Yazid I

Yazid ibn Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan (Arabic: يزيد بن معاوية بن أبي سفيان, romanized: Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya ibn ʾAbī Sufyān; c. 646 – 11 November 683), commonly known as Yazid I, was the second caliph of the Umayyad Caliphate. He ruled from April 680 until his death in November 683. His appointment was the first hereditary succession to the caliphate in Islamic history. His caliphate was marked by the death of Muhammad's grandson Husayn ibn Ali and the start of the crisis known as the Second Fitna.

Yazid's nomination as heir apparent in (56 AH) by his father Mu'awiya I was opposed by several Muslim grandees from the Hejaz region, including Husayn and Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr. The two men refused to recognize Yazid following his accession and took sanctuary in Mecca. When Husayn left for Kufa in Iraq to lead a revolt against Yazid, he was killed with his small band of supporters by Yazid's forces in the Battle of Karbala. Husayn's death caused resentment in the Hejaz, where Ibn al-Zubayr called for a consultative assembly to elect a new caliph. The people of Medina, who supported Ibn al-Zubayr, held other grievances toward the Umayyads. After failing to gain the allegiance of Ibn al-Zubayr and the people of the Hejaz through diplomacy, Yazid sent an army to suppress their rebellion. The army defeated the Medinese in the Battle of al-Harra in August 683 and the city was sacked. Afterward, Mecca was besieged for several weeks until the army withdrew as a result of Yazid's death in November 683. The Caliphate fell into a nearly decade-long civil war, ending with the establishment of the Marwanid dynasty (the Umayyad caliph Marwan I and his descendants).

Yazid continued Mu'awiya's decentralized model of governance, relying on his provincial governors and the tribal nobility. He abandoned Mu'awiya's ambitious raids against the Byzantine Empire and strengthened Syria's military defences. No new territories were conquered during his reign. Yazid is considered an illegitimate ruler and a tyrant by many Muslims due to his hereditary succession, the death of Husayn, and his attack on Medina. Modern historians take a milder view, and consider him a capable ruler, albeit less successful than his father.

## Early life

Yazid was born in Syria. His year of birth is uncertain, placed between 642 and 649. His father was Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, then governor of Syria under Caliph Uthman (r. 644–656). Mu'awiya and Uthman belonged to the wealthy Umayyad clan of the Quraysh tribe, a grouping of Meccan clans to which the Islamic prophet Muhammad and all the preceding caliphs belonged. Yazid's mother, Maysun, was the daughter of Bahdal ibn Unayf, a chieftain of the powerful Bedouin tribe of Banu Kalb. She was a Christian, like most of her tribe. Yazid grew up with his maternal Kalbite kin, spending the springs of his youth in the Syrian Desert; for the remainder of the year he was in the company of the Greek and native Syrian courtiers of his father, who became caliph in 661.

During his father's caliphate, Yazid led several campaigns against the Byzantine Empire, which the Caliphate had been trying to conquer, including an attack on the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. Sources give several dates for this between 49 AH (669–70 CE) and 55 AH (674–5 CE). Muslim sources offer few details of his role in the campaigns, possibly downplaying his involvement due to the controversies of his later career. He is portrayed in these sources as having been unwilling to participate in the expedition to the chagrin of Mu'awiya, who then forced him to comply. However, two eighth-century non-Muslim sources from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), the Chronicle of 741 and the Chronicle of 754, both of which likely drew their material from an earlier Arabic work, report that Yazid besieged Constantinople with a 100,000-strong army. Unable to conquer the city, the army captured adjacent towns, acquired considerable loot, and retreated after two years. Yazid also led the hajj (the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca) on several occasions.

## Nomination as caliph

The third caliph Uthman drew the ire of the Muslim settlers of the conquered lands as a consequence of his controversial policies, which were seen by many as nepotistic and interfering in provincial affairs. In 656 he was killed by the provincial rebels in Medina, then capital of the Caliphate, after which Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, was recognized as caliph by the Medinese people and the rebels. In the consequent first Islamic civil war (656–661), Mu'awiya opposed Ali from his stronghold in Syria, fighting him to a stalemate at the Battle of Siffin in 657. In January 661 Ali was assassinated by a Kharijite (a faction opposed to Ali and Mu'awiya), after which his son Hasan was recognized as his successor. In August, Mu'awiya, who had already been recognized as caliph by his partisans in Syria, led his army toward Kufa, the capital of Hasan and Ali in Iraq, and gained control over the rest of the Caliphate by securing a peace treaty with Hasan. The terms of the treaty stipulated that Mu'awiya would not nominate a successor. Although the treaty brought a temporary peace, no framework of succession was established.

Mu'awiya was determined to install Yazid as his successor. The idea was scandalous to Muslims, as hereditary succession had no precedent in Islamic history—earlier caliphs had been elected either by popular support in Medina or by the consultation of the senior companions of Muhammad—and according to Islamic principles, the position of ruler was not the private property of a ruler to award to his descendants. It was also unacceptable by Arab custom, according to which the rulership should not pass from father to son but within the wider clan. According to the orientalist Bernard Lewis, the "only precedents available to Mu'āwiya from Islamic history were election and civil war. The former was unworkable; the latter had obvious drawbacks." Mu'awiya passed over his eldest son Abd Allah, who was from his Qurayshite wife, perhaps due to the stronger support Yazid had in Syria because of his Kalbite parentage. The Banu Kalb was dominant in southern Syria and led the larger tribal confederation of Quda'a. The Quda'a were established in Syria long before Islam and had acquired significant military experience and familiarity with hierarchical order under the Byzantines, as opposed to the more free-spirited tribesmen of Arabia and Iraq. Northern Syria, on the other hand, was dominated by the tribal confederation of Qays, which had immigrated there during Mu'awiya's reign, and resented the privileged position of the Kalb in the Umayyad court. By appointing Yazid to lead campaigns against the Byzantines, Mu'awiya may have sought to foster support for Yazid from the northern tribesmen. The policy had limited success as the Qays opposed the nomination of Yazid, at least in the beginning, for he was "the son of a Kalbi woman". In the Hejaz (western Arabia, where Medina and Mecca are located and where the old Muslim elite resided), Yazid had support among his Umayyad kinsmen, but there were other members of the Hejazi nobility whose approval was important. By appointing Yazid to lead the hajj rituals there, Mu'awiya may have hoped to enlist support for Yazid's succession and elevate his status as a Muslim leader. According to Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (d. 967), Mu'awiya had also employed poets to influence public opinion in favour of Yazid's succession.

According to the account of Ibn Athir (d. 1233), Mu'awiya summoned a shura (consultative assembly) of influential men from all of the provinces to his capital, Damascus, in 676 and won their support through flattery, bribes, and threats. He then ordered his Umayyad kinsman Marwan ibn al-Hakam, the governor of Medina, to inform its people of his decision. Marwan faced resistance, especially from Ali's son and Muhammad's grandson Husayn, and Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, Abd Allah ibn Umar, and Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr, all sons of prominent companions of Muhammad, who, by virtue of their descent, could also lay claim to the caliphal office. Mu'awiya went to Medina and pressed the four dissenters to accede, but they fled to Mecca. He followed and threatened some of them with death, but to no avail. Nonetheless, he was successful in convincing the people of Mecca that the four had pledged their allegiance, and received the Meccans' allegiance for Yazid. On his way back to Damascus, he secured allegiance from the people of Medina. General recognition of the nomination thus forced Yazid's opponents into silence. The orientalist Julius Wellhausen doubted the story, holding that the reports of the nomination's rejection by prominent Medinese were a back-projection of the events that followed Mu'awiya's death. A similar opinion is held by the historian Andrew Marsham. According to the account of al-Tabari (d. 923), Mu'awiya announced the nomination in 676 and only received delegations from the Iraqi garrison town of Basra, which pledged allegiance to Yazid in Damascus in 679 or 680. According to Ya'qubi (d. 898), Mu'awiya demanded allegiance for Yazid on the occasion of the hajj. All, except the four prominent Muslims mentioned above, complied. No force was used against them. In any case, Mu'awiya arranged a general recognition for Yazid's succession before his death.

## Reign

Mu'awiya died in April 680. According to al-Tabari, Yazid was at his residence in Huwwarin, located between Damascus and Palmyra, at the time of his father's death. According to verses of Yazid preserved in Isfahani's Kitab al-Aghani, a collection of Arabic poetry, Yazid was away on a summertime expedition against the Byzantines when he received the news of Mu'awiya's final illness. Based on this and the fact that Yazid arrived in Damascus only after Mu'awiya's death, the historian Henri Lammens has rejected the reports of Yazid being in Huwwarin. Mu'awiya entrusted supervision of the government to his most loyal associates, Dahhak ibn Qays al-Fihri and Muslim ibn Uqba al-Murri, until Yazid's return. He left a will for Yazid, instructing him on matters of governing the Caliphate. He was advised to beware Husayn and Ibn al-Zubayr, for they could challenge his rule, and instructed to defeat them if they did. Yazid was further advised to treat Husayn with caution and not to spill his blood, since he was the grandson of Muhammad. Ibn al-Zubayr, on the other hand, was to be treated harshly, unless he came to terms.

### Oaths of allegiance

Upon his accession, Yazid requested and received oaths of allegiance from the governors of the provinces. He wrote to the governor of Medina, his cousin Walid ibn Utba ibn Abi Sufyan, informing him of Mu'awiya's death and instructing him to secure allegiance from Husayn, Ibn al-Zubayr, and Ibn Umar. The instructions contained in the letter were:

> Seize Husayn, Abdullah ibn Umar, and Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr to give the oath of allegiance. Act so fiercely that they have no chance to do anything before giving the oath of allegiance.

Walid sought the advice of Marwan, who suggested that Ibn al-Zubayr and Husayn be forced to pay allegiance as they were dangerous, while Ibn Umar should be left alone as he posed no threat. Husayn answered Walid's summon, meeting Walid and Marwan in a semi-private meeting where he was informed of Mu'awiya's death and Yazid's accession. When asked for his oath of allegiance, Husayn responded that giving his allegiance in private would be insufficient and suggested the oath be made in public. Walid agreed, but Marwan insisted that Husayn be detained until he proffered allegiance. Husayn scolded Marwan and left to join his armed retinue, who were waiting nearby in case the authorities attempted to apprehend him. Immediately following Husayn's exit, Marwan admonished Walid, who in turn justified his refusal to harm Husayn by dint of the latter's close relation to Muhammad. Ibn al-Zubayr did not answer the summons and left for Mecca. Walid sent eighty horsemen after him, but he escaped. Husayn too left for Mecca shortly after, without having sworn allegiance to Yazid. Dissatisfied with this failure, Yazid replaced Walid with his distant Umayyad kinsman Amr ibn Sa'id. Unlike Husayn and Ibn al-Zubayr, Ibn Umar, Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr, and Abd Allah ibn Abbas, who had also previously denounced Mu'awiya's nomination of Yazid, paid allegiance to him.

### Battle of Karbala

In Mecca Husayn received letters from pro-Alid Kufans, inviting him to lead them in revolt against Yazid. Husayn subsequently sent his cousin Muslim ibn Aqil to assess the situation in the city. He also sent letters to Basra, but his messenger was handed over to the governor Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad and killed. Ibn Aqil informed Husayn of the large-scale support he found in Kufa, signalling that the latter should enter the city. Informed by some Kufan tribal chiefs (ashraf) of the goings-on, Yazid replaced the governor of Kufa, Nu'man ibn Bashir al-Ansari, who had been unwilling to take action against pro-Alid activity, with Ibn Ziyad, whom he ordered to execute or imprison Ibn Aqil. As a result of Ibn Ziyad's suppression and political maneuvering, Ibn Aqil's following began to dissipate and he was forced to declare the revolt prematurely. It was suppressed and Ibn Aqil was executed.

Encouraged by Ibn Aqil's letter, Husayn left for Kufa, ignoring warnings from Ibn Umar and Ibn Abbas. The latter reminded him, to no avail, of the Kufans' previous abandonment of his father Ali and his brother Hasan. On the way to the city, he received news of Ibn Aqil's death. Nonetheless, he continued his march towards Kufa. Ibn Ziyad's 4,000-strong army blocked his entry into the city and forced him to camp in the desert of Karbala. Ibn Ziyad would not let Husayn pass without submitting, which Husayn refused to do. Week-long negotiations failed, and in the ensuing hostilities on 10 October 680, Husayn and 72 of his male companions were slain, while his family was taken prisoner. The captives and Husayn's severed head were sent to Yazid. According to the accounts of Abu Mikhnaf (d. 774) and Ammar al-Duhni (d. 750–51), Yazid poked Husayn's head with his staff, although others ascribe this action to Ibn Ziyad. Yazid treated the captives well and sent them back to Medina after a few days.

### Revolt of Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr

Following Husayn's death, Yazid faced increased opposition to his rule from Ibn al-Zubayr who declared him deposed. Although publicly he called for a shura to elect a new caliph, in secret Ibn al-Zubayr let his partisans pay allegiance to him. At first, Yazid attempted to placate him by sending gifts and delegations in an attempt to reach a settlement. After Ibn al-Zubayr's refusal to recognize him, Yazid sent a force led by Ibn al-Zubayr's estranged brother Amr to arrest him. The force was defeated and Amr was taken captive and executed. As well as Ibn al-Zubayr's growing influence in Medina, the city's inhabitants were disillusioned with Umayyad rule and Mu'awiya's agricultural projects, which included the confiscation of their lands to boost government revenue. Yazid invited the notables of Medina to Damascus and tried to win them over with gifts. They were unpersuaded and on their return to Medina narrated tales of Yazid's lavish lifestyle. Accusations included Yazid drinking wine, hunting with hounds, and his love for music. The Medinese, under the leadership of Abd Allah ibn Hanzala, renounced their allegiance to Yazid and expelled the governor, Yazid's cousin Uthman ibn Muhammad ibn Abi Sufyan, and the Umayyads residing in the city. Yazid dispatched a 12,000-strong army under the command of Muslim ibn Uqba to reconquer the Hejaz. After failed negotiations, the Medinese were defeated in the Battle of al-Harra. According to the accounts of Abu Mikhnaf and al-Samhudi (d. 1533), the city was sacked, whereas per the account of Awana (d. 764) only the ringleaders of the rebellion were executed. Having forced the rebels to renew their allegiance, Yazid's army headed for Mecca to subdue Ibn al-Zubayr. Ibn Uqba died on the way to Mecca and command passed to Husayn ibn Numayr al-Sakuni, who besieged Mecca in September 683. The siege lasted for several weeks, during which the Ka'ba, the sacred Muslim shrine at the center of the Mecca Mosque, caught fire. Yazid's sudden death in November 683 ended the campaign and Ibn Numayr retreated to Syria with his army.

### Domestic affairs and foreign campaigns

The style of Yazid's governance was, by and large, a continuation of the model developed by Mu'awiya. He continued to rely on the governors of the provinces and ashraf, as Mu'awiya had, instead of relatives. He retained several of Mu'awiya's officials, including Ibn Ziyad, who was Mu'awiya's governor of Basra, and Sarjun ibn Mansur, a native Syrian Christian, who had served as the head of the fiscal administration under Mu'awiya. Like Mu'awiya, Yazid received delegations of tribal notables (wufud) from the provinces to win their support, which would also involve distributing gifts and bribes. The structure of the caliphal administration and military remained decentralised as in Mu'awiya's time. Provinces retained much of their tax revenue and forwarded a small portion to the Caliph. The military units in the provinces were derived from local tribes whose command also fell to the ashraf.

Yazid approved a decrease in taxes on the Arab Christian tribe of Najran upon their request, but abolished the special tax exemption of the ethno-religious community of Samaritans, which had been granted to them by previous caliphs as a reward for their aid to the Muslim conquerors. He improved the irrigation system of the fertile lands of the Ghouta near Damascus by digging a canal that became known as Nahr Yazid.

Toward the end of his reign, Mu'awiya reached a thirty-year peace agreement with the Byzantines, obliging the Caliphate to pay an annual tribute of 3,000 gold coins, 50 horses, and 50 slaves, and to withdraw Muslim troops from the forward bases they had occupied on the island of Rhodes and the Anatolian coast. Under Yazid, Muslim bases along the Sea of Marmara were abandoned. In contrast to the far-reaching raids against the Byzantine Empire launched under his father, Yazid focused on stabilizing the border with Byzantium. In order to improve Syria's military defences and prevent Byzantine incursions, Yazid established the northern Syrian frontier district of Qinnasrin from what had been a part of Hims, and garrisoned it.

Yazid reappointed Uqba ibn Nafi, the conqueror of the central North African region of Ifriqiya whom Mu'awiya had deposed, as governor of Ifriqiya. In 681, Uqba launched a large-scale expedition into western North Africa. Defeating the Berbers and the Byzantines, Uqba reached the Atlantic coast and captured Tangier and Volubilis. He was unable to establish permanent control in these territories. On his return to Ifriqiya, he was ambushed and killed by a Berber–Byzantine force at the Battle of Vescera, resulting in the loss of the conquered territories. In 681 Yazid appointed Ibn Ziyad's brother Salm ibn Ziyad as the governor of the northeastern border province of Khurasan. Salm led several campaigns in Transoxiana (Central Asia) and raided Samarqand and Khwarazm, but without gaining a permanent foothold in any of them. Yazid's death in 683 and the subsequent chaos in the east ended the campaigns.

## Death and succession

Yazid died on 11 November 683 in the central Syrian desert town of Huwwarin, his favourite residence, aged between 35 and 43, and was buried there. Early annalists like Abu Ma'shar al-Madani (d. 778) and al-Waqidi (d. 823) do not give any details about his death. This lack of information seems to have inspired fabrication of accounts by authors with anti-Umayyad leanings, which detail several causes of death, including a horse fall, excessive drinking, pleurisy, and burning. According to the verses by a contemporary poet Ibn Arada, who at the time resided in Khurasan, Yazid died in his bed with a wine cup by his side.

Ibn al-Zubayr subsequently declared himself caliph and Iraq and Egypt came under his rule. In Syria, Yazid's son Mu'awiya II, whom he had nominated, became caliph. His control was limited to parts of Syria as most of the Syrian districts (Hims, Qinnasrin, and Palestine) were controlled by allies of Ibn al-Zubayr. Mu'awiya II died after a few months from an unknown illness. Several early sources state that he abdicated before his death. Following his death, Yazid's maternal Kalbite tribesmen, seeking to maintain their privileges, sought to install Yazid's son Khalid on the throne, but he was considered too young for the post by the non-Kalbites in the pro-Umayyad coalition. Consequently, Marwan ibn al-Hakam was acknowledged as caliph in a shura of pro-Umayyad tribes in June 684. Shortly after, Marwan and the Kalb routed the pro-Zubayrid forces in Syria led by Dahhak at the Battle of Marj Rahit. Although the pro-Umayyad shura stipulated that Khalid would succeed Marwan, the latter nominated his son Abd al-Malik as his heir. Thus the Sufyanid house, named after Mu'awiya I's father Abu Sufyan, was replaced by the Marwanid house of the Umayyad dynasty. By 692 Abd al-Malik had defeated Ibn al-Zubayr and restored Umayyad authority across the Caliphate.

## Legacy

The killing of Muhammad's grandson Husayn caused widespread outcry among Muslims and the image of Yazid suffered greatly. It also helped crystallize opposition to Yazid into an anti-Umayyad movement based on Alid aspirations, and contributed to the development of Shi'a identity, whereby the party of Alid partisans was transformed into a religious sect with distinct rituals and memory. After the Battle of Karbala, Shi'a imams from Husayn's line adopted the policy of political quietism.

### Traditional Muslim view

Yazid is considered an evil figure by many Muslims to the present day, not only by the Shi'a, who hold that the ruling position rightly belonged to Husayn's father Ali and his descendants, including Husayn, whom Yazid killed to strip him of his right, but also by many Sunnis, to whom he was an affront to Islamic values. For the Shi'a, Yazid is an epitome of evil. He is annually reviled in the Ashura processions and passion plays, and rulers considered tyrannical and oppressive are often equated with him. Before the Iranian Revolution, the Shah of Iran was called the "Yazid of his time" by the Iranian cleric Rouhollah Khomeini, as was the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein by the Iraqi Shi'a during the Iran–Iraq War for his ban on pilgrimages to the holy sites of Shi'a Islam. Among the Sunnis, the Hanafi school allows cursing of Yazid, whereas the Hanbali school and many in the Shafi'i school maintain that no judgment should be passed on Yazid, rather tyrants in general should be cursed. However, the Hanbali scholar Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201) encouraged the cursing. According to al-Ghazali (d. 1111), cursing Yazid is prohibited, for he was a Muslim and his role in the killing of Husayn is unverified.

Yazid was the first person in the history of the Caliphate to be nominated as heir based on a blood relationship, and this became a tradition afterwards. As such, his accession is considered by the Muslim historical tradition as the corruption of the caliphate into a kingship. He is depicted as a tyrant who was responsible for three major crimes during his caliphate: the death of Husayn and his followers at Karbala, considered a massacre; the aftermath of the Battle of al-Harra, in which Yazid's troops sacked Medina; and the burning of the Ka'ba during the siege of Mecca, which is blamed on Yazid's commander Husayn ibn Numayr. The tradition stresses his habits of drinking, dancing, hunting, and keeping pet animals such as dogs and monkeys, portraying him as impious and unworthy of leading the Muslim community. Extant contemporary Muslim histories describe Yazid as "a sinner in respect of his belly and his private parts", "an arrogant drunken sot", and "motivated by defiance of God, lack of faith in His religion and hostility toward His Messenger". Al-Baladhuri (d. 892) described him as the "commander of the sinners" (amir al-fasiqin), as opposed to the title commander of the faithful (amir al-mu'minin) usually applied to the caliphs. Nevertheless, some historians have argued that there is a tendency in early Muslim sources to exonerate Yazid of blame for Husayn's death, and put the blame squarely on Ibn Ziyad. According to the historian James Lindsay, the Syrian historian Ibn Asakir (d. 1176) attempted to stress Yazid's positive qualities, while accepting the allegations that are generally made against him. Ibn Asakir thus emphasised that Yazid was a transmitter of hadith (the sayings and traditions attributed to Muhammad), a virtuous man "by reason of his connection to the age of the Prophet", and worthy of the ruling position.

### Modern scholarly view

Despite his reputation in religious circles, academic historians generally portray a more favourable view of Yazid. According to Wellhausen, Yazid was a mild ruler, who resorted to violence only when necessary, and was not the tyrant that the religious tradition portrays him to be. He further notes that Yazid lacked interest in public affairs as a prince, but as a caliph "he seems to have pulled himself together, although he did not give up his old predilections,—wine, music, the chase and other sport". In the view of the historian Hugh N. Kennedy, despite the disasters of Karbala and al-Harra, Yazid's rule was "not devoid of achievement". His reputation might have improved had he lived longer, but his early death played a part in sticking of the stigma of "the shocks of the early part of his reign". According to the Islamicist G. R. Hawting, Yazid tried to continue the diplomatic policies of his father but, unlike Mu'awiya, he was not successful in winning over the opposition with gifts and bribes. In Hawting's summation, "the image of Muʿāwiya as operating more like a tribal s̲h̲ayk̲h̲ than a traditional Middle Eastern despot ... also seems applicable to Yazīd". In the view of Lewis, Yazid was a capable ruler "with much of the ability of his father" but was overly criticized by later Arab historians. Expressing a viewpoint similar to Wellhausen's, Lammens remarked, "a poet himself, and fond of music, he was a Maecenas of poets and artists".

The characterization of Yazid in the Muslim sources has been attributed to the hostility of the Abbasid dynasty, during whose rule the histories were written, toward the Umayyads, whom they toppled in 750. Most reports in the traditional Muslim sources focus on the revolts against Yazid, and usually lack detail on his public life in Syria and his activities other than the suppression of the revolts. Lammens has attributed this to the tendency of the Iraq-based, Abbasid-era chroniclers to portray a caliph, under whom Husayn was killed and the holy cities of Islam were attacked, only as an impious drunkard. In contrast, a Syrian source preserved in the Chronicle of 741 describes the Caliph as "a most pleasant man and deemed highly agreeable by all the peoples subject to his rule. He never, as is the wont of men, sought glory for himself because of his royal rank, but lived as a citizen along with all the common people."

### Yazidism

In the Yazidi religion, practiced by the mainly Iraq-based Kurdish-speaking ethno-religious community of Yazidis, Sultan Ezid is a highly revered divine figure. Most modern historians hold that the name Ezid derives from the name of Caliph Yazid. In Yazidi religious lore, there is no trace of any link between Sultan Ezid and the second Umayyad caliph. A pro-Umayyad movement particularly sympathetic towards Yazid existed in the Kurdish mountains before the 12th century, when Shaykh Adi, a Sufi of Umayyad descent venerated by Yazidis to this day, settled there and attracted a following among the adherents of the movement. The name Yazidi seems to have been applied to the group because of his Umayyad origins.

## Coins

A Sasanian-style silver coin bearing the mint date as "Year I of Yazid" has been reported. The obverse side shows the portrait of the Sasanian king Khosrow II (r. 590–628) and his name in the Pahlavi script. The reverse has the usual Zoroastrian fire altar surrounded by attendants. The margins, however, contain the inscription that it was minted during the first year of Yazid's reign. An anonymous coin from the Nishapur mint bearing the mint date 60, which is assumed to be the Hijri year, is also thought to be from Yazid's first regnal year. Other coins from his reign usually have only the name of the governor of the province where the coin originated. Coins bearing the name of the counter-caliph Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr have also been found from the provinces of Fars and Kirman, dated between 61 and 63 (681–683 CE), although Ibn al-Zubayr did not publicly claim the caliphate until after the death of Yazid. This may show that as well as the challenges to his rule in Arabia and Iraq, Yazid's authority was also challenged in southern Persia from roughly the time of his accession. The coins were probably minted in the name of Ibn al-Zubayr to lend legitimacy to the challengers of the Umayyads by using a suitable Qurayshite name.

## Wives and children

Yazid married three women and had several concubines. The names of two of his wives are known: Umm Khalid Fakhita bint Abi Hisham and Umm Kulthum, a daughter of the veteran commander and statesman Abd Allah ibn Amir. Fakhita and Umm Kulthum both hailed from the Abd Shams, the parent clan of the Umayyads.

Yazid had three sons from his wives. His eldest, Mu'awiya II, was between 17 and 23 years old at the time of Yazid's death. The name of Mu'awiya II's mother is unknown, but she was from the Banu Kalb. Ill health prevented him from carrying out the caliphal duties and he rarely left his residence. He survived his father only by a few months and died without leaving any offspring. Yazid's second son, Khalid, was from Fakhita, and was born circa 668. Marwan married Fakhita after becoming caliph, to foster an alliance with the Sufyanid house and neutralize her son Khalid's claim to the caliphate. He remained quiet about being sidelined from the succession, although a legendary report says that he protested to Marwan, who in turn insulted him. He had friendly relations with Abd al-Malik, whose daughter he married. Several legendary accounts report Khalid being interested in alchemy and having ordered the translation of Greek works on alchemy, astronomy, and medicine into Arabic. Yazid's daughter Atika was the favourite wife of Abd al-Malik. They had several children, including the future Caliph Yazid II (r. 720–724). Yazid's son Abd Allah, from Umm Kulthum, was a famed archer and horseman. Yazid had several other sons from slave women.

Second Umayyad caliph (r. 680–683)

Umayyad people of the Arab–Byzantine wars


Infinity Blade

Infinity Blade was an action role-playing game developed by Chair Entertainment and Epic Games and released through the Apple App Store on December 9, 2010. It was the first iOS video game to run on the Unreal Engine. In the game, the unnamed player character fights a series of one-on-one battles in a derelict castle to face the immortal God King. When in battle, players swipe the screen to attack and parry, and tap the screen to dodge and block enemy attacks. Upon defeat, the player restarts the game as the character's descendant with the same items and experience level.

The game was developed by a team of twelve people, who took two months to make a playable demo and three more to finish the game. Infinity Blade was intended to demonstrate the new iOS version of the Unreal Engine, and to combine the combat of Karateka and Prince of Persia with the loneliness of Shadow of the Colossus. The game received four free expansions that added new equipment, endings, and game modes.

Infinity Blade was the fastest-grossing app in the history of iOS upon its release. It made US\$1.6 million in its first four days, and over US\$23 million by the end of 2011. It was well received by gaming critics. Reviews praised the graphics and compared the mobile game favorably to console games. Critics also praised the swipe-based combat system, but split opinions on the cyclical gameplay as either addictive or repetitive. Chair later released an arcade port and two sequels: Infinity Blade II and Infinity Blade III. Author Brandon Sanderson also wrote two novellas set between the games: Infinity Blade: Awakening and Infinity Blade: Redemption.

The game, along with its two sequels, was removed from the App Store on December 10, 2018, due to difficulties in updating the game for newer hardware.

## Gameplay

In the primary portion of Infinity Blade, the player character travels a mostly linear path through a ruined castle and fights one-on-one battles with oversized enemies. The path through the castle is a series of discrete locations where the player can pan the camera around the stationary player character to view a fully three-dimensional area. The player taps locations highlighted onscreen to trigger either a short cutscene as the player character moves to the next location, or a sword battle with an enemy. During combat, the player controls the character's sword by swiping a finger across the screen. Players can touch icons at the bottom of the screen to dodge attacks by ducking right or left, or to block attacks with a shield, which has a limited number of uses during a single battle. Players may also parry incoming attacks with an intercepting sword move that, for example, parries an attack from the left with a swipe to the left. Each of these three counters can leave the enemy vulnerable to counterattack for a short period, but incorrect counters result in damage to the player character, as reflected in the health bar. When players fail in battle en route to the God King, the game resets to the location preceding the previous battle. Enemies can perform attacks that cannot be parried or blocked—such as a shield bash—that must be dodged. Players use two special abilities via icons atop the screen: the Super Attack temporarily stuns the opponent, and magic heals or attacks as indicated by drawing a given symbol. Both require time to recharge after use. When attacking, the player can swipe in any direction, and can do specific attack combinations to deal extra damage.

In addition to combat, there is also a mild role-playing component. An experience point system levels up the player character and their equipment (weapons, armor, shields, helms, and magic rings). Equipment pieces have special properties and a predetermined number of experience points required to master them. Mastering a piece of equipment increases its sale value but decreases the player's experience gain by 20%. Upon leveling up or mastering a piece of equipment, players gain attribute points that can be allotted towards four character attributes: health, attack, shield power, or magic. Each point can only be allocated once and is a permanent upgrade to the character. Players can purchase new equipment using in-game money from sacks and treasure chests found throughout the castle, defeated enemies, and sales of unused equipment. In-game money can be purchased with real money within the game.

The game follows a cyclical narrative structure in which the protagonist and his descendants individually explore a castle in a quest to battle the primary antagonist, the immortal God King. In the game's introduction, the non-playable protagonist has just finished this quest, but is slain by the God King. The player then assumes the role of the dead protagonist's descendant as he starts his journey at the beginning of the castle. This cycle, called a bloodline, continues after the player finally faces the God King and either dies or wins. The player may also choose to join the God King and terminate the cycle; upon doing so, the game resumes at the checkpoint before fighting the God King. Enemy difficulty increases with each bloodline cycle. Another bloodline ending is unlocked after purchasing the Infinity Blade item: the sword is placed into a pedestal in the castle's underground dungeons and three doors open. After then defeating each of the three "Deathless"—immortal beings like the God King—of increasing difficulty found within, a final fourth door opens, and the player faces a mechanized warrior guarding the high-tech chamber where the God King is reborn whenever he is killed. Upon defeating the mechanized warrior, the chamber is revealed to be controlled by an ancestor of the player character, who chose to serve the God King. After fighting the ancestor, the player character is told that the Infinity Blade can prevent immortals like the God King from resurrecting after death. The player is then given the option of either starting the next bloodline as they do when defeated, or resetting the game and starting New Game+ mode, which resets all gold and item progression but maintains the character's experience level, letting the player remaster the items and level up even further.

### Expansions

Chair Entertainment released four expansions as free updates to the game. The first, released December 20, 2010, added a new enemy, equipment, and microtransactions. It also removed an experience level cap. The second update, titled Infinity Blade: The Deathless Kings, was released on March 2, 2011, and added the dungeons as a second branch to the game's path. This expansion also added new equipment, enemies, and the second ending where the player character defeats his ancestor. The third update, Infinity Blade: Arena, was released on May 19, 2011. It added the player vs. player "Arena Mode", a tiered combat game progression where one player fights as the hero and the other as an enemy from the game. The update also included new equipment and a single-player version of Arena Mode called "Survival Mode". On October 4, 2011, a fourth update added a new enemy and new equipment to coincide with the announcement of the forthcoming sequel Infinity Blade II.

## Development

Infinity Blade was created by Chair Entertainment, a subsidiary company of Epic Games. In July 2010, Chair had both recently finished the Xbox Live Arcade game Shadow Complex and been acquired by Epic. Chair was brainstorming Kinect and Wii games, including an idea similar to Infinity Blade, and Epic was nearing completion of an iOS version of the Unreal Engine 3 graphics engine and in need of a "killer game" to show it off. Epic had previously licensed the engine for use in numerous console and personal computer games. They asked Chair to develop a game for the engine in five months, with a playable demo for the Apple Special Event conference in two months. The team decided within a few days to work on the Infinity Blade concept, codenamed "Project Sword". Instead of normal initial game development, where working prototypes test gameplay ideas, Chair spent the first week of development refining the gameplay concept on paper before beginning to code. Many of the core gameplay ideas were developed in their first few hours. Geremy Mustard, Chair's co-founder and technical director, estimates that the team cut two-thirds of that initial design due to lack of time. Refining the complex touch-based interface was complicated due to the Unreal Engine's incomplete status and the native iOS code library's lack of support for fast touch-based gameplay. The five-month development was completed by a team of twelve people from Chair, with assistance from Epic. In addition to Geremy Mustard, the team was composed of Chair co-founder and creative director Donald Mustard; Simon Hurley as producer; Joshua Andersen and Scott K. Bowen as programmers; Adam Ford as art director; Orlando Barrowes, Bert Lewis, Mike Low, Scott Stoddard, and Nathan Trewartha as artists and animators; Joshua Akers as composer; and Brandon Raul Campos as lead tester.

The game's swipe-based swordplay was based on Donald Mustard's desire for unique gameplay based on nuanced sword fighting and parrying. He described the game's influences as the combat of Karateka and Prince of Persia combined with the "lonely epicness" of Shadow of the Colossus. Chair sought to develop an experience that could be picked up and played for a minute (a single battle) or half an hour (a bloodline). They felt that many other developers accustomed to consoles were wrong to make iOS games that required long-playing experiences to feel meaningful, and so Chair developed the bloodline concept as a natural breakpoint. They also felt that mobile games like Infinity Blade with constant action elements went too long without giving the player time to relax and resulted in player exhaustion, and so Chair kept their battles short with brief cinematic pauses in longer battles. Chair showed their playable demo at the Apple conference on September 1, 2010, after weeks of rehearsal, and attracted much attention to the game. It was released on December 9, 2010. While Chair itself spent little on marketing, Apple used the game extensively in advertisements for its devices.

The music for the game was composed by Josh Aker, who had written the music for previous Chair games. The soundtrack was intended by Aker to be "intense" during combat, but to vary between "serene" and "otherworldly" outside battle. It is a mixture of live and synthetic instrument performances. Cello and nyckelharpa were the primary instruments used. Aker wanted to have "avant-garde performances" for the recordings. The soundtrack was sold as a digital album, Infinity Blade: Original Soundtrack, through several online music retailers. Chair began to develop the game's first update before the initial game was released. They intended only to add new monsters and features, but added the ability to purchase gold due to customer requests. Chair did not rebalance the game to incentivize in-app purchases. Work on The Deathless Kings update began immediately afterward. Chair felt that releasing several large, free updates to the game would increase their overall user base and result in more total sales due to word of mouth.

## Reception

Infinity Blade was noted for its sales at launch, selling more than 270,000 copies and making over US\$1.6 million in its first four days—the "fastest-grossing app" ever released for iOS at the time. By the end of 2011, it had made at least US\$23 million in revenue. Around fourteen months after the initial release, Chair noted that half of the game's sales were for the iPhone and half were for the iPad and iPod. After releasing the sequel, Epic Games noted in 2012 that the series was Epic's most profitable by measure of revenue against person-hours spent in development.

Infinity Blade was reviewed by several major gaming sites in addition to mobile game-focused sites. Critics praised the game's graphics heavily. IGN reviewer Hilary Goldstein said that it was "an absolute stunner for any handheld device and ushers in a new era of possibility for high-end graphics." GamePro's Ryan Rigney called the game "downright gorgeous" and said that the graphics were almost at the level of an Xbox 360 game, which was echoed by John Meyer of Wired, who claimed that it had the best graphics of any iPad game. The reviewer for Edge further praised the art direction, especially with regards to the enemy and armor designs.

The gameplay was generally praised by reviewers, who typically found the combat engaging, but were split on the repetitive aspects of the game. 1UP.com's Matt Clark said that the sword gameplay "just feels right", while Mark Brown of Eurogamer said that the combat had an excitement factor that pushed players to keep on going for one more battle. Tracy Erickson of Pocket Gamer described the swipe-based combat system as "easy to understand, though tough to master", and Nick Chester of Destructoid said that although the combat was not very complicated, it was fun to play. The role-playing game elements were praised—Destructoid's Chester called them "satisfying", and IGN's Goldstein said that they added to the game's difficulty. Brown's review for Eurogamer, however, said that while good they were not as engaging as the combat, and the Edge review dismissed them as minimal. Reviewers had mixed opinions on the effectiveness of the bloodline system's repetition: Destructoid's Chester described it as addictive, and IGN's Goldstein agreed, but Erickson's review for Pocket Gamer said that the game had problems with repetition and Wired's Meyer dismissed it as "repetitive ... as the title suggests". J. Nicholas Geist, writing for Kill Screen, focused his entire review on the cyclical nature of the game, treating its nature of repetition with small changes between each bloodline as a metaphor for life. Most reviewers found themselves between the two extremes, with Brown of Eurogamer simultaneously describing it as "alarmingly repetitious" but still addictive and 1UP.com's Clark saying that enjoying the game required getting past the repetition, despite being "stellar".

## Sequels and spin-offs

On October 28, 2011, Epic Games and Adrenaline Amusements released an arcade version of the game, Infinity Blade FX. The game is played on a 46-inch screen rigged with optical sensors to mimic a large iPhone or iPad screen. Each arcade stand contains up to three screens, and players can play against each other or in the single-player game. A sequel to the iOS game, Infinity Blade II, was announced on October 4, 2011, during the Apple iPhone 4S keynote presentation. It was released on December 1, 2011, and features enhanced graphics, a new storyline, and new fighting styles. A spinoff game, Infinity Blade: Dungeons, was in development for iOS by Epic Games subsidiary Impossible Games, but was cancelled in February 2013 when Impossible Games was shut down. A final game in the trilogy, Infinity Blade III, was released on September 18, 2013.

A novella by author Brandon Sanderson was released before both Infinity Blade II and III to serve as a story bridge between the games. Infinity Blade: Awakening was released as an e-book on October 4, 2011, to correspond with the announcement of Infinity Blade II. The story gives the protagonist of the first game a name, Siris, introduces the idea that the God King was one of multiple Deathless in the world, as is Siris, and has Siris and the assassin Isa journey to find the Worker of Secrets in order to kill the resurrected God King and the other Deathless. The second e-book novella, Infinity Blade: Redemption, was released on September 9, 2013, just before the third game. In it, Siris and the God King escape from their imprisonment by the Worker of Secrets, while extensive flashbacks show the rise of the Deathless in a future-Earth analog. While Siris disrupts the Worker of Secret's plans, the God King confronts and is killed by the Worker.

A Chinese version of the game for Xbox One and Android was published by Tencent Games on November 28, 2015.

A day after Epic Games removed the Infinity Blade trilogy from the App Store, the titular weapon made a crossover appearance in the winter-themed seventh season of Fortnite Battle Royale as a unique, very powerful melee weapon that can be obtained in a match, granting any player who finds it devastating abilities and extra survivability, at the cost of being unable to use other items. Three days later, however, Epic Games later "vaulted" the weapon over concerns that it was too overpowered. Epic Games later brought back the Infinity Blade in February 2019 as a restricted item that is only available in the limited-time mode "Sword Fight", reducing its power and allowing multiple copies of it to be found from loot chests.

Multiplayer and single-player video games

Products and services discontinued in 2018

Video games developed in the United States


Cate Blanchett

Catherine Elise Blanchett AC (/ˈblæntʃɪt/ BLAN-chit; born 14 May 1969) is an Australian actress and producer. Regarded as one of the best performers of her generation, she is known for her versatile work across independent films, blockbusters, and stage. She has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, four British Academy Film Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for a Tony Award and two Primetime Emmy Awards.

A graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Blanchett began her career on the Australian stage. Making her film debut in 1997, she came to international prominence for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I in biographical period drama Elizabeth (1998), for which she received her first Academy Award nomination. Her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in the biopic The Aviator (2004) won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She later won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing a neurotic former socialite in the comedy-drama Blue Jasmine (2013). Blanchett's other Oscar-nominated roles are in Notes on a Scandal (2006), I'm Not There (2007), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Carol (2015), and Tár (2022), making her the most-nominated Australian. Her biggest commercial successes include The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Cinderella (2015), Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Ocean's 8 (2018), and Don't Look Up (2021).

Blanchett has performed in over twenty stage productions. She and her husband, Andrew Upton, were the artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company from 2008 to 2013. Some of her stage roles during this period were in acclaimed revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire, Uncle Vanya, Big and Little and The Maids. She made her Broadway debut in 2017 in The Present, for which she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She has also received two Emmy Award nominations for producing and starring as Phyllis Schlafly in the period drama miniseries Mrs. America (2020).

Blanchett is the recipient of several honorary awards. The Australian government awarded her the Centenary Medal in 2001, and she was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2017. In 2012, she was appointed Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In 2015, she was honoured by the Museum of Modern Art and received the British Film Institute Fellowship. Blanchett has received honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from the University of New South Wales, University of Sydney and Macquarie University. Time named her one of its 100 most influential people in the world in 2007. In 2018, she was ranked among the world's highest-paid actresses.

## Early life and education

Catherine Elise Blanchett was born on 14 May 1969 in the Ivanhoe suburb of Melbourne. Her Australian mother, June (née Gamble), was a property developer and teacher; and her American father, Robert DeWitt Blanchett Jr., a Texas native, was a United States Navy Chief Petty Officer who became an advertising executive. They met when Robert's ship broke down in Melbourne. When Blanchett was ten, her father died of a heart attack, leaving her mother to raise the family. Blanchett is the second of three children, with an older brother and younger sister. Her ancestry includes English, some Scottish, and remote French roots.

Blanchett has described herself as a "part extrovert, part wallflower" child. During her teenage years she had a penchant for dressing in traditionally masculine clothing, and went through goth and punk phases, at one point shaving her head. She attended primary school in Melbourne at Ivanhoe East Primary School; for her secondary education, she attended Ivanhoe Girls' Grammar School and then Methodist Ladies' College, where she explored her passion for the performing arts. In her late teens and early twenties, she worked at a nursing home in Victoria. After high school, she began a degree in economics and fine arts at the University of Melbourne but dropped out after one year to travel overseas. While in Egypt, Blanchett was asked to be an extra as an American cheerleader in the Egyptian boxing film Kaboria (1990); in need of money, she accepted the job. On returning to Australia, she moved to Sydney and enrolled at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), graduating in 1992 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

## Career

### 1992–2000: Early work and international breakthrough

Blanchett's first stage role was opposite Geoffrey Rush, in the 1992 David Mamet play Oleanna for the Sydney Theatre Company. That year, she was also cast as Clytemnestra in a production of Sophocles' Electra. A couple of weeks after rehearsals, the actress playing the title role pulled out, and director Lindy Davies cast Blanchett in the role. Her performance as Electra became one of her most acclaimed at NIDA. In 1993, Blanchett was awarded the Sydney Theatre Critics' Best Newcomer Award for her performance in Timothy Daly's Kafka Dances and won Best Actress for her performance in Mamet's Oleanna, making her the first actor to win both categories in the same year. Blanchett played the role of Ophelia in an acclaimed 1994–1995 Company B production of Hamlet directed by Neil Armfield, starring Rush and Richard Roxburgh, and was nominated for a Green Room Award. She appeared in the 1994 TV miniseries Heartland opposite Ernie Dingo, the miniseries Bordertown (1995) with Hugo Weaving, and in an episode of Police Rescue entitled "The Loaded Boy". She also appeared in the 50-minute drama short Parklands (1996), which received an Australian Film Institute (AFI) nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Blanchett made her feature film debut with a supporting role as an Australian nurse captured by the Japanese Army during World War II, in Bruce Beresford's film Paradise Road (1997), which co-starred Glenn Close and Frances McDormand. The film made just over \$2 million at the box office on a budget of \$19 million and received mixed reviews from critics. Her first leading role came later that year as eccentric heiress Lucinda Leplastrier in Gillian Armstrong's romantic drama Oscar and Lucinda (1997), opposite Ralph Fiennes. Blanchett received wide acclaim for her performance, with Emanuel Levy of Variety declaring, "luminous newcomer Blanchett, in a role originally intended for Judy Davis, is bound to become a major star". She earned her first AFI Award nomination as Best Leading Actress for Oscar and Lucinda. She won the AFI Best Actress Award in the same year for her starring role as Lizzie in the romantic comedy Thank God He Met Lizzie (1997), co-starring Richard Roxburgh and Frances O'Connor.

Blanchett's played a young Elizabeth I in the critically acclaimed historical drama Elizabeth (1998), directed by Shekhar Kapur. The film catapulted her to international prominence, earning her the Golden Globe Award and British Academy Award (BAFTA), and her first Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. In his review for Variety, critic David Rooney wrote of her performance, "Blanchett conveys with grace, poise and intelligence that Elizabeth was a wily, decisive, advanced thinker, far too aware of her own exceptional nature to bow to any man. [She] builds the juicy character almost imperceptibly from a smart but wary young woman who may be in over her head into a powerful creature of her own invention." Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Blanchett's performance "brings spirit, beauty and substance to what otherwise might have been turned into a vacuous role", and Alicia Potter writing for the Boston Phoenix stated that, "In the end, Kapur's crown jewel is a tale of twin transformations, that of Elizabeth into one of history's most enigmatic and powerful women, and that of Blanchett into, well, a bona fide screen queen."

The following year, Blanchett appeared in Bangers (1999), an Australian short film and part of Stories of Lost Souls, a compilation of thematically related short stories. The short was written and directed by her husband, Andrew Upton, and produced by Blanchett and Upton. She also appeared in the Mike Newell comedy Pushing Tin (1999), with her performance singled out by critics, and the critically acclaimed and financially successful film The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), alongside Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. She received her second BAFTA nomination for her performance as Meredith Logue in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

### 2001–2007: The Lord of the Rings and established actor

Blanchett appeared in Peter Jackson's blockbuster trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, playing the role of elf leader Galadriel in all three films. The trilogy was a major critical and financial success, earning \$2.981 billion at the box office worldwide, and all three films were later ranked within the top 10 greatest fantasy movies of all time in a poll conducted by American magazine Wired in 2012. In addition to The Lord of the Rings, 2001 also saw Blanchett diversify her portfolio with a range of roles in the dramas Charlotte Gray and The Shipping News and the American crime-comedy Bandits, for which she earned a second Golden Globe and SAG Award nomination. Bandits marked Blanchett's first notable foray into the comedy genre, with Ben Falk of the BBC declaring her and co-star Billy Bob Thornton "a real find as comedians" and calling her performance as an unsatisfied housewife caught between two escaped convicts, "unhinged, though undeniably sexy".

In 2002, Blanchett starred opposite Giovanni Ribisi in Tom Tykwer-directed Heaven, the first film in an unfinished trilogy by acclaimed writer-director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Her performance in the film as a grieving woman who commits a desperate act of terrorism was highly praised, with Stephen Holden of The New York Times calling it, "the most compelling screen performance of her career" and going on to state, "Although Ms. Blanchett's face has always registered emotion with a mercurial fluidity, the immediacy of feeling she conveys in "Heaven" is astonishing." 2003 saw Blanchett again playing a wide range of roles: Galadriel in the third and final instalment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture); the Ron Howard-directed western thriller The Missing; Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, playing two roles (both against herself), for which she received an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female nomination; and the biographical Veronica Guerin, which earned her a Golden Globe Best Actress Drama nomination. In 2004, Blanchett portrayed a pregnant journalist chronicling an underwater voyage by an eccentric oceanographer in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Blanchett won her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2005, for her highly acclaimed portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004). This made Blanchett the first actor in history to win an Academy Award for portraying another Academy Award-winning actor. She lent her Oscar statuette to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote that Blanchett portrayed Hepburn with "lip-smacking vivacity", and Roger Ebert lauded the performance, describing it as "delightful and yet touching; mannered and tomboyish". During her preparation for the role, and at the request of Scorsese, Blanchett reviewed 35-millimeter prints of all of Hepburn's first 15 screen performances to study and memorise her poise, mannerisms and speech pattern. Blanchett spoke of the responsibility of portraying such an iconic star, stating, "Representing Kate in the same medium, film, in which she existed was very daunting. But because she was so private and few people really knew her, we basically know Hepburn through her films. So of course you have to give a nod to her screen persona when playing her." That year, Blanchett also won the Australian Film Institute Best Actress Award for her performance as Tracy Heart, a former heroin addict, in the Australian film Little Fish (2005), co-produced by her and her husband's production company, Dirty Films. Though lesser known globally than some of her other films, the sober and sensitive Little Fish received great critical acclaim in Blanchett's native Australia and was nominated for 13 Australian Film Institute awards.

In 2006, Blanchett portrayed Hedda Gabler at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the Sydney Theatre Company production of Hedda Gabler, directed by Robyn Nevin. She then starred opposite Brad Pitt in Alejandro González Iñárritu's multi-lingual, multi-narrative drama Babel, as one half of a grieving couple who get caught up in an international incident in Morocco. Babel received seven Academy Award nominations. She also co-starred in the Steven Soderbergh-directed World War II-set drama The Good German with George Clooney, and the acclaimed psychological thriller Notes on a Scandal opposite Dame Judi Dench. Blanchett received a third Academy Award nomination for her performance in the latter film, where she portrays a lonely teacher who embarks on an affair with a 15-year-old student and becomes the object of obsession for an older woman played by Dench. Both Blanchett's and Dench's performances were highly acclaimed, with Peter Bradshaw writing in The Guardian, "Director Richard Eyre, with unshowy authority, gets the best out of Dench and Blanchett and, with great shrewdness, elicits from these two actors all the little tensions and exasperations - as well as the genuine tenderness - in their tragically fraught relationship."

In 2007, Blanchett was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World, and appeared on Forbes' Celebrity 100 list. She made a cameo as Janine, forensic scientist and ex-girlfriend of Simon Pegg's character, in Edgar Wright's action comedy film Hot Fuzz (2007). The cameo was uncredited and she gave her fee to charity. She reprised her role as Queen Elizabeth I in the 2007 sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age directed by Shekhar Kapur, and portrayed Jude Quinn, one of six incarnations of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' experimental film I'm Not There. She won the Volpi Cup Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Jude Quinn. At the 80th Academy Awards, Blanchett received two nominations – Best Actress for Elizabeth: the Golden Age and Best Supporting Actress for I'm Not There – becoming the first actress to receive a second nomination with the reprisal of a role. Of her achievement that year, Roger Ebert said, "That Blanchett could appear in the same Toronto International Film Festival playing Elizabeth and Bob Dylan, both splendidly, is a wonder of acting."

### 2008–2011: Directing the Sydney Theatre Company

Blanchett next appeared in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), as the villainous KGB agent Col. Dr. Irina Spalko. The film received mixed reviews from critics and audiences but was a major box office success, grossing over \$790 million worldwide. In David Fincher's Oscar-nominated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, she co-starred with Brad Pitt for a second time, playing the title character's love interest, Daisy Fuller. In the same year, Blanchett voiced the character of Granmamare for the English language version of Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo, released in July 2008.

Also in 2008, Blanchett and her husband Andrew Upton became co-CEOs and artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company. Blanchett returned to acting in the theatre in 2009 with the Sydney Theatre Company production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Liv Ullmann. She starred as Blanche DuBois alongside Joel Edgerton as Stanley Kowalski. Ullmann and Blanchett had been meaning to collaborate on a project since Ullman's intended film adaption of A Doll's House fell by the wayside. Blanchett proposed embarking on Streetcar to Ullmann, who jumped at the opportunity after initial discussion.

A Streetcar Named Desire production travelled from Sydney to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It was a critical and commercial success and Blanchett received acclaim for her performance as Blanche DuBois. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley said, "Ms. Ullmann and Ms. Blanchett have performed the play as if it had never been staged before, with the result that, as a friend of mine put it, 'you feel like you're hearing words you thought you knew pronounced correctly for the first time.'" John Lahr of The New Yorker wrote of her portrayal, "with her alert mind, her informed heart, and her lithe, patrician silhouette, [Blanchett] gets it right from the first beat ... I don't expect to see a better performance of this role in my lifetime." Jane Fonda, who attended a New York show, deemed it "perhaps the greatest stage performance I have ever seen", and Meryl Streep declared, "That performance was as naked, as raw and extraordinary and astonishing and surprising and scary as anything I've ever seen ... I thought I'd seen that play, I thought I knew all the lines by heart, because I've seen it so many times, but I'd never seen the play until I saw that performance." Blanchett won the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The production and Blanchett received Helen Hayes Awards, for Outstanding Non-Resident Production and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Non-Resident Production award, respectively.

In 2010, Blanchett starred as Lady Marion opposite Russell Crowe's titular hero in Ridley Scott's epic Robin Hood. The film received mixed reviews from critics but was a financial success, earning \$321 million at the worldwide box office. In 2011, she played the antagonist CIA agent Marissa Wiegler in Joe Wright's action thriller film Hanna, co-starring with Saoirse Ronan and Eric Bana.

In 2011, Blanchett took part in two Sydney Theatre Company productions. She played Lotte Kotte in a new translation of Botho Strauß's 1978 play Groß und klein (Big and Small) from Martin Crimp, directed by Benedict Andrews. After its Sydney run, the production travelled to London, Paris, the Vienna Festival and Ruhrfestspiele. Blanchett and the production received wide acclaim. Blanchett was nominated for the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for Best Actress, and won the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and the Helpmann Award for Best Actress. She then played Yelena, opposite Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh, in Andrew Upton's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, which travelled to the Kennedy Center and the New York City Center as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. The production and Blanchett received critical acclaim, with The New York Times' Ben Brantley declaring, "I consider the three hours I spent on Saturday night watching [the characters] complain about how bored they are among the happiest of my theatregoing life ... This Uncle Vanya gets under your skin like no other I have seen ... [Blanchett] confirms her status as one of the best and bravest actresses on the planet." The Washington Post's Peter Marks dubbed the production Washington, D.C.'s top theatrical event of 2011. Blanchett received the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Non-Resident Production, and the Helpmann Award for Best Actress.

### 2012–2016: Blue Jasmine and resurgence in Hollywood

Blanchett reprised her role as Galadriel in Peter Jackson's adaptations of The Hobbit (2012–2014), prequel to The Lord of the Rings series, filmed in New Zealand. While less critically acclaimed than The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit trilogy was nonetheless a major box office success, earning nearly \$3 billion worldwide. The character of Galadriel does not appear in J.R.R. Tolkien's original novel, but the story was amended by co-writer Guillermo del Toro and director Peter Jackson so that Blanchett could appear in the film trilogy. She voiced the role of "Penelope" in the Family Guy episode "Mr. and Mrs. Stewie", which aired on 29 April 2012, and Queen Elizabeth II in the episode "Family Guy Viewer Mail 2". Blanchett returned to Australian film with her appearance in The Turning (2013), an anthology film based on a collection of short stories by Tim Winton. She was head of jury of the 2012 and 2013 Dubai International Film Festival. The Sydney Theatre Company's 2013 season was Blanchett's final one as co-CEO and artistic director.

In 2013, Blanchett played Jasmine Francis, the lead role in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, co-starring Alec Baldwin and Sally Hawkins. Her performance garnered widespread acclaim, with some critics considering it to be the finest of her career to that point (surpassing her acclaimed performance in Elizabeth). In his review for The Guardian, Mark Kermode proclaimed, "Blanchett takes on the challenge like a peak-fitness runner facing a marathon, ploughing her way through 26 miles of emotional road pounding, with all the ups and downs, strains and tears, stomach turns and heartburns that that entails, a feat that occasionally leaves her (and us) gasping for breath." Peter Travers, reviewing the film for Rolling Stone, called Blanchett's performance, "miraculous", and went on to write, "The sight of Jasmine – lost, alone and unable to conjure magic out of unyielding reality – is devastating. This is Blanchett triumphant, and not to be missed." The performance won her more than 40 industry and critics' awards, including the LAFCA Award, NYFCC Award, NSFC Award, Critics' Choice Award, Santa Barbara International Film Festival Outstanding Performance of the Year Award, SAG Award, Golden Globe Award, BAFTA Award, Independent Film Spirit Award and the Academy Award for Best Actress. Blanchett's win made her just the sixth actress to win an Oscar in both of the acting categories, the third to win Best Actress after Best Supporting Actress, and the first Australian to win more than one acting Oscar.

Allen's adopted daughter Dylan Farrow has since criticised Blanchett and other actresses for working with Allen. Blanchett responded, "It's obviously been a long and painful situation for the family and I hope they find some resolution and peace." On the subject of the Me Too movement, Blanchett said she thinks that "social media is fantastic about raising awareness about issues, but it's not the judge and jury" and the cases "need to go into court, so if these abuses have happened, the person is prosecuted, so someone, who is not in the shiny industry that I am, can use that legal precedent to protect themselves. Always, in my industry or any other industry, they're preyed upon because they're vulnerable."

In 2014, Blanchett co-starred with Matt Damon and George Clooney in the latter's ensemble film, The Monuments Men, based on the true story of a crew of art historians and museum curators who recover renowned works of art stolen by Nazis. The French heroine Rose Valland was an inspiration for Blanchett's character of Claire Simone. The Monuments Men received mixed reviews from critics and grossed \$155 million at the worldwide box office. That year, Blanchett also voiced the part of Valka in the DreamWorks Animation film How to Train Your Dragon 2. The film received critical acclaim and was a box office success. It went on to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film and receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Blanchett guest starred on the Australian show Rake, as the onscreen female version of Richard Roxburgh's rogue protagonist, Cleaver. On 29 January 2015, she co-hosted the 4th AACTA Awards with Deborah Mailman.

In 2015, Blanchett starred in five films. She portrayed Nancy in Terrence Malick's Knight Of Cups, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. IndieWire named Blanchett's performance in Knight of Cups one of the 15 best performances in Terrence Malick films. She starred as the villainous Lady Tremaine in Disney's Kenneth Branagh-directed live-action adaptation of Cinderella, to critical acclaim. Writing for Time magazine, Richard Corliss declared that "Blanchett [earns top billing], radiating a hauteur that chills as it amuses; the performance is grand without skirting parody." She then starred opposite Rooney Mara in Carol, the highly acclaimed film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, reuniting her with director Todd Haynes. Blanchett, who also served as an executive producer of the film, drew rave reviews for her performance as the titular character, which was widely cited as one of the best of her career, alongside Elizabeth and Blue Jasmine. Justin Chang of Variety proclaimed, "As a study in the way beautiful surfaces can simultaneously conceal and expose deeper meanings, [Blanchett's] performance represents an all-too-fitting centerpiece for this magnificently realized movie." For Carol, Blanchett received again Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA Award nominations.

Blanchett portrayed Mary Mapes opposite Robert Redford's Dan Rather in Truth (2015), a film about the Killian documents controversy. Blanchett's production company was a producing partner for the film. She then starred in Manifesto, Julian Rosefeldt's multi-screen video installation, in which 12 artist manifestos are depicted by 13 different characters all played by Blanchett. The project, and Blanchett, received critical acclaim, with Roberta Smith of The New York Times stating: "If the art world gave out Oscars, Cate Blanchett should win for her tour de force of starring roles in 'Manifesto'". In 2016, Blanchett narrated one of two versions of Terence Malick's documentary on Earth and the universe, Voyage of Time, which had its world premiere at the 73rd Venice Film Festival.

### 2017–2020: Broadway debut and television success

Blanchett starred in the Sydney Theatre Company play The Present, Andrew Upton's adaption of Anton Chekhov's play Platonov, directed by John Crowley. The production debuted in Sydney in 2015, to critical acclaim, and transferred to Broadway in 2017, marking Blanchett's Broadway debut. Blanchett's performance during the play's Broadway run received acclaim. Ben Brantley of The New York Times remarked that "Blanchett knows how to hold a stage and, if necessary, hijack it ... Such commanding, try-anything charisma is useful if you're attempting to hold together a badly assembled party or, for that matter, play." For her work, Blanchett received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play, a Drama Desk Award nomination, and a Drama League Award nomination for the Distinguished Performance Award. In 2017, Blanchett also appeared in Terrence Malick's Song to Song, shot back-to-back with Knight of Cups in 2012, and portrayed the goddess of death Hela in the Marvel Studios film Thor: Ragnarok, directed by Taika Waititi. Thor: Ragnarok was both a critical and financial success, earning \$854 million at the worldwide box office.

In 2018, Blanchett starred in Ocean's 8, the all-female spin-off of the Ocean's Eleven franchise, directed by Gary Ross, opposite Sandra Bullock, Anne Hathaway, Sarah Paulson, Mindy Kaling, Helena Bonham Carter, Rihanna and Awkwafina. The film garnered mainly mixed reviews but was a box office success, earning over \$297 million worldwide. She also portrayed Florence Zimmerman in the film adaptation of The House with a Clock in Its Walls directed by Eli Roth and narrated Shannon Ashlyn's award-winning Australian historical fantasy film Sweet Tooth. Blanchett was appointed the president of the jury of the 71st Cannes Film Festival, which took place in May 2018. That year, Forbes listed her as one of world's highest-paid actresses with annual earnings of \$12.5 million.

Blanchett portrayed a female version of the python Kaa in Andy Serkis' adaptation of The Jungle Book titled Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018). Serkis utilised a mixture of motion capture, CG animation and live-action in the film, and the role of Kaa was written to be much closer to the original character in the short stories by the author Rudyard Kipling, which is as a mentor-like figure for Mowgli. The film was released on Netflix in 2019. In the same year, Blanchett starred in Where'd You Go, Bernadette, an adaptation of the best-selling book of the same name, which was directed by Richard Linklater. The film received mostly mixed reviews and made \$10.4 million at the box office against a budget of \$18 million, but Blanchett's performance as the titular character received praise, with Pete Hammond writing in his review for Deadline, "[The film] doesn't quite measure up to expectations, despite a game performance from the incandescent Cate Blanchett, who clearly is the best reason to see this movie." She received her tenth Golden Globe nomination for her performance in the film. Also that year, she reprised her role as Valka in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, which was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 92nd Academy Awards.

In 2020, Blanchett's Dirty Films production company was signed with New Republic Pictures for feature films and FX Networks for television. Blanchett returned to television by starring in two miniseries. She played a supporting role in the Australian drama series Stateless, inspired by the controversial mandatory detention case of Cornelia Rau. Stateless was funded by Screen Australia and Blanchett also served as co-creator and executive producer for the series. It aired on the Australian public broadcaster ABC, and premiered internationally on Netflix. Blanchett won two awards at the 10th AACTA Awards for Stateless: Best Guest or Supporting Actress for her performance, and Best Mini-Series for her role as executive producer.

Blanchett also headlined and produced the FX/Hulu historical drama miniseries Mrs. America (2020), starring as conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. The nine-part series aired to widespread critical acclaim, with James Poniewozik writing in his review for The New York Times, "Her final scene, wordless and devastating, might as well end with Blanchett being handed an Emmy onscreen"; and Michael Idato for The Sydney Morning Herald proclaiming, "Blanchett's track record speaks for itself, but here something else is happening. Every time Blanchett's Schlafly glides perfectly into the frame, there is simply nowhere else to look." At the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards, she received nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie and Outstanding Limited Series, as well as nominations for the Golden Globe Award, the Screen Actors Guild Award (both for her performance), and the Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Drama. Blanchett also served as an executive producer on the Greek film Apples (2020), directed by Christos Nikou. The film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival to critical praise, and was selected to be the country's submission to the Academy Awards as their Best Foreign Language Film.

### 2021–present: Tár and further acclaim

In 2021, Blanchett starred alongside Bradley Cooper in Guillermo del Toro's film adaptation of the novel Nightmare Alley, which was released to positive reviews and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. She also appeared alongside Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in Adam McKay's Don't Look Up, an apocalyptic political satire black comedy film for Netflix, which also received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. With Nightmare Alley and Don't Look Up's Best Picture Oscar nominations, Blanchett broke the record held by actress Olivia de Havilland of being the female actor with the most credited roles in Best Picture nominees.

Blanchett then starred in the 2022 film Tár, directed by Todd Field. Her performance as Lydia Tár, a fictional renowned conductor, received widespread critical acclaim. The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney wrote that Blanchett gives an "astonishing performance — flinty, commandingly self-possessed and ever so slowly splintering under pressure", adding that it "marks yet another career peak for Blanchett – many are likely to argue her greatest". For her performance, she won her second Volpi Cup for Best Actress, fourth Golden Globe Award, and fourth BAFTA Award. She also swept the major critics awards trifecta (NYFCC, LAFCA, NSFC) for the second time and went on to receive her eighth Oscar nomination, tying for the fourth most Oscar-nominated actress. In 2022, Blanchett also voiced Spazzatura in the Netflix film adaptation Pinocchio, reuniting her with del Toro.

Blanchett will next star alongside Kevin Kline in the Apple TV+ thriller series Disclaimer, written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. She will also portray Lilith in Borderlands, a live action adaptation of the video game of the same name, reuniting her with Eli Roth.

## Reception

Blanchett is regarded as one of the finest and most versatile actors of her generation. She is noted for her ability to play characters from many different walks of life, and for headlining and being an ensemble player in a wide range of film genres and production scales, from low-budget independent films to high-profile blockbusters. She has also been praised for her mastery over a wide array of diverse accents, including English, Irish, French, and various regional American accents. In a 2022 readers' poll by Empire magazine, Blanchett was voted one of the 50 greatest actors of all time.

Commenting on her appeal as a screen actor in Vulture, Will Leitch and Tim Grierson stated that her greatest skill was "her ability to combine relatability and elusiveness: She is always completely present and yet just out of grasp. She has been forever daring, uncompromising and perpetually, resolutely, herself." Blanchett's performance in the film Carol was ranked as the 2nd best movie performance of the decade by IndieWire in 2019. Writing of her performance in the film, Christian Zilko states, "The greatest performance in a career where almost every role feels like a legitimate contender, Cate Blanchett's take on Carol Aird is a veritable symphony of repressive silence."

Blanchett has been cited in the press as being a style icon and has frequently topped lists of the best dressed women in the world. In 2004, Blanchett was named the third most naturally beautiful woman of all time by a panel of beauty and fashion editors, make-up artists, model agencies and photographers, behind Audrey Hepburn and Liv Tyler. She was in Empires list of the "100 Sexiest Movie Stars of All-Time" in 2007 and 2013. In 2022, she was named in The Hollywood Reporter's listing of "Women in Entertainment Power 100".

In 2006, a portrait of Blanchett and her family painted by McLean Edwards was a finalist for the Art Gallery of New South Wales' Archibald Prize. Another portrait of Blanchett was a finalist for the Archibald Prize in 2014. Blanchett appeared in a series of commemorative postage stamps called Australian Legends in 2009, in recognition of the outstanding contribution made to Australian entertainment and culture. In 2015, Madame Tussauds Hollywood unveiled a wax statue of Blanchett draped in a recreation of the yellow Valentino dress she wore to the 77th Academy Awards in 2005. In 2019, Blanchett was among the "10 inspirational women honored with a larger-than-life bronze sculpture" as part of the Statues for Equality project, which "aims to balance gender representation in public art and honor women's contributions to society". The bronze statues were unveiled on Women's Equality Day: 26 August 2019 on Avenue of the Americas in New York City. Blanchett's statue is "a creation based on a single image from the 2003 photoshoot by Matt Jones for Movieline's Hollywood Life magazine."

## Activism

### Environmental

Blanchett has been a long term proponent of individual and collective action on climate change and other environmental issues. In 2006, she joined former US Vice-president Al Gore's Climate Project. In 2007, Blanchett became the ambassador for the Australian Conservation Foundation. She was made an honorary life member of the Australian Conservation Foundation in 2012, in recognition of her support for environmental issues. At the beginning of 2011, Blanchett lent her support for a carbon tax. She received some criticism for this, particularly from conservatives. Blanchett is a patron of the international development charity SolarAid, which works to create a sustainable market for solar lights in Africa.

From 2008 to 2011, the Sydney Theatre Company under the leadership of Blanchett and her husband Andrew Upton, initiated a comprehensive large scale environmental program called Greening the Wharf, which invested in solar energy, rainwater harvesting, energy efficiency measures and best practice waste management. The program won a Green Globe Award which was accepted by Blanchett and Upton.

In January 2014, Blanchett took part in the Green Carpet Challenge, an initiative to raise the public profile of sustainable fashion, founded by Livia Firth of Eco-Age. In September 2020, as part of her role as Jury President of the 77th Venice International Film Festival, Blanchett vowed that during the festival she would only wear outfits that she had previously worn at public events in an effort to highlight the issue of sustainability in the fashion industry. In October of the same year, Blanchett was appointed by Prince William as a council member for the Earthshot Prize, which provides 50 environmental pioneers with the funds needed to further their work in tackling major problems impacting the environment. In 2022, Blanchett launched the Climate of Change podcast on Audible together with Danny Kennedy to discuss climate change and the importance of preserving the environment.

### Humanitarian

Blanchett has been working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) since 2015. In May 2016, the UNHCR announced her appointment as a global Goodwill Ambassador. Blanchett, along with other celebrities, featured in a video from the UNHCR to help raise awareness to the global refugee crisis. The video, titled "What They Took With Them", has the actors reading a poem written by Jenifer Toksvig and inspired by primary accounts of refugees, and is part of UNHCR's "WithRefugees" campaign, which also includes a petition to governments to expand asylum to provide further shelter, integrating job opportunities, and education.

Blanchett has undertaken missions with the UNHCR to Jordan in 2015, Lebanon in 2016 and Bangladesh in 2018 to meet with and highlight the issues faced by both Syrian and Rohingya refugees in those areas. In January 2018, she was awarded the Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum to honour her advocacy for refugees and displaced people around the world, and in August 2018, she addressed the United Nations Security Council about the atrocities committed against the Rohingya people in Myanmar.

In July 2020, the Australian miniseries Stateless, which was co-created and produced by Blanchett (and originally aired on the ABC network in Australia), premiered on Netflix. The series was inspired by Blanchett's work with the UNHCR and focuses on four strangers whose lives collide at an immigration detention centre in Australia. In Blanchett's words, the show's aim is to "build empathy and understanding for refugees, particularly those who have been and still are in detention."

As an esteemed member of the performing arts community that was seriously impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and a person concerned about environmental and humanitarian issues, Blanchett contributed an essay to Upturn: A Better Normal After COVID-19, a book published in 2020 about what could be done to improve society after the pandemic in her native Australia. Blanchett said:

> We engage with the performance of the gesture and the whole of it is greater than the sum of its parts. I think this need to gather is fundamental to who we are, and it has been stymied by Covid-19 but also underlined by it, and that need in us for community addresses the difficult lesson we have to learn: business is not government and government is not a business.

In May 2020, Blanchett was among the celebrities who read an installment of Roald Dahl's children's fantasy novel James and the Giant Peach in aid of the global-non profit charity Partners In Health, co-founded by Dahl's daughter Ophelia, which had been fighting COVID-19 in vulnerable areas.

In September 2020, Blanchett, Helen Mirren, Eddie Redmayne, Salman Rushdie and other figures of British cultural life support the protests of University for Theater and Film Arts (SZFE) students in Budapest against changes ushered Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government that forced a transfer of control of the public institution to a private foundation and a new structure to guide key decisions at the storied SZFE.

## Personal life

Blanchett is married to playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton. They met in Australia in the mid-1990s and married on 29 December 1997. They have three sons, and a daughter, who was adopted in 2015. Blanchett said that she and her husband had wanted to adopt since the birth of their first son.

After making Brighton, England, their main family home for nearly 10 years, she and her husband returned to their native Australia in 2006. In November 2006, Blanchett attributed the move to their desire to select a permanent home for her children, to be closer to her family, and to have a sense of belonging to the Australian theatrical community. She and her family lived in the Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill, extensively renovating their home in 2007 to be more eco-friendly. Following its sale in 2015, she and Upton purchased a house in Crowborough, East Sussex, England, in early 2016.

Blanchett has spoken about feminism and politics, telling Sky News in 2013 that she was concerned that "a wave of conservatism sweeping the globe" was threatening women's role in society. She has also commented on the pressures women in Hollywood face now: "Honestly, I think about my appearance less than I did ten years ago. People talk about the golden age of Hollywood because of how women were lit then. You could be Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and work well into your 50s, because you were lit and made into a goddess. Now, with everything being sort of gritty, women have this sense of their use-by date."

Blanchett was the first ambassador and has been a patron of the Australian Film Institute and its academy, the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts, since 2001. She is also a patron of the Sydney Film Festival. Blanchett is a patron of the new Australian Pavilion in the Venice Biennale, and spoke at its opening at the Venice Giardini in May 2015. Blanchett spoke at former Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam's state funeral in 2014, and at the Margaret Whitlam dinner and fundraiser event hosted by politician Tanya Plibersek in June 2015.

Blanchett became a spokeswoman for and the face of SK-II, the luxury skin care brand owned by Procter & Gamble, in 2005, and brand ambassador for Giorgio Armani fragrances for women in 2013, being paid \$10 million for the latter. In 2018 Armani announced Blanchett would become the first beauty ambassador for the company, representing the company globally by absorbing responsibilities for skincare and make-up, in addition to her previous 2013 commitments to fragrances. In 2022, Louis Vuitton announced Blanchett as its new house ambassador.

## Acting credits and awards

Blanchett has appeared in over 70 films and over 20 theatre productions. As of 2019, Blanchett's films have grossed over \$9.8 billion at the worldwide box office. Her highest-grossing films include The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003) and The Hobbit (2012–2014) trilogies, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Cinderella (2015), Thor: Ragnarok (2017), and Ocean's 8 (2018).

Among her numerous accolades for her acting work, Blanchett has won two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and three Screen Actors Guild Awards. Her performance as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator made her the only actor to win an Academy Award for portraying an Academy Award-winning actor. Blanchett is one of only four actresses to win the Academy Award for Best Actress after winning Best Supporting Actress. She is the only actress (and one of only six actors) in Oscar history to be nominated twice for playing the same role in two films (Elizabeth I for Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age), and the eleventh actor to receive two acting nominations in the same year. She is also the only Australian to win two acting Oscars.

Blanchett has been recognised by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the following performances:

- 71st Academy Awards (1998): Best Actress, nomination, Elizabeth
- 77th Academy Awards (2004): Best Supporting Actress, win, The Aviator
- 79th Academy Awards (2006): Best Supporting Actress, nomination, Notes on a Scandal
- 80th Academy Awards (2007): Best Actress, nomination, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
- 80th Academy Awards (2007): Best Supporting Actress, nomination, I'm Not There
- 86th Academy Awards (2013): Best Actress, win''', Blue Jasmine
- 88th Academy Awards (2015): Best Actress, nomination, Carol
- 95th Academy Awards (2022): Best Actress, nomination, Tár

Blanchett received Premiere'' magazine's Icon Award in 2006. In 2008, she received the Santa Barbara International Film Festival Modern Master Award in recognition of her accomplishments in the film industry. That year, she received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, inducted at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard outside Grauman's Egyptian Theater. She received Women in Film and Television International's Crystal Award for excellence in the entertainment industry in 2014. In 2015, Blanchett was honoured at the Museum of Modern Art's Film Benefit for her outstanding contributions to the industry. She received the British Film Institute Fellowship in recognition of her outstanding contribution to film, presented to her by fellow actor Ian McKellen. Blanchett was also the recipient of the AACTA Longford Lyell Award in 2015, for her "outstanding contribution to the enrichment of Australia's screen environment and culture." In 2016, she received the Costume Designers Guild Lacoste Spotlight Award, in honour of an "enduring commitment to excellence" and her "appreciation for the artistry of costume design and collaboration with the Costume Designers."

Blanchett was awarded the Centenary Medal for Service to Australian Society by the Australian government. In 2012, she was appointed Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture, in recognition of her significant contributions to the arts. In 2017, Blanchett was made a Companion of the Order of Australia by the Queen for "eminent service to the performing arts as an international stage and screen actor, through seminal contributions as director of artistic organisations, as a role model for women and young performers, and as a supporter of humanitarian and environmental causes." She has been presented with honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales and Macquarie University in recognition of her contribution to the arts, philanthropy and the community. In 2022, she received the Honorary César award from the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma for her "absolutely remarkable career and personality".

## See also

- Cate Blanchett on screen and stage
- List of Academy Award records
- List of actors nominated for two Academy Awards in the same year

Australian actor (born 1969)

Australian expatriate actresses in the United Kingdom

Best Actress AACTA International Award winners

Best Drama Actress Golden Globe (film) winners

Best Supporting Actress AACTA Award winners

Best Supporting Actress Academy Award winners

Best Supporting Actress BAFTA Award winners

Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe (film) winners

Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead winners

Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female winners

National Institute of Dramatic Art alumni

Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role Screen Actors Guild Award winners

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role Screen Actors Guild Award winners

People educated at Methodist Ladies' College, Melbourne