Cate Blanchett is used to playing strong women on screen, from Elf Queen Galadriel to Elizabeth I and in her latest role, as murdered journalist Veronica Guerin, she tackled a dilemma which was close to home. Steve Pratt reports.

ACTRESS Cate Blanchett is fascinated that the first question she's usually asked about the murdered Irish reporter she plays in a new film, concerns the balance between her personal and professional life.

Veronica Guerin was the journalist and mother who shot dead by gunmen in 1996 while investigating Dublin's powerful crime and drug lords. Despite having been beaten up and shot in the leg, and her family being threatened, she persisted with her investigations until she was gunned down.

Blanchett doesn't altogether approve of queries about Guerin's approach to motherhood, believing it part of "an inherent cultural sexism". She lobs back the question, wondering if a man would face the same accusations of parental neglect.

She has a son herself - 19-month-old Dashiell - and faces the same question of balancing work and children. She wants to be an involved parent, saying: "I don't think there's much point in having children and not raising them. I think it happens to men and women.

"I've been fascinated how that's the first question I've been asked, and I asked it myself. Frankly, as an actor I've been confronted by that question.

"Life in itself, not just motherhood or parenthood, is a constant juggling act. I don't consciously think about how parenthood has changed me, but I'm sure it must have.

"It's not that I was consciously thinking of my own situation when playing Veronica. I always invest in the reality of the character."

Over the past few years the Australian actress has made a habit of playing strong women on screen, including Elizabeth I and Charlotte Gray, although she reached her widest audience wearing pointy ears as Galadriel, the Elf Queen, in The Lord Of The Rings movies.

She finds herself defending Guerin's actions in continuing her journalistic crusade against the Dublin villains after being injured and threatened. She chose to fight them in the courts, only to see them get away and leaving her to expose them in print.

"What's she saying is that the only way to protect yourself and other people from suffering the same fate was to do something about it," says Blanchett.

"I was talking to my husband about heroism the other day, and we're living in cowardly times. If someone actually stands up in public and says, 'I think this, I'm prepared to fight for this', we think 'what an idiot'.

"The heroes we often see in films are people who get away with things, and we are quite naughtily pleased they do get away with them. Now anyone, particularly a woman, who stands up and fights for what she believes is considered foolish, reckless and an irresponsible mother."

While playing Guerin, she didn't feel it necessary to make judgements about her behaviour. "I'm not a great believer in mottoes but if I had one it would be, don't judge your character, don't fall in love with them and don't hate them. That's up to the audience, and that's the potency of the film to pass back to them to ask, 'what would I have done?'," she says.

"There's been a lot written about her after her death. Like every human being, there are people who don't like her, people who admired her, people who loved her, and people who couldn't care less what she wrote but loved her as a human being."

She thinks Guerin would have been horrified to hear herself described as a crusader or heroine. "I don't think she saw herself as a courageous woman," she says.

"She didn't come to journalism as a frustrated writer. She came as someone who was curious about what made people tick. It was a vocation for her, and she was like a dog with a bone who saw very little being done about a very important part of Irish life. It became very important and personal to her."

Blanchett will next play another real life person on screen - actress Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, a film about the life of reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes.

"It's a singular challenge to represent someone whose job was to invent characters on screen because everyone feels there's an ownership, a bit like Veronica, who was in the media so people had a sense of her," she says.

Hepburn's recent death has brought the legendary actress back into people's immediate consciousness. Blanchett doesn't think there's an actress alive without an enormous amount of admiration for her work.

The Aviator covers the period when she was in a relationship with Hughes. At the time she was considered box office poison by Hollywood, something that came as a surprise to Blanchett.

"I had no idea the great Katharine Hepburn had put a foot wrong. I found that quite inspiring because often people say he's washed up, she's washed up because they got a bad review or their films failed to make 700 million, billion, trillion dollars in the first day of release. Our sense of success is so warped, and she had an individual measure of success, which I really admire. People didn't know what to do with her because she was so unusual."

* Veronica Guerin (18) opens in cinemas on Friday