Blanchett was born in Ivanhoe, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, the daughter of June, an Australian property developer and teacher, and Robert Blanchett, a Texas-born United States Navy Petty Officer who met Blanchett's mother while stationed in Melbourne and who later worked as an advertising executive.
When Blanchett was 10, she lost her father to a heart attack.
She has described herself during childhood as "part extrovert, part wallflower". She has two siblings; her older brother, Bob, is a computer systems engineer, and her younger sister, Genevieve, is a theatrical designer.

Blanchett attended primary school in Melbourne at Ivanhoe East Primary School before completing secondary education at Methodist Ladies' College, where she explored her passion for acting. She studied Economics and Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne before leaving Australia to travel overseas.
When she was 18, Blanchett went on a vacation to Egypt. A fellow guest at a cheap hotel in Cairo asked if she wanted to be an extra in a movie, and the next day she found herself in a crowd scene cheering for an American boxer losing to an Egyptian in the film Kaboria, starring the late Egyptian actor Ahmed Zaki.
Blanchett returned to Australia and later moved to Sydney to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Art; graduating in 1992 and beginning her career in the theatre. Her first major stage role was opposite Geoffrey Rush in the 1993 David Mamet play Oleanna, for which she won the Sydney Theatre Critics' Best Newcomer Award.

Blanchett's husband is playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton, whom she met in 1996 while she was performing in a production of The Seagull. It was not love at first sight, however; "He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant", Blanchett later remarked. "It just shows you how wrong you can be, but once he kissed me that was that." The two were married on December 29, 1997. Their first child, Dashiell John, was born on December 3, 2001; their second child, Roman Robert, was born on April 23, 2004. Blanchett is currently pregnant with the couple's third child, due in April 2008.

After the making Brighton in England their main family home for much of the early 2000s, she and her husband returned to their native Australia. In November 2006, Blanchett stated that this was due to a desire to be closer to her family as well as a sense of belonging to the Australian theatrical community. She and her family live in "Bulwarra", a 1877 sandstone mansion in the harbourside Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill. It was purchased for $10.2 million Australian dollars in 2004 and underwent extensive renovations in 2007 in order to be made more "eco-friendly".

Blanchett is a Patron of the Sydney Film Festival.

Blanchett works as the face of SK-II, the luxury skin care brand owned by Procter & Gamble.

Cate Blanchett's Photos

In 2006, a portrait of Cate Blanchett and family painted by McLean Edwards was a finalist in the Archibald Prize, which is awarded for the "best portrait painting preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics".

In 2007, Blanchett supported the web-based campaign whoonearthcares.com - urging people to express their concerns about climate change in Australia.