Cate Blanchett knows pain – she starred in the last Indiana Jones film, after all, and even watching that was agony.
And she knows danger, too. Yesterday Cate Blanchett appeared in a stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire in Sydney. That in itself is pretty dangerous – asking a group of Australians to follow a narrative that doesn’t feature a comedy transvestite burping out television theme-tunes sounds like a recipe for widespread violence to us – but there was more to come.
Because Cate Blanchett got hit on the head with a radio during the play. And she bled a bit. Danger.
What are the chances, eh? Cate Blanchett has just gone through the most dangerous few months of her entire life – filming a Robin Hood movie with Russell Crowe, where every day was a potential minefield of hurled telephones and violent temper tantrums and, let’s say, dirty protests over imaginary injustices only visible to Russell Crowe – and she came out of it unscathed. But then she goes back to Australia to do a harmless little stageplay and – bam! – she ends up with blood gushing out of her head after an inexplicable run-in with a transistor radio.
During a preview performance of The Sydney Theatre Company’s stage run of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cate Blanchett ended up getting accidentally wounded by her co-star Joel Edgerton. Let’s get straight to the juicy stuff. The Times reports:
Blanchett fell down on all fours and then used a prop nightdress to stem the flow of blood from the back of her head as she continued her lines. ?He [Edgerton] was supposed to throw it [the radio] out the window, but it sort of slipped and hit her in the head ? she was so good, she just went straight on,? a witness said.
Straight on for a bit, anyway, because right afterwards Cate Blanchett decided that she couldn’t go on and the play was cancelled, although previews are expected to resume before Saturday’s big opening.
It seems to us like this is just another sign that A Streetcar Named Desire is cursed. After all, look at what happened to the stars of the 1951 movie version – Vivian Leigh died, Kim Hunter died, Karl Malden died, Marlon Brando got fat, went a bit weird and died, and Wright King who played the seminal role of A Collector survived but went on to star in something called Invasion Of The Bee Girls. And now Cate Blanchett has sustained a fairly minor-sounding knock on the head? It’s cursed, we tell you. Cursed!
Still, we have our fingers tightly crossed that Cate Blanchett makes a full recovery from this injury and that her production of A Streetcar Named Desire is a wild success. In fact, no, we hope it becomes the biggest play in Australian theatrical history. It’s an uphill task – it’ll have to beat the current record holder, Steveo From Down The Pub Points At His Funny-Looking Sheep And Does A Funny Dance For A Bit, but we have faith.
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