Waltz, Emily Blunt, Zhou Xun, Ewan McGregor, Adriana Lima, and Karolina Kurkova, who remarked that the shoot was stripped of hair and makeup, resulting in a more natural and unembellished aesthetic.

The images, predominantly black and white, are austere yet refined, recalling a controlled, modernist sensibility. Blanchett was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2012, two years before receiving her second Academy Award for her role in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine” (2013). In that film, she portrays Jasmine, a woman unravelling after the collapse of her privileged life in New York, forced to rebuild herself in San Francisco under starkly diminished circumstances.

Within minutes of the film, it becomes clear that both the performance and the film itself will attract significant critical attention, centred on the theme of decline and dislocation. Jasmine’s present reality stands in sharp contrast to her former life on the Upper East Side.

Observing Cate Blanchett in person, one is struck less by constructed ideas of attractiveness and more by an immediate sense of presence, composed, striking, and distinctly human.