Cate Blanchett, 55, announces plans to retire from acting (2025)

She has been treading the boards for over three decades, but Cate Blanchett has declared that she is to retire from acting.

The Oscar-winning actress, 55, hesitated about her job title during an interview with Radio Times and explained: 'It's because I'm giving up [acting]. My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it. I am serious about giving up acting.'

Cate insisted she had 'a lot of things I want to do with my life'.

The Australian actress, who recently starred in an adaptation of Chekov's The Seagull at the Barbican, London, did not give a timeframe on her departure from the entertainment industry.

But it is not the first time that she has threatened to quit her career despite international acclaim.

She told Vanity Fair in 2023 that she has often toyed with the idea of walking away from her acting work.

She said: 'It's not occasional — it's continual. On a daily or weekly basis, for sure.

'It's a love affair, isn't it? So you do fall in and out of love with it, and you have to be seduced back into it.'

Despite her latest declaration, the Lord of the Rings star is set to feature in her first radio play on Radio 4 on Saturday in a 90-minute monologue titled The Fever.

Written by Wallace Shawn, Blanchett will play an unnamed traveller who falls ill in a foreign country riven by civil war.

The mother-of-four explained why she had chosen to embark on her first audio radio project.

She told the Radio Times: 'I'm obsessed with the psychological space that is the interior of people's cars. Often the most profound and intense and memorable conversations that I have with my children are in the car.'

'That special space was where my 16-year-old encountered Desert Island Discs and now he's completely obsessed with it, and, because the school run is quite long, it's where I listen to long-form radio drama.'

Cate has racked up thousands of rave reviews over the last 30 years afterworking tirelessly across dozens of projects in theatre, film and TV.

A regular on the global awards circuit, Blanchett has received major prizes from all over the world, including two Oscars, three BAFTAs, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, an Order of Australia, and in France a Chevalier, for her contribution to the arts.

Born in Melbourne, Cate started her movie career in Australia but quickly made an international breakthrough in 1998 with one of her first films, the historical drama Elizabeth.

By the early 2000s, global audiences knew her from the blockbuster Lord of the Rings series. She later appeared in the Hobbit trilogy.

She won great praise and a best supporting Oscar for playing Hollywood great Kate Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator in 2005.

In 2013, she won her first best actress Academy Award in the Woody Allen film Blue Jasmine.

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